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North and South
Stories and Genealogy of Theodore Charles Anderson and Sara Carlene Shuttleworth
The Blacks of Blacksburg
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Downtown Blacksburg, Virginia
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There are actually 2 Blacksburgs in the United States; one in Virginia and the other in South Carolina. Both were founded by Ted's relatives.
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Blacksburg, VA
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Blacksburg, VA is a pretty, medium-sized town located in the New River Valley of Northwestern Virginia Montgomery County. It was founded in 1798 and is named after John10 Black and his younger brother William7 (Ted’s 2nd cousins, 6 times removed) who donated land for the town in 1793. Blacksburg is located on the site of an earlier settlement known as Draper's Meadow, which was destroyed by a Shawnee Indian raid in 1755.
John10 and William7 Black were what are commonly known as Scotch-Irish, at least in America. If you were to ask an Englishman what a Scotch-Irish person was he wouldn’t know.
Firstly, the Scotch-Irish weren’t Irish. There never was a drop of Irish blood in most of them. Secondly, and more importantly, they weren’t Catholic. What they were was Protestant-Lowlander-Scotsmen who were encouraged by James the First of England to populate the Ulster Province of Northern Ireland during the 1600’s.
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King James I
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King James I had a problem. How was he going to curb the power of the Roman Catholic nobles in Ireland and Scotland who were giving him a bad time while simultaneously expanding the Anglican Church of England?
The opportunity (or pretext) for achieving both goals came in September 1607 when the Roman Catholic Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell in Northern Ireland fled the country and took refuge in Catholic France. This event, known in Irish history as the "Flight of the Earls," resulted in their lands being forfeited to the English Crown. Those lands were six of the nine counties that compose present day Ulster; Antrim, Down, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Derry (or Londonderry) and Donegal.
Counties of Ulster Province
James I was a wily and pragmatic guy who came up with the idea of creating what he euphemistically called "His Majesty’s Plantation of Ulster". The idea was to form a Protestant buffer zone in Northern Ireland thereby strengthening his control of the north, while taking lands away from the generally hostile (to English rule at least) native Irish Roman Catholics to the south.
At first, King James attempted to bring over large numbers of English Protestants but few Englishmen could be persuaded to migrate.
However, due to the poor economic conditions in Scotland at the time, many Lowland Scots were eager to make the relatively short move (it’s only twelve miles across the North Channel between Scotland and the northeastern Irish coast) and the King encouraged them to do so.
Most of us know there are Highland Scots and Lowland Scots because somewhere in our history lessons’ relating to Great Britain that distinction was made.
It was the Lowlanders King James wanted, not the Highlanders!
Highland Scots spoke Gaelic, wore kilts and lived in the mountains of Northern Scotland. Migration of the Highlanders was deemed unwise by both the King and his principal minister of the time, Sir Francis Bacon. They considered them too wild, too unruly and too unreliable, possibly even more so than the native Catholic Irish they were trying to subdue.
On the other hand, Lowland Scots were an ethnic group with many bloodlines: Picks, Gaels, Britons, Romans, Scots (who were really Celtics from Ireland), Norsemen, Normans, Flemish and even some English. They generally spoke English, didn’t wear kilts and lived in the low lands of Southern Scotland around Edinburgh and Glasgow.
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Ian Black (1640-1700)
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Ian Black’s father (or maybe his grandfather, we don’t know for sure) was a French Huguenot named "LeNoir", which means “black” in French. He fled to Scotland from France to escape religious persecution. He became a naturalized British citizen and had his French name anglicized to Black (probably really Blacke, because that’s what is in the records).
They lived in Cowall, Argyllshire, Scotland and became a Sept of the MacGregor Clan. (A "Sept" is a non-blood line related family that is absorbed into a clan for mutual benefit.)
Ian had two sons, James1 (born about 1674) and John1? (or Robert?, not sure about first name) (born about 1677).
James1 was a wool merchant and moved from Edinburgh, Scotland to Northern Ireland sometime before 1705.
James1 had four sons: James2 Jr., John2, Samuel1, and Anthony1.
James2 Jr. lived and died in County Down, Ulster Province, Ireland, but all three of his brothers immigrated to America in 1738. (Visit the Brandywine section below)
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Waves of Immigration
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The settlement of the thirteen colonies in British North America before the Revolution was not a uniform thing; rather, it consisted of many highly different immigrant groups coming over in waves.
