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THE MANY CONNECTIONS OF MARY MILLER GREEN DELIGE (C1849-1932): PART 2

Philip Ruth, Research Coordinator

June 29, 2025

Note: For quick reference, Family View Reports for Thomas and Rosanna (Delige) Miller, as well as their daughter Mary Miller and her first husband William Green Sr., can be found at the bottom of this page.

A series of articles published in Bellefonte’s weekly Democratic Watchman in September 1857 reported on a trial held in the Centre County Courthouse of “Catherine Miller, Alexander Delige, Thomas Miller, Eliza Ganz and Benjamin Miller (colored), charged with stealing and receiving Flour, Meat, Leather, Dry Goods, Groceries, etc. from the whole neighborhood of Halfmoon.” The accused perpetrators were said to “hail from Tow Hill, [which] is yet swarming with the same kidney” (i.e., people of similar character). More details of the alleged crimes were presented in those articles, which ultimately reported the finding of all but Benjamin Miller guilty of larceny. Catherine Miller received the lightest sentence. She was required “to pay a fine of $5 to the Commonwealth, for the use of the county of Centre, to pay the costs of prosecution, to return the goods stolen to the respective owners, or to pay the full value thereof, and to undergo an imprisonment in the county jail for the term of six calendar months.” Her fellow convicts were similarly fined and ordered to make restitution, but received much stiffer sentences: “Alexander Delige to undergo a servitude in the penitentiary of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for the term of 18 months, and Thomas Miller and Eliza Ganz to undergo a like servitude in the said penitentiary for the term of one year—all to be kept to hard labor.” The “said penitentiary” was the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.

A few days after the trial, as the sun rose on Friday, September 4, 1857, Centre County Sheriff Mordecai Waddle and his deputies ushered Thomas Miller, Alexander Delige, and Eliza Ganz from their cells in the county prison to a Philadelphia-bound coach waiting on Jail Hill. The transfer was monitored by a knot of concerned onlookers, most of whom were Black. Spying the throng, and “thinking there might be a smart chance for a local [news item],” a Democratic Watchman reporter rushed to the scene and elbowed his way through the crowd. The report he later filed was laced with the kind of derision and ridicule the paper’s editorial staff routinely directed at African Americans:

It was nothing more nor less than a lot of sympathizing friends who had congregated there to take a sad farewell, and cast their last, lingering, longing look upon their dearly ‘belubbed collud bredderen’ Alexander Delige and Thomas Miller, and their loving and affectionate sister, Miss Eliza Ganz, whom Sheriff Waddle and deputies were about escorting to the Eastern Penitentiary. Miss Eliza observed to a friend ‘good-by, you’ll see dis chile back in ‘bout a year,—den she’ll be ready to go agin.’ This reflects her true character, and she is a fair type of her caged companions. . . . The stage soon started and stopped at the Pennsylvania Hotel [precursor of the Brockerhoff House], the crowd following after. Here we observed one or two of their most particular friends crying very distressingly (poor fellows, we thought their hearts would break). The coach departed, and one individual, more affectionate than the rest, held on to the boot [luggage compartment] for some time, but his hold slipped and he was compelled to return.

I suspect the Thomas Miller hauled off on that occasion to spend one year of solitary confinement with hard labor in the Eastern State Penitentiary was Mary Miller’s father. By extension, Thomas’ associates Benjamin and Catherine (Delige) Miller were probably uncle and aunt to Mary, and Alexander Delige was another uncle. The convicted Thomas Miller was recorded in Eastern State’s admissions ledger several days later as a 30-year-old, married, mulatto laborer from Centre County. He could neither read nor write, was “occasionally intemperate” (meaning he sometimes drank alcohol to excess), and was Methodist by religious affiliation. Mary Miller’s father Thomas is the only Centre County resident documented in mid-nineteenth-century records who even remotely fits that description.

