A detailed description of these settlements has no place in this dissertation save as it has a bearing on the development of education among the colored people. These settlements, however, are important here in that they furnish the key to the location of many of the early colored churches and schools of the North and West. Philanthropists established a number of Negroes near Sandy Lake in Northwestern Pennsylvania.[1] There was a colored settlement near Berlin Crossroads, Ohio.[2] Another group of pioneering Negroes emigrating to this State found homes in the Van Buren township of Shelby County. Edward Coles, a Virginian, who in 1818 emigrated to Illinois, of which he later became Governor, made a settlement on a larger scale. He brought his slaves to Edwardsville, where they constituted a community known as "Coles' Negroes."[3] The settlement made by Samuel Gist, an Englishman possessing extensive plantations in Hanover, Amherst, and Henrico Counties, Virginia, was still more significant. He provided in his will that his slaves should be freed and sent to the North. It was further directed "that the revenue from his plantation the last year of his life be applied in building schoolhouses and churches for their accommodation," and "that all money coming to him in Virginia be set aside for the employment of ministers and teachers to instruct them."[4] In 1818, Wickham, the executor of this estate, purchased land and established these Negroes in what was called the Upper and Lower Camps of Brown County, Ohio.
[Footnote 1: Siebert, _The Underground Railroad_, p. 249.]
[Footnote 2: Langston,_From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol_, p. 35.]
[Footnote 3: Davidson and Stuvé,_A Complete History of Illinois_, pp. 321-322; and Washburne, _Sketch of Edward Cole, Second Governor of Illinois_, pp. 44 and 53.]
[Footnote 4: _History of Brown County_, pp. 313 _et seq._; and Lane, _Fifty Years and over of Akron and Summit County, Ohio_, pp. 579-580.]
Augustus Wattles, a native of Connecticut, made a settlement of Negroes in Mercer County early in the nineteenth century.[1] About the year 1834 many of the freedmen, then concentrating at Cincinnati, were induced to take up 30,000 acres of land in the same vicinity.[2] John Harper of North Carolina manumitted his slaves in 1850 and had them sent to this community.[3] John Randolph of Roanoke freed his slaves at his death, and provided for the purchase of farms for them in Mercer County.[4] The Germans, however, would not allow them to take possession of these lands. Driven later from Shelby County[5] also, these freedmen finally found homes in Miami County.[7] Then there was one Saunders, a slaveholder of Cabell County, now West Virginia, who liberated his slaves and furnished them homes in free territory. They finally made their way to Cass County, Michigan, where philanthropists had established a prosperous colored settlement and supplied it with missionaries and teachers. The slaves of Theodoric H. Gregg of Dinwiddie County, Virginia, were liberated in 1854 and sent to Ohio,[7] where some of them were educated.