Building Free Communities
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The Original Inhabitants, The Kiskiak People
Indigenous communities were the first to inhabit the land where the Naval Weapons Station, Yorktown, now stands. According to archaeological evidence, the Algonquian-speaking Kiskiak people lived in the area for at least 4,500 years. Between 1200 and 1500 CE, they developed a significant town, known as Kiskiak. They cultivated crops and harvested oysters, clams, crabs, and fish from the York River. Archaeological evidence suggests that their oyster harvesting, consumption, and shell depositing practices contributed to a sustainable fishery.
The Kiskiak people were a powerful tribe, independent of the Powhatan chiefdom. However, in the 16th century, the Powhatan chiefdom incorporated the Kiskiak under its rule through violent conquest. By 1608, there were approximately 150 residents at the Kiskiak town site.
When the British colonized Jamestown, they visited the Kiskiak but did not establish a relationship with them. Instead, interactions between the communities became more violent. As the colonists burned Kiskiak homes and stole their food supplies, the Kiskiak were forced to move further north.
To learn more about the Kiskiak and the archaeological research being conducted on their histories, please visit this website.
British colonist, John Smith's, map of Jamestowne and surrounding area, including Kiskiak (spelled Kiskiack on map)
Source: Hall (2022) The Archaeology of Kiskiak
Free Black People Forge Autonomy and Community
As the British colonized the Virginia peninsula, the area became deeply integrated into the Atlantic slave trade. Many Black people were enslaved on plantations. This included the Tinsley plantation on the York River, where records indicate that 44 enslaved men, women, and children worked. Up until the mid 1700s, plantations along the southeastern bank of the York River produced a sweet-scented tobacco that became a hallmark of luxury and a driver of Virginia's slave trade. But by 1750, tobacco cultivation declined due to farming practices that left soils depleted of nutrients; however, white planters continued to employ enslaved labor.
Despite the dominance of slavery in this period, a significant free Black population grew from 1790 onwards, forging the community that would become known as the “Reservation." These free Black people may have intermingled with some Kiskiak people remaining in the region, and they built small settlements on the fringes of plantations.
Living in the shadow of slavery, the free Black community faced great difficulties making a living and saw land as a route to survival. Most worked as skilled and unskilled laborers, but some families were able to establish small homesteads by squatting on unclaimed land, gaining plots from sympathetic whites, or purchasing small tracts themselves.
This map identifies in grey the broad area known as 'The Reservation" along the York River and indicates the probable location of at least one settlement of free Black families before the Civil War.
Map of Country between James and York Rivers, 1863
Source: Mahoney (2013); Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Research Library
For this free Black population, land ownership and subsistence farming helped establish self-reliance and autonomy from white society.
While few records exist of the free Black community in this area, Mrs. Fannie Epps, born in 1895, also gave memories of her great-grandparents, William and Betsy Thornton, who, she recalls, “never were slaves” but rather established an autonomous livelihood on land in the northern part of York County. In this excerpt from a 1987 oral history, Mrs. Fannie Epps recalls her great-grandparents’ home, giving a glimpse of the life they forged on this land before and after the Civil War:
Mrs. Fannie (Pierce) Epps and her husband Fred Epps Sr.
Courtesy: Fredi Epps Jackson
"It was a log cabin…log house, I guess you could call it a cabin…’cause it had one big room with a big fireplace. And the walls were of clay…because they used to paper them—not with wall paper but with newspaper. And when I was a child—the reason I remember it was newspaper was I had just learned how to read—I was learning how to read. And I’d go around and read the newspapers. And she thought that was just grand...
They just had the one big room downstairs...The bed was in that room. Well, this and that was there. The bedroom, the sitting room and everything in that log cabin, ‘cause that little kitchen was in the back...
One thing that I remember, too, about it was that it had a bed…and they didn’t have mattresses like we have now. It was a quilted mattress. And so we had a little stool and the bed was up high like this. And I being a little child, I had to step up on the stool. And then I’d fall over on the bed. And the bed was made of feathers....And I used to like to get up on that stool and fall over in that bed because it was all soft and everything...that was one of the highlights of my young life."
Source: Fannie Epps (1987:51-52)
John Allen also recalls the stories his mother, Cora Hundley, passed on to him about his great-grandparents, Anthony Hundley (1844-1904) and Octavia Hundley (1848-1912). Anthony and Octavia were free people who settled in the Reservation prior to the Civil War and built a properous life and family. Anthony, alongside his parents, William and Margaret Hundley, are listed on the 1850 census of Free Inhabitants of York County. According to the 1860 Census, Octavia's father, Henry Redcross, was an oysterman, suggesting he was a free man.
Source: John Allen (2018)
Sources:
Allen, John. 2018. Oral History collected for the Hundley Family Reunion. January 25.
Allen, Kristen, Vicki Simons, Yvonne Johnson, and Lauren Rich. 2018. The Reservation: The Untold Story of Our Ancestors. The Hundley Family History Committee. July 21.
Ancestry.com. 1850 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009. Images reproduced by FamilySearch. Original data: Seventh Census of the United States, 1850; (National Archives Microfilm Publication M432, 1009 rolls); Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, D.C. William and Margaret Hunley.
Epps, Fannie. 1987. Series of Oral Histories compiled by Kathleen Bragdon. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Hall, Rebecca. 2022. The Archaeology of Kiskiak.
Hornsby, Elizabeth. 2015. New findings on Kiskiak Tribe Discovered at Naval Weapons Station. Virginia Gazette, July 28.
Renner, Kimberly Suzanne. 2006. Yorktown, Tobacco, and Slaves: The Rise and Decline of a Colonial Port in Virginia. MA Thesis, College of William & Mary.
Mahoney, Shannon. 2013. Community Building After Emancipation: An Anthropological Study of Charles’ Corner, Virginia, 1862-1922. Doctoral Dissertation, College of William & Mary.
McDonald, Bradley M. 1994. African-American Family and Society on the Lands of the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station, 1862-1880. Master’s Thesis, College of William & Mary.
McDonald, Bradley M., Kenneth Stuck, and Kathleen J. Bragdon. 1992. "Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are": An Ethnohistorical Study of the African American Community on the Lands of the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station, 1865-1918. Williamsburg: William & Mary Center for Archaeological Research.
Stuck, Kenneth. 1995. Social Stratification in York County, Virginia, 1860-1919: A Study of Whites and African-Americans on the Lands of the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station. Master’s Thesis, College of William & Mary.
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