Lemuel & Annie Wallace: Farm, House, & Family
Table of Contents
Introduction
Lemuel Wallace was an African American farmer born in the early 1850s. He and his wife, Annie Boots, lived south of Parkers Creek. The couple’s 11 children were born between 1873 and 1894. In 1909, Lemuel purchased a 100-acre property about a mile and a half from the creek, and in 1910, he bought an additional 7 acres about three-quarters of a mile to the west.
Tobacco was the cash crop on the Wallace farm. The land also supported the family’s sustenance via gardens, poultry, and hogs. Over time, some of the Wallace children and grandchildren were provided housing by successive occupation of the house on the larger tract–still standing today– while others acquired lots subdivided from the smaller tract by Lemuel before his death in 1934 and, later, from his son John Cephas Wallace (1884-1968). We have not found a death date for Annie Wallace, but census records indicate that she was still living in 1940.
We know very little about Lemuel Wallace’s family history. His father Basil Wallace was enumerated in the 1870 census, at age 60 (born 1810), with seven children including 18-year-old Lemuel. (No spouse is named in that entry but an Ancestry-hosted family tree reports that Basil’s wife was named Margaret Dorsey.) The name Basil Wallace turns up in two earlier censuses: in 1850 census as Basil Walles and, in 1860, as Basil Wallace. However, none of the other members of those two households match family names enumerated in 1870 and, for this reason, we cannot be certain that the 1850 or 1860 entries identify Lemuel’s father. This is of special interest because African Americans named in pre-Civil War census records carry the status of–to use the term of the period–Free Blacks. If either of the men named Basil were Lemuel’s father, we could infer that that Lemuel had not been born enslaved.
Farmland and the home site
Left: Weeding tobacco in 1988, just south of Lemuel Wallace’s former land. Woodrow Wallace, Lemuel’s grandson, with his grandnephew Derrick Parker and grandson Johnny Weems.
“All this land you see, all this level land was for tobacco,” Lemuel’s grandson Woodrow Wallace said during an interview in 1989, as he recalled the extent of the farm’s tilled fields from about 1910 to the 1930s. “This land was used for tobacco, the other side of the [farm lane was also used] for tobacco. I remember when [uncle] Ed Carr used to have tobacco on it. Yeh, he’s the last one I remember having any tobacco. He had, all the way over to them big trees there.”
The tobacco was cured in a barn at the top of the hill where breezes were more prevalent (and in a day when there were many open fields and few trees), facilitating the curing of the air-dried crop. To ready the tobacco for movement to market, Woodrow said, we “had a prize [press], to pack tobacco . . . in the southwest corner of the barn.”
During the 1989 interview, we talked about the farmstead as it stood from the 1910s to the 1940s. The house is a one-and-one-half-story dwelling with what is sometimes called a tight-wind staircase, which keeps the space required for the stairs to a minimum. When asked if everyone slept upstairs, Woodrow replied that “some would sleep downstairs. That’s the way they done in them days. Them days, houses was scarce, they’d have, maybe they’d have a bed downstairs, I’m sure.”
Right: Woodrow Wallace, Lemuel Wallace’s grandson, at the Wallace house, during an interview conducted in November 1989.
The kitchen with a woodburning stove (still in the structure today) was in an ell addition at the back. Water for household use was carried in pails from a spring about 200 feet to the east. Other features were also typical of the time and place. Woodrow explained that there was an outbuilding, “what they call a lockhouse. Where they kept the meat and stuff like that.” The meat came from livestock raised for the household. “They’d keep meat, you know, they’d raise hogs, beef and stuff like that and they’d kill it in the fall or winter,” Woodrow explained, “they keep it in there in them [lock]houses.” The hogs, he said, were kept “in a little pen down here in the woods.” In contrast, the cattle had more of a free run. “The beef run out in the field,” Woodrow said, “there were big fields for beef, like my tobacco fields out there. Like you see going up and down the road now, see cattle running in them big fields.” The hogs were butchered at the homeplace when the weather turned cold. “We butchered [hogs] at the pen. They fixed up a kettle of water, like a — last time, I saw, a fifty-gallon drum, set ’em over a fire, get hot, dig a hole and roll it off there, we used to do it. Roll ’em off the fire into the hole, we used to scald ’em right there. . . . Pick out the hair, scrape all this [hide].”
Left: ACLT volunteers Frank Caldwell, Arnold Petty, and Art Cochran siding over gaps in the Wallace house clapboarding, April 1990. The new tulip poplar siding was purchased from the Amish-owned Stoltzfus Lumber Company in St. Mary’s County.
