213-215 Witten Street, Petersburg
The house at this address, located on Pocahontas Island, purportedly served as a stop on the Underground Railroad for enslaved people headed north.
While it is nearly impossible to confirm or deny exact railroad locations today, Petersburg served as a well-established conduit along this path to freedom. Enslaved people began settling on Pocahontas Island, a seventy-acre peninsula on the banks of the Appomattox River in Petersburg, in the 1730s. Pocahontas Island became a notable freedom colony prior to the Civil War as the first predominantly free Black settlement in the state. At the start of the Civil War, more than half of Petersburg’s population was Black, and one-third of that community consisted of freemen and women. Pocahontas Island represented one of the largest free Black communities in the nation, and likely the largest one in the South.
In 1856, Virginia passed a law requiring that all ships traveling north be inspected due to an escalation in the number of enslaved people sailing toward freedom. The General Assembly passed the law specifically in response to actions conducted by people like Captain William Baylis, a white ship captain who resided in Delaware. Baylis had recently sailed out of Richmond with an enslaved person who worked in one of the city’s oyster houses hidden on his ship.
Using this Witten Street location as a site of congregation, Baylis again planned to transport a group of enslaved people north. On May 29, 1858, the schooner Keziah left the Petersburg port with a cargo of wheat and five enslaved people: Gillbert, Sarah, William, John, and Joe. Baylis set sail one day after 2,000 white residents in Norfolk and Portsmouth gathered to demand stricter oversight of the waterways following an attempted escape by an enslaved person named Anthony, who was found hiding aboard the ship Francis French in the James River. Unfortunately, the Keziah ran aground soon after leaving port. The enslaved people were found by a search party authorized by Petersburg’s mayor after their enslavers raised the alarm that they were missing. Everyone on board returned to Petersburg under guard. There, Baylis, well-known for his work helping the enslaved reach freedom, received a forty-year jail sentence for abduction. He remained in prison until the end of the Civil War. John was sold south for $1150. The fates of Gillbert, Sarah, William, and Joe remain unknown.
Today, this house still stands, although it has significantly deteriorated. In the 1970s, residents worked to prevent the city of Petersburg from condemning 250 homes on Pocahontas Island in favor of industrial building. They later secured the creation of the Pocahontas Island Historic District after a tornado devastated the area in 1993. A few key ancestral community keepers, like Richard Stewart who runs the Pocahontas Island Black History Museum out of his home, take great care and responsibility in stewarding the rich history of this site. According to Stewart, “My ancestors always had confidence in me that one day, I’d grow up and be the man to lead this community and tell our history. You go into Washington, DC museums, but you can’t walk on the fertile ground, the same ground that my ancestors walked. When you come here, you see things that are a glance into our past that allow you to touch that past. I want people to see this history so that they can pass it on to future generations.”
A note on the name: Pocahontas Island acquired its name when it became incorporated as a town in 1752; it became part of Petersburg in 1784. The name itself is part of a long history of settler colonialism. Archeologists acknowledge this site as a key Indigenous settlement dating from 6500 B.C.E. The Appomattoc lived here at the time of European contact, and like many Indigenous communities in the area, they became tributaries to Powhatan at the turn of the 17th century. They numbered 100-150 and were continually driven from their lands by the English, due to both war and settlement. By the 1720s, no tribal members remained. Thus white colonizers, after eradicating local Indigenous communities, named this area after an Indigenous woman, paramount chief Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, whose own story and life had been deeply misconstrued and manipulated by the English.
To learn more:
- Kneebone, John T. “A Break Down on the Underground Railroad: Captain B. and the Capture of the Keziah, 1858.” Virginia Cavalcade (1999): 74-83.
- Schneider, Gregory. “One Man’s Quest to Preserve the Haunting Black History of Pocahontas Island.” Washington Post, September 26, 2016.
- Steger, Martha. “Island Time.” Richmond Magazine, March 2, 2021.
To visit nearby:
- Pocahontas Island Black History Museum at 224 Witten St, Petersburg. Call ahead (804-861-8889) to schedule a visit.
Image: 213-215 Witten Street, Pocahontas Island. Courtesy of Kim Lee Schmidt, 2020.