Joseph and Arabella Wallace: Civil War Soldier and Land-owning Farmer
Table of Contents
Military service
Joseph Wallace was born south of Parkers Creek in the late 1830s. During the Civil War, he enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops. In July 1864, Wallace was wounded during the Battle of the Crater in Virginia. Part of the ten-month-long Richmond-Petersburg campaign, this battle included one of the largest concentrations of African American troops in the Civil War, and–due to poor leadership by white officers–they suffered heavy casualties.
Wallace was mustered out in 1865 with a pension and bonus. One of Wallace’s military records states “Free April 19/61,” indicating that he was (using the term of the time) a Free Black as of that date, which made him eligible for a $300 bounty above and beyond his pay.
From the National Archives and Records Administration, NARA M1993, military service records of volunteer Union soldiers belonging to the 36th through 40th infantry units (USCT).
Starting a family
Upon his return, he formed a household with Arabella Watts, a woman born in Island Creek, near the Patuxent River. Watts had been enslaved in a household north of Parkers Creek and, as a teenager in the 1850s, had a child named Mary by an enslaved man named Jim Parker.
Arabella Wallace’s circumstances are documented in a deposition made in 1910, one year after her husband’s death, when she successfully sought a widow’s pension. Wallace’s next-door neighbor Lucretia Parran states that Arabella had been enslaved by a woman named Rebecca Howe Clare on a farm between Parkers Creek and the road to today’s Dare’s Beach. Parran reports that Arabella lived with a slave named Jim Parker, who “belonged to a family named Taylor, living some miles away from the Clare place. Parker was hired out by the Taylors to work for Mr. [John] Dare on his farm [where] Miss Howe Clare [also] lived.” This farm may have been Holly Hill, now owned by the ACLT.
Parran also states that Parker escaped, was recaptured, and sold to a slave owner in Georgia. The following advertisement may refer to Parker’s escape, although it identifies Parker’s enslaver as B.D. Bond, not Taylor, the name that Parran recalled fifty years after the event.
Joseph and Arabella Wallace raised eight children, including Mary and the couple’s seven children born from 1865 to 1880. The couple formalized their marriage in 1877 at a church near Parkers Creek, which we believe later evolved into Brown’s Methodist Episcopal Church (aka Brown’s United Methodist Church). During the 1880s, Joseph Wallace was a trustee of the church.
Acquiring land, role in community
Between 1880 and 1899, Joseph Wallace bought his first property, north of Parkers Creek, containing about 70 acres. In 1901, he bought a second, adjacent property with more than 200 acres.
Joseph H. Wallace’s property north of Parkers Creek. Various records describe tract 1, purchased between 1880 and 1899, as containing from 54 to 73 acres. Tract 2, purchased in 1901, has been described as containing from 200 to 230 acres. The place and road names in this map are those in use today; the green dashed lines represent ACLT hiking trails.
In addition to serving as church trustee, Joseph Wallace was a trustee of the Parkers Creek Colored School, built with the support of the Freedmen’s Bureau and in operation from 1869 to 1949. Wallace was also a member of the Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, a benevolent society founded in Baltimore in 1856 that established homes for orphans, the elderly, and disabled persons. Galilean Fishermen Tabernacle 809 was associated with Brown’s Church.
Death and funeral
Calvert Gazette, 2 October 1909
Joseph Wallace died in 1909, with an obituary in the Calvert Gazette that highlighted his Civil War service and civic activities, noting his well-attended funeral at Brown’s Church. Arabella Wallace passed away in 1923.
For an expanded version of this account, see the article “Joseph H. and Arabella Wallace of Calvert County, Civil War Veteran and Family” from the 2023 issue of the Calvert Historian. The Historian is a publication of the Calvert County Historical Society. The society has a website and a contact page.