If the incarcerated Thomas Miller was indeed Mary’s father, his relatives on Tow Hill probably did not see or hear from him again until after his release from prison a year later. Such an absence could help explain why Mary’s mother Rosanna—who would tell a census enumerator in 1900 that she had given birth to 13 children between 1844 and 1871—did not deliver any children conceived between August 1857 and August 1858 (or at least no such children lived long enough to be identified in census records). Of the 13 offspring Rosanna claimed in 1900, only six were still alive at that time. Among those who had died young (we deduce from census records) were eldest sons William and Jackson (last recorded in the 1860 census); and daughter Caroline, said to be three years old in the 1860 census, and 13 years of age in the 1870 census—placing her birth around 1857. She was enumerated for a final time in the 1870 census, suggesting she died during the following decade.

When the 1860 census was taken in Centre County, 10-year-old Mary Miller was recorded living with her parents and four siblings (William, Jackson, Franklin, and Caroline, apparently misidentified as “Catherine”) in a house near the Farmer’s High School (precursor of Penn State) in Harris Township. Father Thomas had found work in that neighborhood as a farm laborer, and had managed to accrue $20 in savings. He told a census enumerator he was a native Pennsylvanian, which didn’t jibe with his claim in 1850 that he had been born in Virginia. He may have been among Pennsylvania’s many Black residents who truthfully reported in 1850 being born in a slave state, but who felt safer a decade later—after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—claiming birth in a free state.

The only other Black persons enumerated in Harris Township in 1860 were Thomas’ 70-year-old mother Lucinda Miller and her housemate William Miller. The latter claimed to be 60 years of age, but that assertion is called into question by his declaration a decade later that he was 90 years old. William was apparently unaware of his actual age, which would not be surprising if he had been born enslaved before the turn of the nineteenth century. I suspect this William Miller was Lucinda’s husband, though he might instead have been a brother. It is noteworthy that Lucinda’s son Thomas (Mary Miller’s father) named his first-born son “William,” in line with the convention of that era of naming a first-born son for his paternal grandfather. It is also worth noting that both Lucinda and William Miller told the 1860 census enumerator they had been born in Pennsylvania—contradicting Lucinda’s apparently more honest report in 1850 that she had been born circa 1792 in Virginia (presumably enslaved).

In March 1863, two years into the Civil War, Congress passed a Conscription Act mandating that all able-bodied men aged 20 to 45—including African Americans—be drafted into service in the Union Army. Thomas Miller was among the 51 Harris Township men drafted the following July. The results of that draft were reported in the August 14, 1863, edition of the anti-Abolitionist Democratic Watchman, under the sarcastic heading “Effects of Abolitionism—the Draft in Centre County.” The writer of the article indicated Thomas’ status as the only Black draftee in Harris Township by attaching the descriptor “(nig.)” to Thomas’ name. I have found no evidence that Thomas served in the Union Army, whereas the service of more than 30 other Black Centre County men in the U.S. Colored Troops is well documented (among those soldiers were Mary Miller’s probable uncle Aaron Delige and her future husband William Green).

Data recorded on census schedules in July 1870 indicate that Mary Miller gained at least four more siblings during the 1860s. Brother John was born around 1865 (the last year of the Civil War), brother Calvin around 1866, brother Abraham Lincoln around 1867, and sister Jane around 1868. Another sister, Catherine (“Katie”), was recorded as having been born in February 1870. It should be noted that later census records and death certificates posit considerably different birth years for all five of the Miller children born during the period 1860-1870. For example, while Katie was recorded in the July 1870 census enumeration as having been born in February of that year, her death certificate asserts she was born seven years earlier, on March 3, 1863. The ages of the Miller children recorded on 1870 census schedules should thus be regarded as unconfirmed.

By the time that census was conducted in Centre County, the Miller family—minus Mary—had moved to a rented house on Bellefonte’s Jail Hill, in the borough’s South Ward. As of July 4, 1870, the Miller household comprised father Thomas, mother “Ann” (Rosanna), and children Frank (20), Caroline (16), John (4), Calvin (3), Lincoln (2), Jane (1), and Catharine (3 months). Thomas, Frank, and Caroline reported being unable to read and write, while Rosanna claimed an ability to read, but not to write. Thomas and Frank were working as day laborers, by far the most common occupation cited for Black men in Centre County at this time.