Three houses for family
In the 1989 interview, Woodrow Wallace outlined the family’s housing arrangements. After the 1910 purchase of the 7-acre tract on Parkers Creek Road, Lemuel and his family–that is, his wife and the children still living with their parents–occupied a house at the Parkers Creek Road location, a dwelling that Woodrow said burned down “forty years ago or more,” i.e., in the 1930s or 1940s. We’ll call it house one in this account.
Evidence in deeds for adjacent land suggests that Lemuel Wallace occupied the 100-acre eastern tract for several years prior to its purchase in 1909. Woodrow Wallace said that Lemuel’s son-in-law Nathaniel “Nate” Parker built the house on that tract–we’ll call it house two–and it may have been built prior to 1909. This is the Lemuel Wallace house, which stands as a point of historical interest today. Parker had been born circa 1883 and was married to Lemuel’s daughter Rosa (aka Rosy), whose birthdate is most often reported as 1893.
Nate and Rosa Parker moved to a new home in 1926, when Lemuel Wallace sold them a three-quarter-acre lot at the far southeastern corner of the larger tract, where Nate built another dwelling. We’ll call it house three and nearby neighbors remember as still standing into the 1950s. After Nate and Rosa vacated house two, it was occupied by another of Lemuel’s daughters, Harriet, born circa 1880, and her husband Edward “Eddy” Carr, born 1876. According to Woodrow Wallace, Lemuel’s son William (born 1873) also occupied house two, although the date was not specified.
Changes in ownership beginning in the 1930s
In 1930, Lemuel Wallace transferred ownership of the western 7-acre property to his son John Cephas Wallace. John Cephas Wallace was already a landowner in the neighborhood, having bought 81 acres on Scientists’ Cliffs Road in 1926. He was also active in overseeing the family’s affairs. When Lemuel passed away in 1934, without a will, John Cephas was named as the administrator of the estate by the county’s Orphans Court.
Taxes on Lemuel’s land went unpaid from 1931 to 1934. The Great Depression was under way, but it may have also been the case that Lemuel’s health was failing during the last four years of his life, preventing him from attending to his financial affairs. The outcome was a forced sale, with the larger (eastern) property, then listed at 87 acres, being purchased by Flippo and Annie Gravatt in 1936. This was one of several acquisitions made by the Gravatts as they developed the Scientists’ Cliffs community on the Bay. About 436 acres of the Gravatt’s holdings, however, including the Lemuel Wallace tract, did not become part of the cottage community proper. The couple retained this land in an undeveloped state and, in 1987, after Flippo and Annie’s deaths, the newly created American Chestnut Land Trust bought the 436 acres from the Gravatt estate.
Left: Woodrow Wallace, Winsco “Dickie” Wallace, and Edward “Eddy” Carr, March 24, 1938. Woodrow and Dickie are brothers; Eddy was married to the young men’s aunt Harriet (Wallace) Carr. The USDA plant pathologist Flippo Gravatt hired these neighbors of Scientists’ Cliffs to assist with an experimental planting of Asian chestnut seedlings on nearby land. Photo courtesy Scientists’ Cliffs Association Archives.
Meanwhile, the three-quarter-acre lot followed a different trajectory even after the Gravatts owned the surrounding land. During the 1940s, Nate and Rosa Parker’s son Josephus (identified as Joseph in the 1920 census) inherited the property. The lot was subsequently used as collateral on a loan that ran into trouble, resulting in a 1940 transfer of ownership to Thomas Parran, a White man who frequently made loans to African Americans in Calvert County. In 1945, Eddy and Harriet Carr bought the property from Parran. When the Gravatts bought this lot in 1951, they gave the Carrs a life estate held until 1960.
The year 1951 also saw John Cephas Wallace begin the subdivision of what had been Lemuel’s western tract into seven lots for family members. The deed for the last transfer was made by heirs in 1971, three years after John Cephas’s death.
Comment on sources
When writing this report, Carl Fleischhauer made extensive use of census and deed records, as well as his 1989 recorded interview with Woodrow Wallace. Regarding Lemuel Wallace’s age, census enumerations offer a range of ages and, thus, calculated dates of birth. Meanwhile, an Ancestry.com family tree identifies Lemuel’s wife as Annie Boots and reports that she was born in 1853. Her age in the 1910 census indicates a birthdate of 1860. The Ancestry.com family tree lists only 7 of the 11 children that we identified from census enumerations in 1880, 1900, and 1910. The Ancestry.com-hosted family tree is assembled by Frank Williams and carries the Ancestry tree identifier 44583326, consulted by PCHT in May 2024. Another page in that family tree is the source for Margaret Dorsey as the name for Basil Wallace’s wife. In general, when we can identify a gravestone with birth and death dates, we take those dates to represent the family’s preference and use them instead of, say, dates calculated from census age statements. Land survey research by Art Cochran; property map produced by Exa Marmee Grubb.