After in original influx to Jamestown in 1607- 1630, there were four major English-speaking waves, culturally very different from each other, even though they all came from Britain and Ireland. The four principal British migration waves were:
1. First came the Pilgrims and middle class English Gentlemen, mostly from the eastern counties of England around London. Many of the Pilgrims had fled first to Holland because of religious persecution. They immigrated to New England during the years 1629-1640.
2. Next came a small bunch of elite Englishmen and a large group of indentured servants from the western and southern English counties. They immigrated mostly to the Tidewater area of Virginia around Jamestown during the years 1642-1675.
3. Then came a group of mostly Quakers from the north midland counties of England and Wales. They immigrated to the Delaware Valley (mainly in the Pennsylvania Colony) during the period from 1675 to 1725.
4. Finally, a huge wave of English-speaking folks from the northern counties of England, the Scottish lowlands and from the Province of Ulster in Northern Ireland (the Scotch-Irish) came. They immigrated to the Appalachian backcountry of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas during the period from 1718 to 1775. This is when all of Ted’s line of Blacks came over. By the time of the Revolution, the Blacks were scattered all over Appalachia.
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The Scotch-Irish
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The term "Scotch-Irish" originated in the colonies to distinguish the Ulster Presbyterian emigrants of Scottish descent from the Catholic Irish settlers who were mostly in the north around New York and Boston. The greatest influx of Scotch-Irish settlers occurred between 1718 and 1775. It has been written that during that time one-third of the Presbyterian population of Northern Ireland immigrated to British North America.
Initially, the Scotch-Irish immigrants were not particularly admired by the Virginia and Carolina colonists who were already there, particularly those of English descent who were not happy about this particular wave of immigration at all.
The great Virginia planter and man of letters, William Byrd II, compared this Scotch-Irish immigration wave as “being like unto the fourth century invasion of the Goths and Vandals into the Roman Empire!”
Back in Britain, Edmund Burke, the noted Protestant Irish political philosopher and essayist, wrote in 1757 that:
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"The number of white people in Virginia is between sixty and seventy thousand; and they are growing every day more numerous, by the migration of the Irish, who not succeeding so well in Pennsylvania as the more frugal and industrious Germans, sell their lands in that province to the latter, and take up new ground in the remote counties in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. These are chiefly Presbyterians from the Northern part of Ireland, who in America are generally called Scotch-Irish."
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Before the Revolution, Virginia and South Carolina settlers of English descent, considered the Scotch-Irish to be little more than savages and would have had little social contact with them. However, during the Revolution, the most ardent supporters of Independence from Britain were the Scotch-Irish, many of whom assumed leadership roles in the War. Accordingly, after the Revolution, many Scotch-Irish assumed dominant political and socio-economic leadership roles that had previously belonged to the English settlers alone. Such was the case with William7 and John10 Black.
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The Great Wagon Road
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Most of the Scotch-Irish entered the colonies through the port of Philadelphia and many settled in the counties just west of the city; mostly in Lancaster County.
Those who didn’t stay (or couldn’t get along with the Germans in Pennsylvania), took the "Great Wagon Road" south into the great Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (Augusta County). William Gooch, the Royal Governor of Virginia from 1728-1749, encouraged them to settle there hoping that they would make a buffer between the Indians who lived west of the Allegheny Mountains and the aristocratic English planters who resided in Richmond and Jamestown.
The Great Wagon Road ran from Pennsylvania through Virginia, the Carolinas and on to Georgia. It was one of the most heavily traveled routes for settlers in the colonies during the early 1700’s.
The Great Wagon Road
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Brandywine
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John2, Samuel1 and Anthony1 Black (three of James1 Black’s four sons) and their families immigrated to America in 1738. They landed on the Delaware River about where Wilmington now stands. They settled on the forks of the Brandywine Creek, in what was known at the time as “Penns County” (now Pennsylvania), remaining there for a few years.
After a while, John2 decided to move his whole family to Augusta Co., VA. Anthony1 and his family went with him
Samuel1 was educated at Edinburgh and was licensed to preach at Glasgow. Shortly after his arrival in America, he became the pastor of the Brandywine Manor Presbyterian Church in Chester County, PA. He became known as the Reverend Dr. Samuel1 Black.
