Cousin Shep Miller

After writing the previous blog post, about my Black cousins, I remembered a book sent to me by a seventh cousin in my Foster line of descent. This Foster cousin and I met years ago when involved in a DNA genealogy project to link her Foster clan to mine. She sent the book to me as a thank-you gift for convincing a male Foster cousin on my side to offer up his spit to Family Tree DNA for analysis. The book is an edited compilation of interviews conducted during the Great Depression, 1937 to 1939, by the Federal Writers’ Project to capture the testimonies of formerly enslaved people. She told me the tiny volume, We Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard, included a story about a shared relative, Shepard Gabriel Miller (1808-1868), a several times great uncle of hers. The DNA confirmed paper genealogies, making Shep my second cousin, five times removed. Isn’t genealogy fun? 

I recalled that the story suggested cousin Shep had sexually abused his slaves. Although it was disturbing at the time, I didn’t know what to do or how to feel about it. Now, in these times of awakening White people like me getting in touch with Black cousins, the family story takes on new significance. 

So, last week I re-read the story and spent some time digesting it. While it painfully came to life in my mind, I set about making the characters in the story jibe with the limited research I’d done on this distant branch of my family tree. I had two Shepard Millers, so which one? Beyond that, I considered what the story said, about where and how they lived. What would census and slave schedule records tell me? 

I had questions about details in the edited interview, and I found the original transcript of it in the Library of Congress’s digital collections. While I discovered that the editor had rearranged the text she hadn't altered the details. She had also, thankfully, replaced the interviewer’s attempt to write in dialect. In neither version does Elizabeth Sparks, the interviewee, talk about Shep Miller right away, so I had trouble figuring out how her mistress was connected to him. In my quotations below, I’ve used the original transcript while, like the interviewer, replacing words captured as dialect. 

After a few introductory greetings and statements of reluctance – “You want me to tell you about slavery days . . . It’s all past now, so I say let her rest. It’s too awful to tell anyway. You’re too young to know all that talk.” – Elizabeth begins her story. 

“My mistress’s name was Miss Jennie Brown . . . she died about four years ago. Bless her. She was a good woman. Of course, I mean she’d slap and beat you once in a while, but she wasn’t a woman for fighting, fussing, and beating you all day like some I know. She was too young when the war ended for that. Of course, no white folks are perfect. Her parents were a little rough. What’s that? Can I tell you about her parents? . . . No sense for you to know about all those mean white folks. They’re all dead now. They meant good, I reckon.” 

They meant good? Elizabeth Sparks was a brave woman, talking to a white man who wanted to write down her stories. She swings back and forth – “good woman” to “mean white folks” – and the reader can sense her conflict. She has strong feelings, but does she dare to speak the truth? 

“Shep Miller was my master. His old father, he was a tough one. Lord! I’ve seen him kill them. He’d get the meanest overseers to put over them . . . he was a clerk and was he tough. Sometimes he beat them until they couldn’t work . . . Beat women just like men. Beat women naked and wash them down in brine.” Elizabeth lets the accounts roll out for a few more anguishing paragraphs. Oh, how the memories must have hurt her. But thank goodness for this record, one of a few that tells us the painful truth about our “gallant” White ancestors. We need to know these stories, to feel the pain, too, for thus began systemic racism. 

She continues, “They worked six days from sun to sun . . . Usual work day began when the horn blew and stopped when the horn blew. The got off just long enough to eat at noon. Didn’t have much. They got some suet and a slice of bread for breakfast . . . For dinner they’d eat ash cake baked on the blade of a hoe.” 

And who were these people, her mistress Miss Jennie Brown, her master Shep Miller, and his old father. Who was the clerk? I puzzled through the documents to see if one of my Shep Millers might have been married to Jennie Brown, when I noticed that the eldest daughter of Shepard G. Miller, Sr. was Virginia Cary Miller (1834-1931), who married Andrew C. Brown (1821-Bef. 1900) on 18 October 1860. Jennie must have been Virginia’s nickname and this was seconded by the 1900 census, where she is listed as Jennie C. Brown. 

Shepard G. Miller, Sr., was Mathews Clerk of Court and a farmer. His parents were Gabriel Miller (1766-1845) and Elizabeth “Betsy” Foster (1773-1846), my Foster connection. 

“I lived at Seaford then . . . Shep Miller lived at Springdale.” 

There is a Seaford Lane a little south of the village of Hudgins in Mathews. By looking at the census records, which list Andrew and Jennie Brown living in the Piankatank District, which includes the village of Hudgins, it may be concluded that Seaford Lane was the location of their home. I've asked a genealogist friend to confirm this. A view on Google Maps shows a short, straight Seaford Lane ending in a circle in front of a large house on Stutts Creek. 