No entry for Mary Miller has been found on 1870 census schedules. She would tell a census enumerator in 1930 (at the professed age of 81) that she married for the first time when she was 16. By that measure, she would have married her first husband, William Green, in 1865 or ’66, and would thus have been married at least four years prior to the 1870 census enumeration. But she was not living with William in July 1870, when he was recorded as a 31-year-old ostler (stable hand) living in the Cummings House, a hotel located on the north side of Bishop Street, between S. Penn and S. Ridge Streets (the 1862-vintage building is still standing, converted into apartments). Under the new superintendency of James H. Lipton, the Cummings House had a resident staff of six: William (the establishment’s only ostler), three white waiters, a Black waiter, a Black cook, and a white bar clerk.

Seven years earlier, in the summer of 1863, William Green had identified himself to military officials as a 31-year-old native of Harrisburg. No other information concerning his origins was recorded at that time or, apparently, any other time. Only through recent research has it been possible to posit William as the eldest child of William and Hester Green, who reportedly married somewhere in the Susquehanna Valley north of Harrisburg in 1830, then moved to the Bellefonte area separately in the mid-1840s and early 1850s, each bringing one or more of their children with them. The senior William Green did not live long after moving to the Centre County seat, but Hester made her home here for 30 years, living most of that time in the home of her son Charles Green beside the St. Paul AME Church (Charles’ wife Maria (née Caten) was a charter member of the St. Paul congregation).

As for Hester Green’s presumed first-born son William (future husband of Mary Miller), an obituary published in the Democratic Watchman reported only that he had made his way to Bellefonte before 1860, and launched here what became a multi-decade career as a hotel employee (initially as an ostler, later as a porter).  The only man named William Green enumerated in Centre County in the summer of 1860 was a Pennsylvania-born mulatto laborer living in Bellefonte and claiming to be 24 years of age, by which measure he would have been born in 1835 or early 1836. This William Green also appeared to be married. The only other member of his household was a 22-year-old mulatto woman identified as “Catherine Green.” Catherine’s relation to William was, unhelpfully, not specified. We can suppose from her age and co-habitation with William that she was his wife, but must allow for the possibility that she was instead a sister or some other relative. If this William and Catherine Green were indeed husband and wife, that increases the likelihood that the William Green enumerated in Bellefonte in 1860 was the same William Green (future husband of Mary Miller) identified in a June 1863 military draft ledger as a married, 30-year-old, “colored” laborer living just outside Bellefonte in Spring Township.

A few weeks after being drafted, William Green traveled to Philadelphia and enlisted as a private in Company F, 6th Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry, United States Colored Troops, for the standard term of three years. His enlistment record, dated August 26, 1863, noted that he was 31 years old and stood five feet, seven inches tall. He mustered in with other members of Company F at Camp William Penn, in Cheltenham Township, Montgomery County. Among the other 96 privates assigned to Company F was 35-year-old Lewis Mills of Bellefonte, father of future barber William H. Mills. Lewis Mills and William Green both survived the war and mustered out with Company F on September 20, 1865 (a brief history of the 6th Regiment is included in my biographical sketch of Charles Garner Sr.).

As noted earlier, if Mary Miller reported correctly in 1930 that she was 16 years old at the time of her first marriage, she likely married William Green in late 1865 or early 1866, soon after he mustered out of the army. No other evidence pertaining to Mary and William’s marriage—whether common law or formal—has been found. Also unexplained is why William was enumerated in the July 1870 Centre County census, while Mary was not.

