African Americans of St. Lawrence County: North Country Pioneers

By Bryan S. Thompson

Discover the Black pioneers who shaped St. Lawrence County through grit and determination.

From its origins as part of New France through the Civil War and eventual industrialization of the region, St. Lawrence County has been shapped by all too often overlooked Black families and individuals. Author Bryan S. Thompson reveals the history of the African American community in New York's North Country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Sep 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781439679050

Bryan S. Thompson

Bryan Thompson is a lifelong resident of St. Lawrence County. He holds a BS from Cornell University and an MS from SUNY Geneseo. He has published more than fifty articles on local history in local, regional and state publications. He was the 2009 winner of the New York State Archives and New York State Regents Bruce W. Dearstyne Award for excellence in educational use of historical records. He is also a recipient of a state Archives Hackman Research Fellowship. An Association of Public Historians of New York State registered public historian, he is currently the municipal historian for the Town of De Kalb.

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Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC

www.historypress.com

Copyright © 2023 by Bryan S. Thompson

All rights reserved

Front cover, top right: Courtesy of the Aluminum Bulletin at St. Lawrence County Historical Association Archives.

E-Book year 2023

First published 2023

ISBN 978.1.4396.7905.0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937168

Print Edition ISBN 978.1.4671.5403.1

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For Julia and Isaac

Not the first. Not the last. Part of a never-ending stream.

CONTENTS

Foreword, by M.J. Heisey

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. New France (1749–1760) and British North America (1763–1797)

2. The Slave Years (1797–1827)

3. The Abolitionist Era (1827–1865)

4. A Shifting Landscape in the Postwar Years (1860–1900)

5. The Industrial Era and the Decline of the Black Community (1900–1930)

Appendix A. 1810 U.S. Census: Black Residents of St. Lawrence County

Appendix B. 1820 U.S. Census: Black Residents of St. Lawrence County

Appendix C. 1825 New York State Census: Black Residents of St. Lawrence County

Appendix D. 1830 U.S. Census: Black Residents of St. Lawrence County

Appendix E. 1835 New York State Census: Black Residents of St. Lawrence County

Appendix F. 1845 New York State Census: Black Residents of St. Lawrence County

Appendix G. 1855 New York State Census: Black Residents of St. Lawrence County

Appendix H. 1865 New York State Census: Black Residents of St. Lawrence County

Appendix I. 1875 New York State Census: Black Residents of St. Lawrence County

Appendix J. 1920 U.S. Census: Black Workers at Massena

Appendix K. 1925 New York State Census: Black Workers at ALCOA

Notes

Selected Bibliography

About the Author

FOREWORD

In African Americans of St. Lawrence County, Bryan Thompson turns upside down the idea that African Americans were, until recently, absent from St. Lawrence County in New York State. As he convincingly shows, African Americans have had a continuous presence in this northern county since the mid-eighteenth century and have contributed to shaping it into a diverse community. Some African Americans there were enslaved, but others were activist abolitionists and spiritual leaders or property and business owners. The scarcity of African Americans in the county by the 1930s was the result of intentional exclusion by economic and legal barriers and by racism.

Thompson has been immersed in the history of New York’s North Country for his entire life. His writing ties local history to the largest themes in national and international history: slavery, wars, reform and racist movements. He details this local history by making use of myriad types of historical sources: legal documents; census records; African American, local and national newspapers; business records; oral histories; and correspondence. As a dedicated rural historian, he can decipher documents and also read a landscape. He will happily travel to a distant archive to do research on his community. But for him, a tramp through a nearby woods offers as good an opportunity to understand human exchanges and their impact on the natural world.

Thompson is also a teacher who has shared his historical passions with all ages in the classroom and in public forums for decades. For the last sixteen years, he has served as New York State’s Town of De Kalb historian and archivist, garnering awards for education, preservation, research and writing. He has shared much of this work in the Williamstown Gazette, which he has published since 1996.

Bryan Thompson has never been content to focus only on those aspects of community life that encourage ancestral pride. His research encourages a deeper understanding of our inheritance by including people and structures invisible in existing histories. His diligent methodology as well as his absorbing narrative are gifts to us all.

—M.J. Heisey

Professor emeritus

Department of History

State University of New York at Potsdam

January 2023

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are so many people who have encouraged and helped me along the way. I especially want to thank my neighbor and friend Dr. M.J. Heisey and Dr. Melissane Schrems for reviewing various drafts of this book and providing me with valuable feedback. I would like to also acknowledge Neil Burdick for his editorial assistance.