It took me a while to puzzle over Springdale, a property listed on the National Register of Historic Places and owned by William Shultice from about 1832 to 1868. The property is located on the East River, just south of Mathews Court House. The 1860 census shows the Shultice family living next door to the Shep Miller family. I looked at an architectural survey for names of nearby historic properties listed in the Virginia Department of Historic Resources database and found Spring Hill located right next door. A few Google searches on alternate combinations and spellings of Spring Hill and Shepard Miller landed me on a 29 July 2020 reprint in the Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal that solved any remaining questions. Elizabeth Sparks had remembered the grand Springdale name, but not the less well-known Spring Hill. 

“100 Years Ago, Thursday, July 28, 1910 from the Mathews Journal: A fine bungalow is being erected at ‘Spring Hill,’ the farm of Mr. S.G. Miller, which when completed will be the headquarters of the Riverside Yacht and Tennis Club . . . “ 

This S.G. Miller, Jr. (1848-1932) was the son of Shep Miller, Sr. and his wife, Emory James (1816-1891). Shep Jr.’s sister was Virginia “Jennie” Cary Miller Brown. 

Shep Miller’s Spring Hill real estate was valued at $30,000 and he owned $44,000 in personal property. He owned 43 people, including several young females. Elizabeth was certainly one of them. Jennie and Andrew Brown were married in 1860, and Shepard Miller, Sr. gave the then-enslaved Elizabeth to his daughter Jennie to take with her to Seaford, located about 5 miles away. 

Before his October marriage, Andrew Brown is captured by the census as owning 21 slaves and living on real estate valued at $20,000 with personal property also valued at $20,000. Of Jennie, Elizabeth said, “She didn’t beat. She was just a young thing. Course she took a whack at me sometimes, but that was nothing. Her mother was a mean old thing.” 

Jennie’s mother, Shep’s wife, was Emory James Miller. “She used to make my aunt Caroline knit all day and when she got so tired after dark that she’d get sleepy, she’d make her stand up and knit. She worked her so hard that she’d go to sleep standing up and every time her head nodded and her knees sag, the lady would come down across her head with a switch. That was Miss Jennie’s mother. She’d give the cook just so much meal to make bread . . . Beat the devil out of her if she burned that bread.” 

Elizabeth was glad to leave the Miller home. “I went with Miss Jennie and worked at house. I didn’t have to cook.” She said she slept on the floor in Jennie’s room, on and old rug in front of the fireplace. “I got permission to get married.” Her husband-to-be was lived on the plantation next to the Browns. In 1860, the family of Lewis M. Hudgins, also a maternal ancestor of mine, lived next door, so Hudgins may have been John Sparks’s master. 

“You always had to get permission. White folks would give you away. You jump across a broom stick together and you were married.” 

After the Civil War, in 1870, the Brown household was made up of Andrew, Jennie, and two children as well as a cook, Ellen Smith, noted as Black. The period census records often include Black individuals in White-owned households. They are listed as cooks, domestic servants, laborers, and the like. 

Elizabeth isn’t listed in the Brown household. She and John moved into a home of their own. By 1870, the census shows them having real estate valued at $300 and personal property valued at $100. They had six children, aged eight and under. John Sparks was identified as a Black oysterman. 

Elizabeth was described as “keeping house” and her race, as well as that of the six children, was entered as "M" for Mulatto. They lived in the Westville District of Mathews, the county’s municipal center. 

Mulatto. Was Elizabeth a child of old Shep Miller? Elizabeth’s mother “lived in a big one room log house with an upstairs.” Was she a favorite? Elizabeth knew about others and suggested why they were known as such. “Old Massa done so much wrongness I couldn’t tell you all of it. Slave girl Betty Lilly always had good clothes and all the privileges. She was a favorite of his.” 

Elizabeth remembered the war. “Shep went to war but not for long. We didn’t see none of it, but the slaves knew what the war was about. After the war they tried to fool the slaves about freedom and wanted to keep them working, but the Yankees told them they were free.” She recounted that some slave owners tried to send their slave to South Carolina to keep the Yankees from getting to them. The Yankees “were taking all the livestock and all the men slaves back to Norfolk with them to break up the system . . . the Yankees were giving everything to the slaves.” 

Soldiers were taking the Brown’s possessions and Jennie’s clothes, giving them to the slaves. They offered some to Elizabeth. “I didn’t take them though because she’d been pretty nice to me.” They tried to take her John, but he pretended to be too lame to walk. “I can hear Miss Jennie now yelling at them Yankees. No! Who are you to judge? I’ll be the judge. If John Sparks wants to stay here, he’ll stay.” The Sparks’s baby started to cry. “So, one of them said that as long as he had a wife and a baby that young, he guessed he could stay. They took all the horses, cows, pigs, chickens, and anything they could use and left . . . I was married in 1861, my oldest boy was born in 1862, and the falling of Richmond came in 1865.” 

The Civil War was financially hard on the Browns. In the 1870 census, their real estate, ten years earlier valued at $20,000, was now valued at $2,500 and personal estate, once valued at $20,000, was now worth only $500. 

Elizabeth closed the interview. “Now you take that and go. Put that in the book.” 

Thank you, Elizabeth, for bringing the thorny times of our ancestors to life.