RCHS Blog Post Number 231.
Long In Darke
By Dr. W. E. B. Dubois for the Colored American Magazine, XVII Nov. 1909.
Published on May 19, 2021.
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Charming to almost weird is this tale told by Dr. Dubois in a recent "Independent" of the colored community in Darke County, Ohio, known as Long.
Throughout the United States there are numbers of communities of black folk, segregated, secluded, more or less autonomous, going their quiet way unknown of most of the surrounding world. Some of these, like Mound Bayou, Miss. and Cass County Mich., have been exploited in the press; others, Gouldtown, N. J., and Buxton, Iowa are almost unknown. Particularly are the Ohio Negro settlements unheard of, and yet there are in Ohio and Indiana perhaps a dozen such communities, romantic in history and rich in social lessons. Black men as well as white looked toward Ohio for economic freedom in the first days of the nineteenth century. It was wild John Randolph, of Roanoke that gave his emancipated slaves the choice of Liberia and Ohio. They chose Ohio, and came in 1846 and last month 150 of their descendants held a reunion.
It was this reunion that sent me searching for my folk in Ohio, and then almost by accident I ran into Long in Darke County.
Long is a settlement of colored people, a hundred years old, and Darke County is in Southwestern Ohio, sixty miles north of Cincinnati.
The land is dark and level. Great fields of corn stand strong and luxuriant. The tobacco is green and silent, and all about are piled sheaves of yellow wheat and oats. Far out in the distance there are no hills, but only the shadows of oak and beech woods and the dim dying away of level lands. The houses stand from a hundred to a thousand feet apart. Some are old and built with some shade of the old style of Southern mansions. Most of them are newer, representing a renaissance of building in the last decade or two. They show forth different ideas and degrees of living. Here is a cottage, with smooth shaven lawn and flowers; yonder a little, irregular house, with no step, but a wandering path and garden; further on are great barns and a straight busy house, naked of porch or ornament. There, where I stayed is a yellow house, surrounded by a porch with climbing clematis, barns and outhouses, and in front a view of great stretches of green corn and tobacco. Further up the road two churches crouch, looking each other squarely and suspiciously in the face. They are wooden, small and rather bard. Near them is a two story house, with lodge rooms above and a new grocery store, kept by two pretty girls, below. Three schoolhouses are scattered in the hamlet and one Quaker seminary, with traditions and history of some sixty years or more. The dusty road which runs down through the hamlet, stretching it's 4 1/2 miles through Indiana and Ohio, with it's hundred families on either side, is not apt to be deserted and especially on Sunday it is lively with buggies and well-fed horses and the voices of young people riding up and down.
Down the narrow lane at the back of the house where I lived lies a grove of young, straight and golden green trees. Here the annual Sunday School picnic is held, and here, on the Sunday when I was there, came three hundred buggies with a thousand people. Looking at the people first you would have noted little unusual; they were well fed, well dressed, quiet and white. That is, mostly white here and there a tinge of gold and olive and brown and one or two black faces, mostly white, you would have said. Then, when you inquired, you would have learned that most of these folks were "black," for Long was settled by octoroons and quadroons in 1808.
In this grove last year was celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of Long. There was, it seems, in the eighteenth century a certain Pennsylvania Dutchman who went to Virginia and had a daughter too darkly beautiful to marry under Virginia law. He had for a neighbor, however, a man as moral as himself, whose son was born of an Indian-Negro squaw.
This boy walked to Ohio in 1804, squatted on new land in the wilderness and returned and received the Dutchman's daughter as his wife. But the Dutchman loved his darker daughter and straightaway leaving his white family accompanied his colored children to Ohio, where he lived and died on the 782 acres which they bought. Fifty descendants of this couple now live and half of these farm on 400 acres of the original land.
Later others came from North Carolina and Tennessee and the rest from the South. One white planter brought his colored son and ten grandchildren and placed them on 700 acres, and even as late as 1850 there came a white Mississippi planter and two black wives, with fifteen sons and daughters and $3,000 in gold.
Then came a fight for life. The surrounding communities looked with disdain and hatred on these folk whose faces were scarce darker than their own. If a black man came to town he was liable to be chased by hoodlums, and when whites came out to stop the dedication of a Wesleyan church there was so bloody a battle with fists and brickbats that the experiment was never tried again.
Internal development followed. The church was built and land bought and cultivated. The settlement became one of the main lines of underground railway service from the Ohio River. The Wesleyan church split in an attempt to exclude tobacco and members of secret societies, and wild young lawbreakers and illegitimate children appeared. Then the Civil War came and slowly the community gripped itself. Its sons and daughters went forth into the world and became doctors and lawyers and one a bishop. Some fifteen of the men at various times took white wives from the surrounding community and traveled away, never to return. Their children today in Chicago and New York are probably "hating niggers." The women were more loyal, and refusing to intermarry, took hold of the community. For thirty years they have kept liquor selling out of the village, smashing the last kegs themselves. Today the community is quiet, well-to-do and law abiding. The white judge of the County Court, who spoke to them while I was there said, "I have come to you; you never visit me in court." A visiting presiding elder, who has known the place intimately for more than twenty years, knows of but two illegitimate children, and one of those was begotten abroad. The people own 5,000 acres of land worth a half a million dollars, excluding improvements, and from a community of five or six hundred people. Fully half of them tomorrow could lose themselves among their white neighbors and never be suspected of black blood. Yet they keep themselves aloof, quiet and loyal, refusing to associate with their friends and relatives. Beneath the placid beauty of their fields run the waters of bitterness, but it cannot spoil their cherished past nor the singular comeliness of their growing boys and beautiful women.
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Would you like a book to learn more about local history?
Randolph County, Indiana 1818-1990
Commonly referred to as "The Red History Book"
Compiled by the Randolph County Historical Society, 1991, Second reprint 2003.
To obtain your own copy of "The Red History Book" stop in at The RCHS Museum Shop or send an email to arrange placing a mail order.
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