Miami University students map the land in Ohio stolen from the Randolph Freedpeople
This story is the first in a two-part series on mapping land denied the Randolph Freedpeople and state efforts to make amends. The second part of the story will run tomorrow.
In the 1840s, a group of almost 400 Freedpeople traveled to Ohio from the Virginia plantation where they’d been enslaved. John Randolph, a lesser known but well-connected politician in the early United States, released them in his will, but Virginia law at the time demanded newly freed slaves leave the state. In addition to their freedom, Randolph’s will set aside money to purchase land for his former slaves.
Randolph’s executor, William Leigh, settled on Ohio’s Mercer County, and bought roughly 3,200 acres near a fledgling Black community in a town called Carthagena. But when the Freedpeole arrived, a white mob blocked their path and forced them at gunpoint to leave the area.
In the months and years that followed, the Freedpeople dispersed to nearby settlements like Rossville, just outside of Piqua. Instead of starting out with homesteads of their own, many took work as day laborers or domestic help. The executor who purchased the land for them eventually sold it, but there’s scant evidence the Freedpeople were ever compensated for what they lost.
Several descendants sued in 1907 seeking compensation for their land. Ohio courts dismissed the case under the statute of limitations.
In the more than 180 years that stand between the Randolph Freedpeople’s arrival in Ohio and present day, details got fuzzy. As descendants and state lawmakers took a closer look at the story last year, they knew how much land was purchased and its general vicinity. But they didn’t know the specific parcels or their current owners and uses.
A geography class at Miami University saw an opportunity and spent the last semester combing through deeds, and late last year they presented, for the first time, a comprehensive map of the land purchased for the Randolph Freedpeople.
Class is in session
On a chilly October morning last year, about 40 students are sluggishly pulling laptops from their bags before wandering to the front of the room to pick up Mercer County printouts. The soft lights, dimmed for the projector, probably aren’t helping them wake up.
For much of the class, Professor Robbyn Abbitt walks them through the nuts and bolts of GIS mapping. What that looks like, at least initially, is a google spreadsheet.
“So, one of the first things we’re going to need to do in order to do this,” she explains, “is that we have to figure out what attributes do we want to have in this data set.”
The students offer different data points to include — date of sale, seller, acreage — and then several geographic designations to help zero in on a given parcel. At the highest level there’s township and range — a six-mile by six-mile grid that stems from land surveys when Ohio was still just part of the Northwest Territory. Those squares are known as sections, and deeds subdivide them further by breaking sections into successive quarters.
But understanding the deed isn’t necessarily straight-forward.
“You’ve got to read them backwards,” Charles Coutellier explained.
Coutellier is a retired surveyor who pitched in to help Abbitt’s students make sense of the deeds. As a hypothetical, he offers the northeast quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 16.
“When you write it in the deed, it’s from the smallest to the largest,” he explained, “When you lay it out on the ground, you got to start out with the largest and go to the smallest.”
Using his example, imagine a square; that’s your section 16. Draw a cross in the center of it, creating four smaller squares and pick the one in the bottom right — the Southeast quarter. Now, subdivide that square just like the last, but this time you’re looking for the square at the top right — the Northeast quarter.
“And that’s easy,” Coutellier said, “because it could have three more divisions, too.”
Deeds can get even more complex, he added, when seller start breaking off a few acres here or a few acres there, and that’s not to mention the challenge of simply reading the handwriting. Sometimes, deeds were written by professional scriveners; other times, Coutellier said, deeds were written by “political hires” in the auditor’s office.
Back in Abbitt’s classroom, she and her students are deciding whether to order subdivisions largest to smallest or smallest to largest. Once that’s settled, Abbitt looks up and asks the class to save their progress, and something kind of magical happens. After more than hour of staring at spreadsheets, and a simple grid map, parcels pop into existence scattered around Mercer County.
“Look at all of this, this is really cool,” Abbitt told the class with a growing smile. “You guys have just put — this is something that’s not been done before.”
