Ancestry Magazine

Uncovering the story of the Peterson family was possible only after an archeology research team uncovered the remnants of the family’s household items.

The Peterson family legacy revealed itself to me when the State of Texas commissioned me to be part of an excavation and investigative team to study Ned and Elizabeth Peterson’s farm site. The site is among the first land to be purchased by African Americans in Southern Brazos County in central Texas, about 100 miles northwest of Houston.

My job was to use genealogical research to put together the story of Ned and Elizabeth Peterson and their family.

Texas A&M University in College Station purchased a portion of the Peterson land in 1940 and held the land for about fifty years. In the early 1990s, the school planned construction on the site, but due to its historic classification, the Peterson property required a thorough examination and report before construction could begin. Unfortunately, data mishandled in the past had complicated record gathering. There were incomplete birth and death records, spelling errors, multiple first names, and disregard for last names during slavery.

For example, various Texas records named Ned Peterson “Edward” with no last name, and called him, Ned No. 3, to distinguish him from other African Americans with the same first name.

In spite of past omissions, the archaeologists exhumed, labeled and stored bits of pottery and glass, and uncovered stone steps and part of a kitchen. Artists were brought in to render representations of farm buildings. Historians searched county and state records.

Based on the findings, I compiled a list of Ned and Elizabeth Peterson’s descendants and discovered that their great-great-grandson, the late Alandrus “Lanny” Peterson, III, had been one of my best friends in high school.

After interviewing several other Petersons, I came upon Lanny’s parents, Atoy and Alandrus II, on my list. I did not need directions to the house where I’d spent so much time more than thirty years ago.

I started the tape recorder and listened to Lanny’s pa rents reminisce about the past. Like the other Petersons, they had saved birth notices, school grade cards, graduation announcements, wedding invitations and certificates, and family pictures.

With the discoveries at the dig in the back of my mind, and the stories and memories of the descendants filling in the missing pieces, the story of the Peterson family began to unfold.

Born around 1840, Ned’s place of birth was listed as Virginia, Alabama, and Texas, depending on which document was examined. This forced the Petersons to rely on family stories to establish Virginia as his birthplace. Probably born to a slave mother whose name was not recorded, Ned may not have known her, due to possible separation by sale. Slave fathers were rarely recorded under laws that required children to follow the mother’s destiny, regardless of identity or status of fathers.

By 1864, Ned had left Virginia, which could mean self-purchased freedom, voluntary surrender by his owner, forgery, or running away. Many slaves, hearing rumors of coming freedom, left without confirmation. Like other Texas pioneers, Ned probably traveled down the Atlantic Coast and around the Gulf states. Longer than the direct route, the coast’s milder climate and big cities provided temporary work.

When Ned reached Alabama, he met Elizabeth Roe, who would become his wife. Ned and Elizabeth’s great-granddaughter, Billie Stewart Smedley, said she heard family stories that Elizabeth may have been an American Indian or a descendant of African and Native American ancestors. Either way, Elizabeth was probably raised as a slave in Alabama.

The Petersons settled in Wellborn, Texas, a frontier rail- and mail-stop in southwestern Brazos County, less than ten miles from the most violent post-Civil War rioting in the state. The 1866 birth registration of their first child, Martha, established that the couple was legally married, as indicated by the child’s legitimacy on the birth certifica te.

In 1869, Ham was born and by 1870, the Petersons had entered into a non-sharecropping contract with a white landowner and gained entry into the cotton culture. This was an unusual position for black tenant farmers, who were usually encouraged to become sharecroppers, a labor-intensive condition resembling slavery. However, Ned had what was considered a large sum of money in that day, and landowners and merchants were eager to do business with him on a cash basis. Without the need for collateral, the Petersons purchased goods and supplies, rented a house, leased land, and started their multi-faceted agricultural business.

According to Ned and Elizabeth’s great-grandson, Alandrus Alexander Peterson II, Ned knew how to make ends meet. He earned extra money on wood sales from rented land and later from land the Petersons owned. He also provided winter cord wood to local customers and, as northern cities ordered wood for heating fuel, he got contracts to transport wood by rail to developing towns in northern and western states.

According to official records, Ned was illiterate and completely without formal education. But according to Lanny’s great aunt, Bertha Peterson Steen, Ned was literate and perhaps educated beyond the rudiments of reading, writing, and simple arithmetic. His granddaughter remembered him reading aloud from the Bible by an oil lamp when she was a girl.

The reason Ned denied to census officials that he could read is unknown. Perhaps it was because slave literacy was illegal, and educating slaves was punishable. With illiteracy so high among the majority population, former slaves hid their ability to read, feeling safer keeping quiet about their academic achievements than risking any offense against lesser achievers who had the power to harm them.

Elizabeth sewed the family’s clothing and bedding, made soaps for bathing and laundry, milked, churned, fed chickens and turkeys, collected eggs, raised gardens, and preserved foo ds. Selling surplus produce, she created an enterprise that contributed to family business growth and passed down food technology careers to her daughters.

