Mariah McQueen, beloved mother, laid to rest in John the Baptist Cemetery

​​Editor’s note: This is the fourteenth in a series of historical obituaries written today to honor the men and women of the past who were denied the honor at the time of their death because of discrimination due to their race and/or gender.

Mariah McQueen, a wife and mother of three, died on May 22, 1911. She was 55 years old. Carved in the marble headstone marking her burial at the Montgomery-John the Baptist Cemetery in Pensacola, Florida, these facts offer a faint glimmer of her singular life. Yet hers undoubtedly included love, loss, personal tragedy and triumphs that unfolded against the backdrop of revolutionary changes in American life.

Mrs. McQueen was born Mariah Jones in the mid-1850s in North Carolina. She left no letters or diaries for us to read about her experiences. As a young child living through the Civil War, she must have had many dreams and fears as she grew into her teenage years during Reconstruction and its violent end. She would have vividly remembered the day she and her family were emancipated. But this story, likely recounted to her children decades later, has been lost to time.

All we are left with today are her headstone and the brief glimpses of Mrs. McQueen’s’ life captured by government bureaucrats.

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The census records indicate that she never learned to read or write. These documents conjure up so many possible connections and questions. Was her mother the Harriet Jones that sailed from New Orleans to Pensacola on the slave schooner St. Rosa in 1845? Is our Mariah the 10-year-old girl living with parents Charles and Harriet and two older sisters in St. Marys, North Carolina, in 1870? Is she the 14-year-old domestic servant, the oldest of five siblings living with their mother, Harriet Jones, in Chowan County, North Carolina, that same year? Or is our Mariah someone else?

These traces and potential Mariahs stymie definitive answers and highlight the errors and inconsistencies that are pervasive in genealogical research. Every record we can tie to our Mariah, for example, lists her age as 10 years younger than what is etched on her gravestone.

Mrs. McQueen first appears in the archival record on May 10, 1895, as Mariah Morrison, aged 25, marrying Jerry McQueen, aged 45, in Hollingsworth, North Carolina. Their marriage license reports that the bride’s mother, Harriet Jones, still lived in North Carolina. Mariah’s father, marked “not known,” was deceased. This was the second marriage for both. Mariah, with her first husband, Robert Morrison, had three sons who did not live with her: Theodore, Daniel and John.

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The McQueens celebrated the dawn of the twentieth century in Hollingsworth, where Jerry worked as a farmer alongside his five children from his first marriage. By 1900, Mariah had given birth to eight children; just three, presumably her sons, were still living. But that year, census takers also listed a 4-year-old, Mary, as Mariah’s daughter. The family of eight lived in a rented house.

Jerry and Mariah soon left the place of their birth for Northwest Florida. They ended up in the small, remote Santa Rosa community of Holt with their niece, Florida Evans. Jerry worked as a cooper, or barrel maker, in the region’s booming naval stores industry. He built the barrels that transported turpentine to waiting cargo vessels in Pensacola.

The McQueens may have lived in the housing and worshiped in the church built by the Ewing brothers, who owned Holt’s turpentine still. The brothers employed most of the community’s African American residents, who accounted for nearly a third of Holt’s population in 1905.

Mariah died in 1911. She was buried in Pensacola, where two of her sons, Theodore and Daniel, lived.

Mariah’s legacy echoed through the lives of her children. Much like the early story of Mariah, Mary’s story remains largely unknown, her life an enigma. Theodore and Daniel became Baptist preachers and opened the Morrison Hotel at 311 N. Tarragona Street. During the Jim Crow era, the hotel served as one of the few that would accommodate African American travelers who visited Pensacola. It later became the Belmont Hotel. Theodore was a founding member of the Pensacola chapter of the NAACP, organized in June 1919. He would remain an influential community leader, operating a Prince Hall Masonic Lodge that bore his name. Daniel and his brother, John, joined the millions of African Americans who left the South as part of the Great Migration in the early decades of the twentieth century. They settled in Nashville, Tennessee, where Mrs. McQueen’s descendants still reside.

The remnants of Mariah’s life that survive in genealogical records, family stories and ancestors’ headstones offer the faintest glimmers of our rich past. Tangible remnants, like the Baroque-style marble headstone of Mariah McQueen, provide evidence and physical connections between past and present. They also help us to see the vital role cemeteries play in memorializing, preserving and celebrating our rich collective history. In searching for answers about our predecessors, we form new connections, share new stories and pass down more complete histories to future generations.

To learn more about Pensacola’s African American cemeteries, you might begin by visiting the Montgomery-John the Baptist Cemetery, located at 17th Avenue and Cross Street.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Righting the past: Beloved mother Mariah McQueen laid to rest