At that early stage it wasn’t perfect. In a handful of cases, parcels overlapped and Abbitt explained the back half of their project would be figuring out what went wrong and fixing it, while double checking the rest of the parcels for accuracy.
Still, after a couple of months of work, they’d been able to put together a pretty good representation of the Randolph Freedpeoples’ land. By December of last year, they’d finalized the project.
After combing through Mercer County property records, the Miami class was able to identify 3,140 of the 3,200 acres purchased by the executor William Leigh on behalf of the Randolph Freedpeople. Those 199 current parcels sit near Carthagena, but they’re not in one central location. Instead, they’re scattered around, mostly south or southwest of Grand Lake St. Marys with a small handful sitting due west of the lake.
In most cases they’re able to demonstrate a parcel was purchased and then sold, but in a dozen others they uncovered gaps in the chain of ownership. Some of those parcels had a purchase deed tied to Leigh, without a subsequent sale; others, a sale deed tied to Leigh without the previous purchase.
The parcels have gone through changes in the intervening years, too. In some cases, the deeds identify land that overlaps with larger parcels — taking those overlaps into account the total acreage grows to 3,825.
In other cases, parcels have since been subdivided. The northeastern quarter of what is now Chickasaw comes from a couple of Randolph Freedpeople parcels. Similarly, a string of parcels along the western edge of St. Henry come from a Randolph parcel as well.
The vast majority — almost 95% — of acreage is zoned for some kind of agricultural use. But more than a hundred parcels are zoned for residential use. According to the Miami analysis, the current assessed value of the parcels is $13.9 million and $52.9 million when taking improvements into account.
What to make of it
There are a handful of explanations for the difference in mapped acreage and the supposed 3200 acres purchased. It’s possible Leigh only ever purchased 3,140 acres. Deeds could’ve been lost or purchased by a different agent. To complicate matters further, the county lines have shifted in the decades since — one of the townships where Leigh reportedly bought land is now part of Auglaize County.
Abbitt described the mapping as a sometimes “hunt and peck” process, and recalled wrestling with deeds written by one recorder whose “south” looked virtually indistinguishable from “north.” Still, once deciphered, she explained the process was relatively straightforward.
“Most of them have been fairly easy to map out,” she said, “because most of them are down to these little 40-acre sub quarters, and I think a big reason for that is because these lands were purchased not too long after this was surveyed.”
In many cases, she explained, Leigh’s purchase was probably the second one in a given parcel’s history.
Descendants of the Randolph Freedpeople and those advocating on their behalf are pleased to see a map, but they’re skeptical of the land valuation figures.
“Laughable.” “Ridiculous,” Butch and Sherri Hamilton said of the $14 million mark. Both are board members for the group Land of the Freed, set up by Paisha Thomas, a seventh-generation descendant of the Randolph Freedpeople.
“It’s too low,” Thomas argued, “because look how much has been produced from that land.”
To Thomas and the Hamiltons, questions of value must necessarily account for the value that land has generated in nearly 180 years since it was denied the Randolph Freedpeople. But even if you set aside the idea of lost generational wealth, the assessed value is significantly lower than market value.
Part of that is down to Current Agricultural Use Value — a tax designation that values farmland for its agricultural use rather than what that land would fetch for development purposes.
An Ohio State University study of cropland value based on a survey of farmers put the average market value per acre in Western Ohio at $11,548. But the value of “transition land,” being sold for residential, commercial or industrial use, tallied much higher. The study’s author warned they’re working with limited data to calculate the figure, but they came up with $26,205.
Taking those numbers into account, the Miami analysis’ 3,140 acres would land somewhere between $36 million and $82 million.
But the map itself? Abbitt is confident that what her class has put together is “representing the deeds.” The surveyor Coutellier, who reviewed their final product, said “they’ve got it nailed.”
“In terms of what was gathered and what they plotted,” he said, “You can take that to the bank.”
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