DIGGING INTO CENTRE COUNTY’S 1850 CENSUS DATA

Philip Ruth, Research Coordinator

December 21, 2022

In my September 9, 2022 post, I quoted J. Thomas Mitchell’s contention that “the negro population of Bellefonte had reached a total of eighty by 1847.” Mitchell didn’t cite a source for that population count in his biography of Quaker ironmaster and abolitionist William A. Thomas, but it seems credible in light of the 93 “Black” or “Mulatto” individuals recorded as Bellefonte residents on federal census schedules in 1850. (“Mulatto” was a racial descriptor signifying mixed African and European ancestry, applied in federal census enumerations for the first time in 1850¹).  Calculating from Bellefonte’s total 1850 population of 1,179 persons, we find that 7.9% of the borough’s residents were persons of color (POC) at the midpoint of the nineteenth century (the current percentage is 1.5).

Nearly as impressive was adjoining Spring Township, where an enumerator recorded 75 Black or Mulatto residents, most of them appearing to occupy homes on Halfmoon Hill, across Spring Creek from Bellefonte Borough. There were thus 168 POC enumerated in Bellefonte and Spring Township, which together had a population of 3,459. As I noted in my March 13, 2022 post, the eastern half of Halfmoon Hill—with its relatively large percentage of POC—would be annexed by Bellefonte in 1866.

The other 21 Centre County municipalities in 1850 were cumulatively credited with 79 POC, pushing the County total to 247. Eleven of those 21 municipalities were entirely devoid of Black or Mulatto residents, while five others contained three or fewer. Clearly, Bellefonte and its Halfmoon Hill extension featured by far the largest concentration of POC in Centre County. (See my concluding note regarding the reliability of these data²).

The groundbreaking U.S. census of 1850 was the first federal decennial headcount in which each enumerated “free person” was identified by name (previously, only heads of households were so identified). Even better, 1850 enumerators were tasked with recording a dozen additional facts for each person, including:

• age on the official “census day” (Saturday, June 1, 1850)
• gender (“sex”)
• race (“color”)
• place of birth
• occupation (if the subject was a male over the age of 15)
• value of real estate owned
• whether married within the previous year
• whether deaf-mute, blind, insane, or idiotic
• whether unable to read or write (if the subject was over the age of 20)
• whether the subject had attended school within the previous year

Enumerators were also charged with identifying individuals as members of “families” lodged in particular “dwelling-houses.” As genealogists have discovered, that practice occasionally yielded confusing results, as many of the enumerated “families” included persons with surnames different from the surnames shared by the majority of their housemates, and enumerators were not required to indicate if differently-named household members were related to other members of the household either biologically, through marriage, or through adoption. Not until the launch of the 1880 federal census enumeration would enumerators be obliged to note “the relationship of each person to this family—whether wife, son, daughter, servant, border, or other.”

As with all federal census enumerations, the information entered by enumerators on census schedules in 1850 was provided either by the subjects themselves, by more-knowledgeable members of the subject’s household, or according to the enumerator’s own lights. Enumerators had no way of determining if the proffered information was accurate. Nor can we assume that enumerators accurately recorded or transcribed what they were told, or on what basis they made determinations of their subjects’ “color” (for instance). Researchers can be further stymied by enumerators’ barely legible penmanship.

All such caveats considered, census data recorded in 1850 offer a view into the social composition of Centre County far more fulsome than the results of previous enumerations. Here are other observations I have teased out of our 1850 census database concerning the County’s POC population at the midpoint of the nineteenth century:

Of the 168 POC residing in and around Bellefonte,

• 111 claimed birth in Pennsylvania (66%)
• 44 claimed birth in Maryland (26%)
• 7 claimed birth in Virginia (4%)
• 2 claimed birth in New York (1%)
• several more were not clearly documented

Older POC were more likely to report their birth in a slave state than a free state such as Pennsylvania.

• Average age of 7 “Virginia-born” Bellefonte-area POC: 45 years
• Average age of 44 “Maryland-born” Bellefonte-area POC: 32 years
• Average age of 111 “Pennsylvania-born” Bellefonte-area POC: 14 years

These data suggest that approximately 50 POC living in and around Bellefonte in 1850 had been born in a slave state 30-50 years earlier. We have anecdotal evidence that at least some of them had been enslaved before finding their way to Bellefonte via the Underground Railroad. Perhaps we will be able to determine that most of them escaped slavery by that means. In any case, Bellefonte-area POC with memories of life under involuntary servitude were greatly outnumbered in 1850 by children, teenagers, and young adult POC who had been born free in Pennsylvania.

Thirty-eight adult POC living in Bellefonte and Spring Township in 1850 were recorded as unable to read and write. As all but a few of them had been born from the 1790s through the 1820s, they represented the area’s senior population. A POC’s ability to read and write correlated more closely with age than with birthplace. Natives of Pennsylvania and Maryland—the great majority of Bellefonte-area POC—were born in states where it was legal to teach enslaved or free Blacks to read or write (the same could not be said for Virginia natives).

Only four Black Centre Countians were recorded on 1850 census schedules as owning real estate. Even accounting for a prospective property owner’s need to pay at least a minimal acquisition fee, then be literate enough to understand the terms set forth in a deed of conveyance (or trust a literate friend to parse the deed’s contents), four seems a remarkable low number of Black property owners. I suspect at least a few more were overlooked by enumerators. For instance (as I documented in my September 9, 2022 post), Isaac Lawson had owned and occupied the western half of Bellefonte Lot 78 along Bishop Street since 1829, but was credited with no real estate in his entry in the 1850 enumeration. A review of tax ledgers housed in the basement of the Centre County Library and Historical Museum would likely turn up more complete and reliable information regarding Centre County’s earliest Black owners of real estate.