Don Papson has always had an ear for me and sent me in the right direction for research, especially early in this project. Betsy Kepes was always ready to read drafts and provide feedback throughout the project.

I thank the staff of the St. Lawrence County Law Library for their assistance in researching the various laws. I would like to also acknowledge the ready assistance of the St. Lawrence County Historical Association and the Potsdam Museum. Thanks to Greg Hyde for providing me with space to retreat and write so many times. Thanks to all my other friends—Raymond, Susan, Claude, Tom, John, Karen, Valerie and all the rest—for supporting me during the process.

I want to acknowledge my elementary school teacher Marion Sheen for discussing the civil rights movement with us on a weekly basis, as it happened, and teaching us that no matter who we are, we all bleed red. I must thank my grandmother Adeline Thompson for first putting the story in history for me. And last but not least, I want to thank my husband, Gary Berk, for putting up with me over the many years it has taken to research and write this book.

INTRODUCTION

I grew up on a typical family farm in St. Lawrence County, New York, during the 1960s. We milked forty cows, made maple syrup and sold a few other commodities from the farm. We lived near Beaver Creek just a few miles from where my ancestors (Sweet, Hurlbut, Giffin) had settled seven generations before. My world was totally white and seemed to have always been that way. However, as I learned in the course of researching this book, that was a myth.

Every story has its beginning. For this book, it was at a fourth-grade parent-teacher conference for my adopted Black son. I asked the teacher what Black history my child had learned during the year. The teacher’s response was, Your son was sick the day we talked about Black history.

I kept my cool at the meeting, but I was flabbergasted. You mean the whole Black experience in New York State and local history over three hundred years warranted only one day? (Having taught elementary social studies methods at SUNY Potsdam, I knew what the curriculum was supposed to include.) Weren’t there Black people present throughout every day of our history? Surely every child, including my son, deserved to see their race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality reflected in the history of their community on a daily basis in the same way white children do.

And so I began to dig into local records. That’s when I came across Charlie Clark, a Black man who had lived for a time on the very farm where I had grown up only sixty-five years before. Why had no one ever mentioned him to me?

I looked for articles and books detailing the stories of our St. Lawrence County Black community. The stories were almost nonexistent. As a seventh-generation St. Lawrence County resident and a local historian, I felt compelled to find the hidden histories of our Black pioneers.

As I began to research, I discovered that there were Black people present in the county from the very first incursions of the non-aboriginal people into the area. These people were essential to the success of these early settlement activities. Some became famous in their own right; some served this country in its time of need and remained totally unrecognized. These people are an important part of the history of St. Lawrence County, New York State and the United States. Removing their history from our collective memory does us all a disservice.

I began this book so that every teacher of history would have some background in local Black history. As I researched and wrote, it quickly became apparent that the contributions of African Americans to St. Lawrence County history were not separate from the state, national and international stage but an integral part of it. The audience for this book is much broader than I originally imagined. It reaches from teachers, public historians and professional scholars to university students and fans of American history. I hope that this work will inspire others to continue this important research, because I have only scratched the surface.

CHAPTER 1

NEW FRANCE (1749–1760) AND BRITISH NORTH AMERICA (1763–1797)

NEW FRANCE

When commencing a story, it is best to begin at the beginning. For the Black pioneers of the St. Lawrence River Valley, that is at the start of the incursion of non-Indigenous people into the area. Although the sources I have on New France provide only brief glimpses of life, even in those snapshots, Black people are present. We cannot have an accurate history of St. Lawrence County without acknowledging their presence and contributions. Other researchers with access to other sources will undoubtedly build on this chapter’s documentation of Black pioneers who appear in sources I combed with this important focus at the forefront.

The French had already been in the St. Lawrence Valley for over a century when they finally established a settlement in 1749 at la Présentation (today’s Ogdensburg, New York). La Preséntation was the last of a string of Catholic mission communities founded along the St. Lawrence known as the Seven Nations or Seven Castles with governance patterned after the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The first Black slave was brought to New France by the British commander David Kirk in 1628. This Black man, Olivier Le Juene, native of Madagascar, died in 1654. There were, however, very few slaves in New France until the end of the seventeenth century. Most were brought to the colony by traveling merchants