Freedman's Village, cleared off the Arlington estate
Dedicated December 1863; ordered closed 1887; gone by 1900Freedman's Village, south end of the Arlington estate, Arlington County, VA
Dedicated in 1863 as a model community for freed people, with a hospital, schools, churches and a home for the aged, Freedman's Village held more than 1,100 residents. The War Department ordered it closed in 1887 and finished the job by 1900.
In May 1863 military authorities chose the grounds of the Arlington estate - the Custis-Lee plantation, seized by the government for unpaid taxes - as the site of a village for people freed by emancipation in the District of Columbia and by the Emancipation Proclamation. Freedman's Village was formally dedicated that December, laid out well south of the mansion with Columbia Pike as its southern edge. It grew into a settlement of more than 1,100 people with a hospital, schools, churches and a home for the elderly. Sojourner Truth lived and worked there for a year. Residents farmed, worked as labourers for the Army, and enlisted in United States Colored Troops regiments.
The village was always described by the government as temporary. In 1887 the War Department decided to demolish it and told the residents they had ninety days to go, the stated reason being that Army regulations barred civilians from living on a military reservation. The villagers held a meeting and chose John B. Syphax to put their case to the Secretary of War - a man born into the Arlington plantation's enslaved community, whose mother Maria Syphax had been given seventeen acres of the estate by her father, George Washington Parke Custis. The removal was called off. In 1888, 763 people still lived in the village.
The reprieve was not a reversal. Removals continued through the 1890s, the last families left, the Army pulled down what was still standing, and the village was gone by 1900, when Congress appropriated $75,000 to pay the villagers and their descendants for the improvements they had made to land they were not allowed to keep. The sources differ on exactly when the last household left; they agree on the outcome. The ground became Arlington National Cemetery and Fort Myer.
The people removed did not go far. Members of a Freedman's Village congregation bought land on the north side of Columbia Pike and subdivided it into lots, and their community became Queen City - which the same War Department condemned in 1942 to build the Pentagon's road network. Two removals, fifty years apart, of the same families by the same department.
The village held more than 1,100 people at its height and 763 as late as 1888. Congress paid $75,000 in 1900 for improvements the residents had made, thirty-seven years after telling them to build there.
Sources
- Freedman's Village at ArlingtonArlington National Cemetery, U.S. Armyeducation.arlingtoncemetery.milThe cemetery's own history of the village: its founding, the 1887 removal order and the villagers' petition, the 763 residents counted in 1888, and the $75,000 Congress appropriated in 1900.
- The Syphax FamilyArlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, National Park Servicenps.govJohn B. Syphax, the family's seventeen acres of the estate, and his role in answering the War Department.
- Arlington HouseEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgThe village's dedication in December 1863 and the residents' resistance to removal until 1900, when the land was taken for the expanding national cemetery.