In the early 1870s William Green switched from ostling at the Cummings House to portering at the Brockerhoff House (as reflected in an 1874-75 Bellefonte directory). He and Mary started a family in 1872, their first child of record—William Henry Green—being born on Christmas Eve of that year. Mary delivered three more children during the 1870s: Thomas Theodore, circa November 1873; Amelia (“Meiley”), on July 25, 1875; and Robert Nelson, on March 16, 1879 (as recorded on their death certificates). Unaccountably, baby Robert was not enumerated with the Green family in its home in Bellefonte’s North Ward in June 1880. William Green was identified on that occasion as a literate 50-year-old hotel porter. His wife Mary was said to be illiterate and 28 years of age (by which measure she would have been born about 1852, which seems several years too late). The Green children were recorded as William (age 9), Thomas Theodore (6), and Amelia (4).

Mary’s parents, seven younger siblings, and a nephew (1-year-old James Miller) were recorded in June 1880 occupying a house in Bellefonte’s South Ward—presumably the same house along E. Logan Street between S. Penn and S. Ridge Streets that Mary’s father Thomas and her brother Frank were reported occupying in the 1874-75 Bellefonte Directory. Thomas and Frank were working as day laborers in the summer of 1880, as were Thomas’ sons Lincoln (age 19), Calvin (17), and John (15).

A year later, those three Miller brothers were arrested on charges of assault and battery, as reported in the August 25, 1881, issue of the Centre Democrat as follows:

Commonwealth vs. Abraham Lincoln Miller, Calvin Miller, John Miller and Harry Brown. Charged with assault and battery upon Charles Williams. Case called; defendants plead not guilty. After proceeding with the case a short time, defendants changed their pleas of not guilty to plea of guilty with the exception of John Miller, in whose case a nolle prose was entered. Calvin Miller and Harry Brown were sentenced to pay the cost of prosecution, a fine of five dollars and three months imprisonment in the county jail. Lincoln Miller sentenced same, except he got five months in the county jail.

The circumstances surrounding the altercation with Charles Williams were not explained. The only “Charles Williams” identified in the 1880 census of Centre County was a Black 18-year-old Maryland native working as a live-in servant with the family of attorney James Hastings. Whatever the cause of the fracas, this would not be the Miller brothers’ last brush with the law.

The February 3, 1881, issue of the Centre Democrat reported that “a small son of Mr. William Green, the colored porter at the Brockerhoff House, was quite seriously injured on Monday last. In attempting to jump on a sled which was moving along Allegheny street, he lost his hold and fell, one of the front runners passing over his neck, cutting it quite severely.” It is not known whether this “small son” of William and Mary Green was eight-year-old William, seven-year-old Theodore, or baby Robert.

On March 26, 1882, Mary Miller Green delivered a fifth child and second daughter: Sarah Ann, soon known as “Sallie.” The Green family thus numbered seven on September 22, 1885, when Mary paid her parents $40 for a house and lot on the south side of E. Logan Street in Bellefonte’s South Ward. The property was described in the deed of conveyance as fronting 15 feet 9 inches on E. Logan Street, and extending southward (up Reservoir Hill) 123 feet, with its western and southern sides abutting a house and lot owned by Mary’s parents. Data recorded during the 1890 census indicate that the property purchased by Mary in September 1885 and occupied by her and her family through the following decades was addressed as 14 E. Logan Street. The property’s frame house had a two-story 15-by-15-foot core and a one-story rear appendage equipped with a rudimentary kitchen. The building is still standing and serving as a residence, but is now addressed as 118 E. Logan Street. Mary’s parents and younger siblings lived in the significantly larger, two-story frame house to the immediate west, at 12 E. Logan Street, now addressed as 116 E. Logan Street.

Mary Miller Green gave birth to three more daughters in her E. Logan Street house: Jennie, on December 11, 1885; Roxanne (“Roxy”), in November 1886; and Lausetta (“Etta”), on May 3, 1889. There were thus ten Greens sharing roughly 500 square feet of living space as of 1890, when the next federal census was recorded. Though father William was probably nearing 60 (calculating from his previous statements to officials), he apparently told the census enumerator on this occasion that he had turned 70.

Our recap of Mary Miller Green Delige’s long life will resume in Part 3.

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