Elizabeth even started a laundry tradition in her community. On Friday mornings, the women and girls walked to nearby White Creek. While the women built fires under pots of streaming water, the girls beat stains from clothes with stones. With wooden poles, women agitated clothes boiling in soapy water until they were clean enough to rinse, wring out, and drape over bushes to dry. Women exchanged recipes, sang folk songs, instructed girls in etiquette, and pulled the day’s supper from the stream. As the community increased in number, the event grew into a spectacular weekly affair. It was treated like a tribal ritual to pass valuable knowledge about life and family history from one generation to the next through stories, legends, and lessons–the essential elements that comprise culture.

“When I was a boy,” said Alandrus II, “laundry day was still going on. Some of us boys used to hide in the bushes within earshot and eavesdrop on the females, trying to find out what they talked about.”

As Ned and Elizabeth worked together as a couple and supervised their children in business operations, they managing to accumulate wealth. According to tax records, they had several riding, working, and buggy horses, mules for clearing and plowing, and other items of luxury for their day.

The Petersons built a business on leased land, earning a line of credit to purchase land for the house of Elizabeth’s dreams. However, in 1892, before their plans were realized, Elizabeth died at age forty-two, shortly after the birth of the couple’s thirteenth child, Ned, Jr. At the time, their youngest daughter, Gussie, was five, Adeline was six, and Elvina was eleven. The rest of their children were teenagers and young adults.

In 1893, Ned purchased 150 acres of farmland along White Creek in so uthwestern Brazos County, for which the family had worked and saved for thirty years. Direct access to White Creek, which empties into the Brazos River, allowed Ned to expand his cotton business, using nearby ferry landings to send cotton to Galveston and New Orleans markets.

With construction skills, Ned, Sr. built elevated chicken coops for roosting, a smokehouse to store meat, a barn for animals and feed, tool and equipment sheds, and a spacious, comfortably furnished, log-style house on beams with a generous front porch.

No photographs of the house survive, only the memories of a granddaughter, Bertha Peterson Steen. The Peterson house, she said, had two parts. The primary part was an enormous kitchen, surrounded by an open sitting and dining area. At one end, a huge fireplace had a metal rod for roasting meat and holding kettles.

The secondary part of the house–connected by an open walkway, made up of roof and stone steps, fragments recovered during excavation–was a three-bedroom sleeping quarter.

A backyard well provided water for drinking and cooking. Bath, wash water, and other household water came from a cistern, a device used to catch rain water. In the early 1900s, indoor plumbing in rural areas was rare, so an outhouse sat some distance from the back door down a foot path.

Compared to other rural Southern youngsters, black and white, the Peterson children were privileged. When Adeline grew up, she married Athie Clark, son of a neighboring landowning family.

However, Adeline and Athie, without land of their own, became sharecroppers, chained by debt to a large plantation near the Brazos River. By padding store charges, plantation owners created insurmountable debt against sharecroppers’ harvests. This made getting out of a sharecropping agreement impossible. Nonpayment could legally bind sharecroppers to plantations indefinitely.

Adeline, unaccustomed to the labor required of sharecroppers, worked cotton fields a s hard as men through the births of her six children. After the death of her husband, Ned Peterson, Sr. paid off his daughter’s debt so she could return home with her children.

In 1910, Ned Peterson, Jr., the youngest child of Ned and Elizabeth, moved his bride, Etta Fuller Peterson, to the homestead where they worked as farmhands along with Adeline and her children. According to Ned, Jr.’s daughter, LaVern Peterson Idlebird, both Ned and Etta also had outside jobs. Ned worked on the railroad and Etta worked in private homes.

Ned, Sr., who never remarried, died in 1917, the year the U.S. Army called his youngest son to serve in World War I. Ned was honorably discharged in 1919. With service money, his railroad salary, and Etta’s domestic earnings, the couple purchased land and left Adeline and her children at the Peterson homestead.

Until the Great Depression in 1929, the Peterson property remained in the family. By 1931, though, forty-five-year-old Adeline was unable to keep the farm afloat, forcing the family to start selling.

The Petersons were landowners, entrepreneurs, consumers, taxpayers and legally married couples. As such, they left behind a path lined with public documents to substantiate their rich oral history, which allowed our team to gather, catalog, interview descendants, and construct their family tree and provide the story of a real family, whose roots are deep in American soil.

The Petersons are a family that fits into a large context of American history–much larger than Lanny and I could ever have imagined when we were growing up in the 50s and 60s in Bryan, Texas.

Sunny Nash is the author of Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s (Texas A&M University Press, 1996) and a photographer, listed in Reflections in Black: a history of black photographers 1840 - present (W.W. Norton, 2000). Photographs and documents included here were reproduced by Sunny Nash.