Historical marker recognizes 19th-century Adirondack Black farm settlement in Loon Lake

Aug. 5—LOON LAKE — "Under the North Star," an article on Willis Augustus Hodges, Blacksville, and John Brown, by Edward Blankman, a St. Lawrence University archivist and historian, appeared in Adirondack Life in March/April 1983.

Forty years and three months later on Sunday, Aug. 6, a new historical marker will be unveiled at Loon Lake in Franklin County, to honor the settlement of Blacksville and its founder, Hodges, a Virginia-born Brooklyn newsman and Black rights activist.

The public is invited to attend.

Awarded by the Pomeroy Foundation, this marker honors a forgotten chapter of Adirondack history with ties to the Black suffrage movement and abolitionist John Brown.

RADAR ALERT

It was the Blankman article that introduced Hodges (1815-1890) to Saratoga-based author and independent scholar Amy Godine, who co-wrote the Blacksville marker's script with educator Curt Stager of Paul Smith's College.

Godine has been writing and speaking about ethnic, migratory, and Black Adirondack history for more than three decades.

She curated the "Dreaming of Timbuctoo" exhibit at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba and is the author of "The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier," forthcoming from Cornell University Press in November.

"This is the only thing that I've seen that was written about him in the Adirondacks," Godine said.

"Adirondack Life pioneered a number of stories with Black content. It gets very little credit for it. This was a good story. It was pretty well-reported. There was very little art, of course. I think Blankman might have gotten a few things wrong about how long he stayed there. I think he might had stayed a little longer than Blankman suggested. I think he got the gist of it, why it was important and why Hodges mattered and how influential he was on getting people to come up with him."

LOON LAKE

In 1848, Hodges and other Brooklyn and Manhattan pioneers moved to remote Loon Lake in south Franklin County, according to a press release.

Hodges and several in his party were among 3,000 poor Black New Yorkers who received 40-acre gift lots in Franklin and Essex Counties from the radical New York philanthropist, Gerrit Smith, in 1846 and '47.

Smith hoped to promote a Black migration out of cities, and to ease access to the ballot for voteless Black New Yorkers who could not meet a for-Blacks-only $250 property requirement. Most of Smith's "grantees" would not migrate. Moving to the wilderness was impractical and unaffordable.

But Willis Hodges and others in his party remained for several years in the vicinity of Loon Lake, where Hodges was said to have sheltered and guided self-freed enslaved people making for the north.

LOST IN MISTS

There's nothing else written about Blacksville in any Adirondack or regional history that Godine is aware of.

"I don't know if there's anything about him until quite recently in local histories," she said.

"Franklin might have had something. Franklin has its historical review and its old newspapers and journals, which are pretty good. But I think while writers did reminisce and write about Black settlers in the town of Franklin, I don't think anybody specified Blacksville in particular or tracked Willis Hodges there."

Godine also learned about Hodges from scouring historical newspapers.

"That had articles by him urging Gerrit Smith grantees to get organized and move and stop speechifying, as he put it, and start moving and packing and actually going on to the land," she said.

"This is why he really was an activist. He moved. It's why I think he had such a natural affinity with John Brown. They were both doers not talkers."

The abolitionist sent barrels of pork and flour to Blacksville and another Black settlement, Timbuctoo, when provisions ran perilously short.

But Hodges' autobiographical essay reflected no discouragement.

"We find ourselves," he wrote of Blacksville, "through the mercy of God and the goodness of the honorable Garret Smith, today 'under our own vine and fig trees,' with none to molest us or make us afraid."

"The thing that interested me about him is that he, like Lyman Epps and several of the more devoted and eager grantees, was an agrarian and all for moving to a farm long before Gerrit Smith comes up with his plan," Godine said.

"Gerrit Smith helps him realize his dream of leaving the city and farming in the country. Gerrit Smith doesn't originate it, but he makes it easier to do. Though he does move north, he does not settle on land that he is given. That is something else we will talk about. Like so many grantees, he finds it subpar and unsatisfactory in some way and finds his own better land and makes a start on that."

At Sunday's 2 p.m. unveiling, commemorative remarks will be offered by Godine, Stager, and others, and at 3 p.m. in the Loon Lake Jewish Community Center, Godine will talk more about Hodges, Adirondack farmer, activist, friend to the slave, public servant, and Brown's ally.

"Even before he moved to the Adirondacks and maybe's it's an incentive to move to the Adirondacks, he and John Brown are communicating," Godine said.

"Brown is a big fan of his newspaper, The Ram's Horn. Before his friend, John Brown gets down to Timbuctoo in 1849, they are in correspondence and Brown is helping him out and giving advice."