In 1743 he went to visit his brothers John1 and Anthony1 in Virginia. He liked what he saw there and for 4 years traveled as a missionary among the Scotch-Irish in that area. He later moved to Albemarle Co., VA where he remained for the rest of his life.
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John10 Black (1755-1851)
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In about 1750, one of John1 Black’s sons, yet another Samuel5 Black, purchased 650 acres of wilderness land known as Draper’s Meadow at the headwaters of the Strouble’s Creek in the New River Valley where the town of Blacksburg now stands. He never lived there himself but two of his sons, John10 and William7 did.
John10 married Jane Alexander in 1775 when he was only 19 (she was only 18). They were married in August and Jane had their first son a few months later (oops). You can just picture Jane’s father standing at the wedding with a shotgun.
As soon as Jane could travel, John10 decided to get out of town. He crossed the Alleghenies in 1776 and tried to survive in the wilderness with his new wife and their infant son, Samuel7 (yes, yet another Samuel. There are 46 Samuel Blacks in the database). With the aid of a black slave he built a log cabin on Draper’s Meadow.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was right at the start of the Revolution and the Indians in that part of the country were stirred up by the British and fighting mad. Right away, John10 had several nasty run-ins with them.
One day, not long after he had built his log cabin, the Indians attacked and burned it to the ground. There is a story that he hid his wife and baby in the hollow of a tree the night of the attack. At any rate, he did escape and made his way back to Augusta with his young family.
He left his family in Augusta for 6 years while he fought in the American Revolution. He served in the Continental Army under the command of General William Campbell. He was with him at the signing of the peace treaty with the Cherokee Indians, at Long Island, Tennessee in September 1778.
He went back to Draper’s Meadow after the war where he built another house which, this time, he turned into a fort for protection against the Indians.
After bearing him 12 children, his wife, Jane Alexander died in 1804 at the age of 48. John10 Black lived on in Blacksburg to the ripe old age of 94.
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William7 Black (1767-1851)
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After the Revolution, John10’s younger brother William7 followed him to Draper’s Meadow.
William7 Black was a life-long farmer and a "self-made" man. While in Virginia, he was a Circuit Court Judge for 14 years. He possessed an unusually retentive memory. He could recite with great accuracy entire sermons, speeches, etc. which he had heard only once.
William7 Black gave 38 acres of land on which the town of Blacksburg, Virginia, now stands to Montgomery County.
It was he who petitioned the General Assembly of Virginia, requesting a town be established on Draper’s Meadow. The petition was addressed to "The Speakers and Members of the General Assembly of Virginia" in the following words:
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"The petition of William Black humbly asks that your petitioner having a piece of ground in a healthy climate, a fertile neighborhood with excellent springs thereon, and agreeably and well situated for a small town, did at the request of a number of his friends and neighbours lay off 38 acres three quarters of an acre and 25 poles of the same, into lots and streets and disposed of a number of the said lots, the purchaser of which hath built and are now building several houses thereon. And your petitioner has been advised to solicit your Honorable body to establish by law a town at said place. Your petitioner therefore prays that your Honorable House will pass an act vesting the said 38 acres, three quarters of an acre and twenty-five poles of land lying in Montgomery County, in Trustees and establish a town thereon as the same has been already laid off into lots and streets and grant to the holders of the same such privileges as are given to Citizens of other towns in this Commonwealth not incorporated. And your petitioner as in duty bound will pray."
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William7’s petition was accepted and the town of Blacksburg was incorporated in 1798.
In 1845 Blacksburg had a population of 250, one Presbyterian and one Methodist Church.
From its initial 38 acres, the town has grown to cover over 13,000 acres. Today Blacksburg has a population of over 40,000, of which about 25,000 are college students at Virginia Technology, some of which is located on John10 Black’s original land on Draper’s Meadow.
In 1814 William7 and his family moved to Clark Co., OH. He died there in 1851 at the age of 84.
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Blacksburg, SC
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There is also a Blacksburg in South Carolina but its story is completely different. It is located in Cherokee County, in the far north of South Carolina, right on the North Carolina border, about 10 miles from Cowpens and King's Mountain where
famous Revolutionary Battles were fought (visit Revolution in the South).
The area was first settled by a man named Stark. He was sort of a conman who managed to convince a lot people in Charleston to move there with him on an agriculture venture. He had told them that they were going to plant bananas, have huge banana plantations and all become very wealthy. When the bananas failed to grow because the climate was not warm enough to support them, the people who had came with him, laughed him out of the settlement. The venture failed miserably and almost everyone left. Those who stayed behind called the area Stark's Folly.
