On These Grounds: Slavery at W&L

Research into W&L's history related to enslaved people by faculty, students, and independent researchers goes back many decades and this data set is only the latest contribution. The materials held by the University Library Special Collections and Archives tell a complex and layered story of the University from its earliest iterations as Liberty Hall and later Washington College.  University administrators wrote the official records kept by the University in the course of doing business and and this project is an examination of those records in an effort to highlight the events directly related to enslaved individuals, presenting them in a structured data set that can be aggravated with datasets created at other institutions using the same data model.  This effort to learn more about the lives of the enslaved people owned by Washington College is part of a larger institutional goal of understanding the lives of African and Native Americans who built and ran households and industries on campus and in Lexington and Rockbridge.

The History of African Americans at W&L Working Group, established in 2013 by former W&L president Ken Ruscio and led by the late Professor Ted DeLaney, researched the University's connections to slavery.  The group was charged with presenting a straightforward look at the history of enslaved people at the institution and identifying themes, trends, and important moments up to the present time, viewable in this timeline.  Based on their work, the University installed a historic marker marker, "A Difficult, Yet Undeniable, History," in 2016 to memorialize the names and the story of the enslaved women and men who were bequeathed to Washington College by John Robinson in 1826 and then sold by the college trustees in 1836.  

The work of examining W&L's history expanded in 2017 with President Will Dudley's creation of the Commission on Institutional History and Community.  At the recommendation of the committee, the University appointed a Director of Institutional History in 2019 to "tell our stories completely and honestly —in our museums and historical sites, curriculum, orientations, alumni programming, and publications." She has collaborated with University faculty and independent researchers and genealogists to broaden the institution's research to include the decedents of the enslaved community and the University's role and responsibility with in the community over the past few centuries. 

In 2021, W&L was selected as a testing partner for the Mellon-funded On These Grounds (OTG) project. As an external testing partner, our role was to apply the data model to our records and provide feedback on the adequacy of the model and its vocabulary to describe the events in our records. In addition to participating in monthly conversations about the process, we submitted feedback forms upon each data creation session to provide details about how we were using the data model, how long it took to create records, and whether our material was turning up situations that were not covered by the model. 

We began our work by identifying and transcribing relevant documents, conducting digitization, recruiting and training student assistants, designing workflows, and learning the data model. The first step in our data gathering was to create records for individuals. This involved careful parsing of the inventory documents to identify unique individuals and establish family relationships. We created records for 94 enslaved individuals and are continuing to add records for slave-owning individuals.

From our initial two inventory documents, we created over 400 event records, mostly describing the birth or death of enslaved individuals, their transfer from the Robinson estate to Washington College, or their hiring out. 

We are eager to continue adding to this data set beyond the bounds of the grant's testing period. We have identified a number of other documents to be reviewed for event creation, including additional Trustees' Papers, estate documents held at the Rockbridge County Courthouse, and other material recently identified in both locally and externally held collections. One of our goals is to include information about individuals enslaved by Washington College faculty, trustees, and students.

If you are interested in using or contributing to this project in your research or teaching, please contact Paula Kiser at kiserp [at] wlu.edu.

• Paula Kiser, Assistant Professor and Digital Scholarship Librarian (Principal Investigator)
• Lynn Rainville, Executive Director of Institutional History and Museums
• Byron Faidley, Rare Materials Digitization Coordinator
• Mackenzie Brooks, Associate Professor & Digital Humanities Librarian
• Tanajia Moye-Green '23
• Madison Williams '23