CHESAPEAKE COUNTRY

Hodges was born in Feb. 12, 1815 in Princess Anne County, Va. to Charles Augustus Hodges, and his second wife, Julia Nelson Wills Hodges, both free African Americans of mixed-race ancestry.

"Willis was never enslaved," Godine said.

"He was born free. His parents were farmers. They had a big family. They were very comfortable. His father was enough of a zealot for education to ensure that his children were schooled at home. His parents were serious abolitionists."

Hodges was elected delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention in Richmond, Dec. 3, 1867-April 17, 1868. He was the best known of the 24 Black delegates, and a very active participant.

The picture of him at the convention shows him facing forward. It ran in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper on Feb. 15, 1868.

"He is wearing the spectacles that gave him the nickname Old Specs," Godine said.

"He looks very different from the fellow in the engraving who is much more gaunt and stern looking than the fellow in the etching in front of everybody else at the Congress looking right at the artist. He's very jolly and a little bit plump.

"On the cover of his autobiographical essay, which he never published, there's this etching of him with kind of a scraggly beard. It shows him in old age."

Hodges served as the keeper of the Cape Henry Lighthouse for just over two months during the summer of 1870, according to preservationvirginia.org

"The path Hodges took to become Cape Henry's first African American lighthouse keeper brought him to New York and back to Virginia. He crossed paths with the noted abolitionist John Brown, guided individuals on their escape from slavery through the Underground Railroad, and won multiple elected positions. Through his own writings, Hodges detailed the daily life in the Virginia Beach area for free Black people as well as the acts of resistance that he and many others waged before and after the abolition of slavery."

"He never gives up on Virginia," Godine said.

"He always returns to it through his life, and he is very devoted to his parents and the memory of his family and then eventually he moves back there from Brooklyn."

After he leaves Blacksville, Hodges goes back to Brooklyn, takes up his anti-slavery and suffrage, and especially his education work again with his brother, William Johnson Hodges, who is also an activist.

"Then, he is rumored to have served as a spy for the Union Army in Virginia during the Civil War," Godine said.

"There's not clear documentation on that, but that's the buzz. Eventually, he moves back to Virginia. He becomes politically active. Makes himself a very prominent and eager candidate at this Constitutional Convention. That was an integrated convention, and of course, all that ends eventually.

"But at the beginning after the Civil War, it was integrated and he was much reported for his remarks and his idea by the press. He was not shy about speaking up, anywhere in Brooklyn, in Virginia, everywhere."

WITHOUT A TRACE

No lasting relic or structure speaks for Blacksville today.

A future archaeological investigation and ground penetrating radar may change that narrative.

"We don't know exactly where it was and one thing that I hope Curt will address when he speaks is why he fixed on this spot for the sign," Godine said.

"What led him to this place rather than the other side of Loon Lake? We know Loon Lake is named because it's named by Hodges and John Brown in their letters. Where Blacksville was particularly and whether is was more than just a few cabins, we have no idea.

"It's a little bit like the original Timbuctoo in this respect. We don't know who named it. I don't really know. I can't say with any certainty that Hodges was the one to give it this name. It might have been his white neighbors, you know."

"The Autobiography of Willis Augustus Hodges a Free Man of Color," was written 1848-49 and published in 1896 by his son, Augustus Michael Hodges, a writer and journalist, in The Indianapolis Freeman.

"What's striking about it is how little there is about where he is writing form, which is Blacksville," Godine said.

"He is really writing about his youth and growing up in the South and why he had to leave and the various humiliations and blows he endured in Brooklyn and his relief of getting up to the Adirondacks. It's really a starting point for a journey that wouldn't last very long. But he's very eager in the beginning to proselytize for it. But, the book is never published. You have to wonder about that. I'm glad it was saved. He saved it for his children, I think."

Hodges' present day descendants include author Sandi Brewster-Walker, a columnist and author of "The Colored Girl from Long Island."

Born in Amityville, Brewster-Walker is an independent historian, genealogist, freelance writer, and business owner. As a member of the Montaukett Indian Nation, she is the Executive Director & Government Affairs Officer for historic tribe, and chair of the Board of Trustees & Executive Director of the Indigenous People Museum & Research Institute.

During President William Jefferson Clinton's Administration, as a member of the Senior Executive Service (SES), she served as Deputy Director of the Office of Communications at USDA, as well as, Director of the Empowerment Zone & Enterprise Community initiative. Brewster-Walker servers on numerous Boards of Trustees and has received many awards.

Brewster-Walker has researched African and Native American genealogy for more than 40 years. Thirty years was spent on researching her great-great grandfather, Willis A. Hodges.

"She's done a load of research on him in the south, in Washington, D.C., and in Virginia," Godine said.

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter@RobinCaudell