The Forgotten People

Who’ll know? It takes years of service and recognition for someone to remain in the community’s memory. Eventually their names are no longer spoken, generations follow, nobody remembers.

Names of politicians are etched on buildings. Highways, intersections and bridges are named for first responders after they’ve answered their last call.

During Black History Month I attempt to focus on forgotten people who contributed to their communities but were not well known during their lives and forgotten after death.

The people who make our community and local government work are not famous, not even in their own time.

Like most freed slaves, Henry Watkins was a life-long agricultural worker. Some slaves had skills that opened doors to enter the economy. They were blacksmiths, cabinet makers, wheelwrights, carpenters, cobblers, harness and saddle makers, candle makers, weavers, seamstresses, washerwomen, maids, nurses.

Many former slaves headed west, many others felt an investment in the land they’d worked and held the remains of their family.

Henry Watkins owned a farm at the local junction of two busy highways. Thousands travel those roads passing the Watkins home place without suspecting it was a liberated family’s home.

The Watkins produced law-abiding, honest, contributing children who made their community and the larger community a better place.

Even knowing the names of the cemeteries, I have yet to find their graves.

Ben Buttrum attended Fairfield AME Church, which still struggles on. He also attended Pray’s Mill Baptist Church and on Homecoming Sundays brought blocks of ice to offer the refreshment of “iced water” when it was a treat.

My father said that Ben set up his barrel in the shade next to the spring that supplied water to church goers. The spring still flows, but it is paved over and under the church parking lot.

There were scores of freedmen living in our county, and for now a few of them are in my inbox — Jasper Jones, Charles Camp, Cornelius Cox, John Ellison, Simon Ferguson, Sels Ensley, Isaiah Love, Calvin McLoren, Green Middlebrooks, John Menifield, Williams VanSandt, Thomas Winn.

Descendants of these freedmen likely still live in the community.

The names and bio information of freedmen and women will go to the Douglas County Museum of History and Art as it is discovered, but it won’t be soon. It is tedious work and the task might outlive me.

It is distasteful to me for anyone’s memory to fade away, for anyone to be forgotten.

I’m making up for lost time.

joenphillips@yahoo.com