Although bananas didn't grow, there was iron "in them thar' hills" at Kings Mountain, 5 miles away towards the North Carolina border.
Patriot Joseph Augustus Black (Ted’s 1st cousin, 5 times removed) who fought in the Battles of Cowpens and Eutaw Springs (visit Revolution in the South) lived near by and knew about the iron. (He was the 3rd cousin of John10 and William7 Black, the founders of Blacksburg, VA.)
His seven sons, John Burnett Black (1788-1844), James Augustus Black (1789-1848), Thomas Pickney Black (1799-1878), Joseph Addison Black (1802-1856), William18 Claiborne Black (1806-1837), Robert Felix Black (1807-1837), and Samuel Russell Black (1809-?) (all Ted’s 2nd cousins, 4 times removed), knew about the iron too. Most became successful businessmen, several were very wealthy; two became
elected congressmen. Three of them, James Augustus, Joseph Addison and William Claiborne are considered the founders of modern day Blacksburg.
At the age of 22, James Augustus Black served as a Lieutenant during the War of 1812. Shortly after this war, he and his partners Jacob Stroup and Edmund Fewell founded the King's Mountain Iron Works near Blacksburg and began smelting iron ore on the western bank of King's Creek. The business went well until 1822 when Fewell died unexpectedly and a major flood on King's Creek destroyed the furnaces. The company's assets had to be sold at public auction but were re-purchased by James Augustus Black for pennies on the dollar.
He re-charted the company and rebuilt the furnaces, almost from scratch. While he owned 87% of the company, amoung the other share holders were his brother William Claiborne Black and his brother-in-law, Dr. John Logan. In 1837 he expaned the operation significantly when he hired John B. Darwin and William McGill to take over the day-to-day management while he turned his attention
to running for public office.
In 1843, he was elected to the US Congress as a Representative from South Carolina. He was Chairman of the Military Affairs Committee during the Mexican War in 1846. He died while serving as a Congressman in Washington D.C. on April 3, 1847.
His brother, Joseph Addison Black, graduated from South Carolina College in 1828 and was admitted to the bar in 1830. He established himself as an attorney in the state capital of Columbia. He owned Watree Plantation in Richland County, right next to Colonel Austin
Ford Peay's huge plantation known as Melrose (visit Crumbling Defences). He was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1842. In 1846 he was elected to the South Carolina State Senate where he served until his death on December 20, 1856.
It turns out that James Augustus and Willian18 Claiborne Black married sisters; James married Sarah Elizabeth Logan and William18 married her younger half-sister Jane Logan, both daughters of the Patriot Colonel John Logan, Jr. who lived nearby. The Logans were also Scotch-Irish and had emmigerated from Northern Ireland to upsate New York in 1739. From there, they moved down to Philadelphia, and following the "Great Wagon Road", wound up in northern South Carolina in the area around Blacksburg.
Joseph Addison married the girl next door on the adjacent Melrose plantation , Martha Keziah Peay, the daughter of Colonel Austin Peay.
While his brothers moved to Washington D.C. and the State Capital at Columbia, Willian18 Claiborne Black and his wife Jane Logan stayed on in the Blacksburg area, watched
over the King's Mountain Iron Works, and managed a large coton plantation. His son, John G. Black was instrumential in getting the railroad in coming through Blacksburg.
The next generation, Colonel John Logan Black (Ted’s 3rd cousin, 3 times removed) was the son of James Augustus Black and Sarah Elizabeth Logan. He was born in the area that is now called Blacksburg on 12 July, 1830.
In 1850, he made a trip from Blacksburg to Union County, AR to visit his cousins, John30 Columbus Black (Ted's second Greatgrandfather) and Robert Johnson Black (Ted's first cousin, 4 times removed). These were the guys who had organized the wagon train in 1839 to get there from Alabama (visit Blacks Road).
Both John30 C. and Robert J. Black had built large log houses. Robert J.'s had to be especially large because he, his children, his mother and sisters and brothers all lived together. The house was probably built of cypress because the records show that cypress logs were prised
by the pioneers of Union County at that time. Robert J. had hollowed out a cypress log which he used to case the well he dug for his new log house.
