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.
Land owned by Lemuel and Annie Wallace. Bought in 1910, the western tract comprises 7 acres, while the 1909 deed for the eastern tract describes the land as containing 100 acres. However, after consulting that deed and deeds for neighboring land, the Parkers Creek Heritage Trail project team has been unable to define a tract with that extent. Our provisional mapping comprises 67 acres. The green dashed lines represent ACLT hiking trails.
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.
The farm
At 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.”
Detail from a Soil Conservation Service Aerial Photograph made in 1938, with explanatory overlays added in 2024.
Houses for the family
Over time, some of the Wallace children and grandchildren were provided housing by successive occupation of the house on the larger tract, while other family members acquired lots subdivided from the tracts by Lemuel before his death and, later, from his son John Cephas Wallace (1884-1968).
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.
Regarding the 100-acre eastern tract, evidence in at least one 1901 deed for adjacent land suggests that Lemuel Wallace occupied the tract for a few years prior to its purchase in 1909. Who built the house? In the interview, grandson Woodrow Wallace said that Lemuel’s son-in-law Nathaniel “Nate” Parker built that house. This may have occurred prior to 1909. This is the Lemuel Wallace house that stands as a point of historical interest today.
Nate Parker (born ca. 1883) was married to Lemuel’s daughter Rosa (aka Rosie), whose birthdate is most often reported as 1893. Nate and Rosa Parker probably lived in this house from about 1910 until 1926. After 1926 and until about the mid-1930s, when Lemuel Wallace died, the house was occupied–probably in succession–by two other children: a son, William Wallace (born 1873), and a daughter, Harriet (born ca. 1880), and her husband Edward “Eddy” Carr.
Where did Nate and Rosa Parker move in 1926? In that year, Lemuel Wallace sold the couple a three-quarter-acre lot at the far southeastern corner of the larger tract, where Nate built another dwelling, shown on the 1938 aerial photo and no longer standing. Nate and Rosa occupied this second house until the late 1930s. At some point during the 1940s, it was bought and occupied by Harriet and Eddy Carr. On this webpage, we call it the Parker-Carr house. By the 1980s, little remained except some scraps of roofing.
The Lemuel Wallace house exterior in 1987
Remains of the Parker-Carr house in 1987. Originally the home for Nate and Rosa Parker and, later, for Eddy and Harriet Carr. Rosa and Harriet were two of Lemuel Wallace’s daughters.
The Lemuel Wallace house
Woodrow Wallace, Lemuel Wallace’s grandson, at the Wallace house, during an interview conducted in November 1989. Woodrow Wallace 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.”
Above: plan-view drawing of the Lemuel Wallace house, made in 2024. Below: composite image of the first floor interior in 2023, main front door at right and kitchen at left.
The kitchen with a woodburning stove (still in the structure today) was 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: Cookstove in the kitchen at the back of the house. Right: Spring that once served the household. Photographs made in 2023.
Repairs in April 1990: ACLT volunteers Frank Caldwell, Arnold Petty, and Art Cochran siding over gaps in the Wallace house clapboarding. The new tulip poplar siding was purchased from the Amish-owned Stoltzfus Lumber Company in St. Mary’s County.
Wallace tobacco barn
At left: Lemuel Wallace barn photographed in 1987, about 50 years after its active use. The tobacco was cured in this barn, located 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.” The barn collapsed in 1991.
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.
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 (1908-1995, identified as Joseph in the 1920 census; his son spelled his given name Jocephus) 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.
Log corn crib moved to site by ACLT in 1990
In 1990, when Calvert County government set up a spray distribution system for wastewater treatment on a former farm in Barstow, ACLT was offered the opportunity to remove a log corn crib from the site. ACLT volunteers accepted the offer and moved the crib to a spot near the Wallace house. Photograph, 2023.
Comment on sources
When drafting this webpage, 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.
