This paper will examine free Black farmers in antebellum Kentucky and the tactics they used to secure financial resources and pass those on to succeeding generations. Through preliminary research supported by the Kentucky Historical Society, I have begun identifying rural Black landowners and tracing their activities through court documents, deeds, and tax records. I was especially surprised to see certain well-placed individuals investing in land on both sides of the Ohio River. Hemp farmers, in particular, working with a racialized crop prone to economic booms and busts, were strongly represented among those able to purchase land in free states when hemp prices were high. In fact, a few rural Black communities in the Midwest, including settlements in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, seem to have owed considerable financial support to farmers who remained in the slave South.
I will focus on the free Black community of rural Woodford County, Kentucky, which generated a surprising amount of economic activity. The wealth circulating within Woodford County’s Black community seems to have been especially shaped by a racially ambiguous “mulatto” connected with a prominent white family. This individual was so important to the free Black economic activities within the community that he declared his profession as “money loaner” in the 1850 census. While his presence on numerous deeds underscore his significance for the Black community’s accumulation of property and wealth, I was equally struck by the importance of women in these legal and economic transactions. One especially intriguing figure, the wife of a man manumitted by the “money loaner,” helped establish a Black community in Illinois while her husband remained in Kentucky, and the woman’s ability to expand her community’s landholdings suggest sources of revenue connected to her husband’s continued residence in Kentucky. This project, then, demonstrates the need to more closely examine rural free Black economic activity as certain individuals’ connections extended well beyond state borders, presenting a far more complicated economic picture than has been previously suggested by historians.