John L. wanted to move to Arkansas, but the girl he loved back in South Carolina, his first cousin Mary Peay Black, would not come to the "Wilderness", as she called it. She was the daughter of his uncle South Carolina State Senator Joseph Addison Black. She was used to the good life as a Southern Bell at the huge Antebellum Melrose Plantation of her Grandfather Colonel Austin Ford Peay and the almost as big adjancent plantation of her father. She had never been outside of South Carolina and didn't want to have anything to do with the back woods of Arkansas.
So, John L. went back home to Blackburg, married his sweetheart, and spent the remainder of his life telling about the wonderful country on the Ouachita River, and about the sweet water that came from the well with the cypress log caseing. In 1940, his daughter, Eunice Black (wife of John B. Palmer, Ridgeway, South Carolina), who was 65 at the time, frequently
recounted to anyone who would listen the story of the cypress well in Arkansas.
John L., went to West Point when Robert E. Lee was Commandant and became a Colonel in the CSA during the War Between the States (visit Crumbling Defences). After the Civil War, he came back to his home town and tried to pick up the pieces.
Making a living after the War amidst the ruins of the South was very difficult. Melrose had been burned to the ground by General Sherman and his forces (visit Crumbling Defences for a vivid description of the destruction of Melrose taken verbatim from the "Charlotte Observer", Sunday, August 28, 1927). Joseph Addison Black's plantation next
door on the Watree River was distroyed at the same time.
John L. still owned his fathers interest in the Kings Mountain Iron Works, but it too had been totally destroyed during the war.
In 1883 he became Vice President of the Magnetic Iron and Steel Company, which is what he renamed his father's old iron works.
Somehow, he, his 1st cousin John G. Black and several of his many other relatives living then in the area persuaded the C.C. & C. Railroad Company to lay track through the town and a depot was built. John G, also a veterian of the Civil War, was a lawyer and later became a state legislator from Blacksburg.
The town was charted as Black's Station on March 21, 1876. On December 24, 1884,
it's name was reduced to simply Black's. It was finally incorporated as Blacksburg on December 20, 1888.
In the 1890’s, a large vein of iron ore was found at King's Mountain and many people, hoping to make their fortune from mining it, flocked there. For a while, Blacksburg was a boom town. Hotels and saloons were built at a rapid pace. The town even went by the name Iron City for a short time. Because of the "iron rush", the town became fairly wealthy for a while and the first electric street lights in upstate South Carolina were installed there.
John G. Black's Home in Blacksburg, circa 1890
But the iron vein eventually played out and nothing was found to take its place.
John L. lived just outside of Blacksburg and drove his horse and buggy into town to get his meals at the home of Mrs. Ramseur, a distant cousin on the Logan side of the family.
He drove as usual to Mrs. Ramseur’s one day for dinner. While there, he had a heart attack. He was carried to the nearby home of his first cousin William Black (the son of William18 Claiborne Black) where he died on March 25, 1902, 3 weeks before Ted’s mother Susan Ida Black was born.
John L. is buried nearby, by the side of his first wife, Mary Peay Black, in the Aimwell Cemetery, Ridgeway, South Carolina.
Here are pictures of his tombstone:
 
Thanks to Charles Robbins of York County, South Carolina for these pictures
Today, Blacksburg, SC is a small, somewhat economically-depressed town of about 2000 inhabitants.
Shelby Street in Downtown Blacksburg
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Tune "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny"
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The introductory tune used on this page is "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" written by James A. Bland (1854 – 1911), a Negro minstrel who wrote over 700 folk songs. Written in 1880, soon after the American Civil War, when many of the newly freed slaves were struggling to find work, the song has become controversial in modern times.
A slightly reworded version was Virginia's state song from 1940 until 1997, using the word "Virginia" instead of "Virginny". In 1997, it was retired on the grounds that the lyrics were considered offensive to African Americans. On January 28, 1997, the Virginia Senate voted to designate "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia" as state song emeritus, and a study committee initiated a contest for writing a new state song. The Virginia General Assembly suspended the contest on January 5, 2000, and recently reinstated it. There were eight candidates.
In January 2006, a state Senate panel voted to designate "Shenandoah" as the "interim official state song", but on March 1, 2006, the House Rules Committee of the General Assembly voted down the bill. As of this writing Virginia still doesn't have an official state song.
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This page and all genealogical data contained on it are Copyrighted © 2007/2008
by Theodore C. Anderson
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