 Isaac Lawson’s ownership of “1/2 of” a town lot in Bellefonte (Lot 78) is noted in an 1859 tax assessment ledger housed in the basement of the Centre County Library and Historical Museum. Lawson’s characterization as a “(col’d)” person suggests that tax records can provide documentation of Black property ownership in Centre County more reliably than census schedules.

Sixty-one of Centre County’s 247 POC in 1850 were recorded as having a “Profession, Occupation, or Trade.” The cited occupations, from most common to least common, were as follows:

• 40 laborers
• 4 house servants
• 4 ostlers (taking care of horses at an inn)
• 3 barbers
• 3 farmers
• 2 teamsters
• 2 weavers
• 1 blacksmith
• 1 sawyer
• 1 shoemaker

“Laborer” (a.k.a. “general laborer” or “day laborer”) was a catch-all term for an unskilled or untrained worker paid either by the hour, the day, or on the basis of tasks performed or products completed. Laborers occupied the lowest rung on the employment ladder, while earning the smallest wages.

An additional 15 adult POC (5 males and 10 females) were recorded in 1850 as living with white families in Centre County, but having no specified occupation. The late Penn State history professor Gerald G. Eggert observed in African Americans in Pennsylvania³ that “it seems safe to assume that . . . blacks [recorded in Pennsylvania’s 1850 federal census as members of otherwise] white households and had no listed occupations were servants.” Projecting from that assumption, the number of Black house servants in Centre County in 1850 would have been closer to 20.

Finally, 19 of Centre County’s 61 “colored” children ages 5-15 were recorded as having attended school within the previous year. Until and unless we learn otherwise, we assume that Bellefonte-area Black children were formally educated in the “Meeting House and School House” reported by J. Thomas Mitchell to have been erected in 1847 by William A. Thomas “with the aid of several of his ‘abolitionist friends,’ on his own land” on Halfmoon Hill (see my September 9, 2022 post for more particulars).

In my next few posts, I will narrow my sights onto four Black Centre Countians whose experiences here and elsewhere during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflect the diverse challenges, accomplishments, and shifting fortunes of a population largely erased from public memory. First up will be Isaac Lawson’s daughter, Adeline Harris Lawson Graham.

¹A 2019 blogpost by Becky Little, titled “The Most Controversial Census Changes in American History,” explains the addition of “the ‘mulatto’ category” to federal census schedules in 1850 as follows: “The category was added at the request of a ‘racial scientist,’ Josiah Nott,” says Melissa Nobles, a political science professor at MIT and author of Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics. Nott was a white slave owner in Alabama who “thought that blacks and whites may have been different species,” she says. He persuaded Joseph Underwood, a senator from Kentucky, to include “mulatto,” on the census so that he could study mixed-race people with some African ancestry and see, for example, “if there was any kind of drop-off in their lifespan.”

²The census data cited throughout this post—gleaned from an electronic database we have compiled from census schedule facsimiles and Ancestry.com digital indexes—should be regarded as preliminary. In the brief time that I have researched the lives of Black Centre County residents, I have found numerous instances where data recorded on census schedules are inconsistent with facts recorded elsewhere. Here is a glaring example:

In enumerating the household of 35-year-old “labourer” John Welch, his wife Mariah, and children William H., Sarah F., Amelia L., and Eliza J. in Spring Township on August 28, 1850 , enumerator John Irwin left blank spaces in their “color” fields (Column 6 in the page image below). Because enumerators had been instructed in writing to “leave the space blank where the person is white,” the blank spaces in each of the Welch entries appear to reflect Irwin’s impression that the Welches were white.

Irwin ultimately included the six Welches in his final tabulation of 2,210 white residents of Spring Township, and, in doing so, omitted them from his final count of 70 “free colored people” in the township.

 

It is hard to imagine that Irwin didn’t recognize the Welches as POC. It seems more likely that he neglected to enter “color” data for them, then failed to recognize the omissions when he totaled up “white” and “colored” residents. The latter likelihood is supported by another apparent error made by Irwin. He appears to have mistakenly enumerated 35-year-old John Welch twice in Centre County: in Bellefonte on July 31, 1850 (below), and again in Spring Township 28 days later. In the Bellefonte enumeration, Irwin identified Welch as the only Black member in the household of attorney James Burnside. Welch’s “occupation” was not specified, suggesting his service as a live-in servant.

 

Data recorded in subsequent federal census enumerations identify John Welch and other members of his family as either Black or Mulatto. But we don’t have to take a census enumerator’s word for it. We have reams of more compelling evidence, such as that provided in a biographical sketch of John and Mariah’s celebrated son Isaiah Henderson Welch. According to sketch-writer William H. Mills, Isaiah had been born “on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in 1845, and was brought to Bellefonte by his parents in infancy, who made their escape from slavery . . . and were concealed by the family of Mr. William A. Thomas.” That is just the beginning of Isaiah’s intriguing life story, which we shall explore in greater detail in a future post.

³Gerald G. Eggert, “‘Two Steps Forward, a Step and a Half Back’: Harrisburg’s African American Community in the Nineteenth Century.” In African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives. Edited by Joe W. Trotter and Eric Ledell Smith (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997, pp. 220-253).

 

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