Gum Springs: A Slave’s Legacy, Part I
Michael K. Bohn
This is the first in a four-part series on the history and future of Gum Springs, a historically African-American community in the Mount Vernonarea. It was published in the Mount Vernon Gazette during February 2010 in recognition of African-American History Month.
Overview
In 1966, Fairfax County authorities demanded that forty-two families in Gum Springs “fix up or get out” of houses so ramshackle that they violated a county housing code.
The county board of supervisors eventually voted to issue a temporary reprieve of the eviction order, largely because the board chairman insisted that a leaky roof was better than no roof at all. The Washington Postheadlined the story, “Fairfax Slum Dwellers Get Word. They Have Reprieve, Help on Way.”
The 1960 census found that the majority of dwellings in Gum Springs were either dilapidated or deteriorating. Half of the adults were unemployed, children were sick from drinking water from contaminated wells, and some houses lacked plumbing facilities. Despite the presence of many solid, respectable homes, a reporter called the assemblage of tarpaper shacks “the largest concentration of slum housing in Northern Virginia.”
The neighborhood traces its history to the 1833 purchase of the land by West Ford, a slave freed by George Washington’s sister-in-law. After the Civil War, Bethlehem Baptist Church and its associated school attracted former slave families to the area. Most worked as tenant farmers or hired hands on nearby white-owned farms; others joined the staff at the Mount Vernonestate.
Gradually, more families settled in Gum Springs. In 1907, there were twenty-seven African-American landowners there, and World War I activity at the new Camp Humphreys (now Fort Belvoir), attracted even more residents. The interwar years were the most prosperous in the community. There was even a nascent black middle class, but most folks who lived in Gum Springs worked on the many farms in the Mount Vernon area.
The relatively good times ended when developers bulldozed farmland into housing tracts after World War II. Jobs for African-Americans in Northern Virginia soon became as hard to find as equitable schools and decent housing in the white-dominated suburbs. Oppressive segregation kept Gum Springs residents from enjoying the amenities of life that people in adjacent neighborhoods took for granted—sewers, running water, streetlights, and paved roads.
Buoyed by the 1960s civil rights movement, civic activists in Gum Springs began pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. They lobbied successfully for drainage systems, formed a community action association, resisted heavy-handed urban renewal by the county, and pooled their land for the construction of new homes to replace the shanties. Slowly, a better life returned to Gum Springs residents, seventy-five per cent of whom were African-American in 1990. Despite the many challenges, the community somehow kept its unique character and history.
The identity that Gum Springs residents have fought to keep is being eroded by the very prosperity they have achieved. Growing numbers of non-black homeowners are moving into town homes in the Village at Gum Springs and brick colonials built off Holland Road. At the time of the last census in 2000, the African-American population was down to sixty percent, and future demographics of Gum Springs might even approach those of surrounding neighborhoods.
The Beginning
The founder of Gum Springs, a mixed race man named West Ford, began his life as a slave. His path to freedom started when his owner, George Washington’s younger brother, John Augustine, died in 1787.
John’s will left a third of his slaves to his wife Hannah, including a couple named Billy and Jenny, their daughter Venus, and her son West. Upon Hannah’s death in 1801, her will stipulated that young West be freed when he reached the age of twenty-one. She also asked her heirs to inoculate West for small pox and bind him to a “good tradesman.”
Hannah’s son Bushrod assumed ownership of West, then sixteen or seventeen. Also, Bushrod inherited Mount Vernon when Martha Washington died in 1802, and he moved there and took West with him. Following Hannah’s will, Bushrod freed West in about 1805. According to oral family history, West adopted the surname Ford upon gaining his freedom.
Ford remained at Mount Vernon, working as a wheelwright and carpenter. He could read and write, and ultimately became foreman of the house servants and a guardian of Washington’s tomb. In 1812, he married Priscilla Bell, a free black woman from Alexandria. Because of her status, their four children—William, Daniel, Jane and Julia—were also free.
Virginia required freed slaves to register, and the 1831 entry for West Ford described him as “a yellow man about forty-seven years of age, five feet eight and a half inches high, pleasant countenance, a wrinkle resembling a scar on the left cheek . . .” Ford was a mulatto, a term of the time that was used to describe a person of one African and one European parent.
Bushrod Washington died in 1829. An associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for thirty years, Washington left West Ford 119 acres of land on the south side of Little Hunting Creek.
Ford sold his inherited land and used the proceeds in 1833 to purchase Samuel Collard’s Gum Spring Farm, a 214-acre tract on the north side of Little Hunting Creek. Collard sold the property to Ford for $500 and five annual installments of $84.80.
In 1857, Ford deeded his Gum Springs land to his four children, dividing the tract into equal parts of 52 ¾ acres. The property lines of those parcels coincide exactly with many of today’s lot lines, as well as the main north-south roads in Gum Springs—Holland, Andrus, and Fordson.
By 1860, Ford and his daughter Jane’s husband, Porter Smith, were growing cash crops of corn, oats, and potatoes. The total tract was assessed at $1,800 in 1860, making West Ford the second-most wealthy freedman inFairfaxCounty.
Ford was near death in the summer of 1863 when staff members at Mount Vernon brought the weakened man back to the estate for his final days. He died on July 30 and The Alexandria Gazette marked his passing: “He was, we hear, in the 79 year of his age. He was well known to most of our older citizens.”
Michael K. Bohn
This is the first in a four-part series on the history and future of Gum Springs, a historically African-American community in the Mount Vernonarea. It was published in the Mount Vernon Gazette during February 2010 in recognition of African-American History Month.
Overview
In 1966, Fairfax County authorities demanded that forty-two families in Gum Springs “fix up or get out” of houses so ramshackle that they violated a county housing code.
The county board of supervisors eventually voted to issue a temporary reprieve of the eviction order, largely because the board chairman insisted that a leaky roof was better than no roof at all. The Washington Postheadlined the story, “Fairfax Slum Dwellers Get Word. They Have Reprieve, Help on Way.”
The 1960 census found that the majority of dwellings in Gum Springs were either dilapidated or deteriorating. Half of the adults were unemployed, children were sick from drinking water from contaminated wells, and some houses lacked plumbing facilities. Despite the presence of many solid, respectable homes, a reporter called the assemblage of tarpaper shacks “the largest concentration of slum housing in Northern Virginia.”
The neighborhood traces its history to the 1833 purchase of the land by West Ford, a slave freed by George Washington’s sister-in-law. After the Civil War, Bethlehem Baptist Church and its associated school attracted former slave families to the area. Most worked as tenant farmers or hired hands on nearby white-owned farms; others joined the staff at the Mount Vernonestate.
Gradually, more families settled in Gum Springs. In 1907, there were twenty-seven African-American landowners there, and World War I activity at the new Camp Humphreys (now Fort Belvoir), attracted even more residents. The interwar years were the most prosperous in the community. There was even a nascent black middle class, but most folks who lived in Gum Springs worked on the many farms in the Mount Vernon area.
The relatively good times ended when developers bulldozed farmland into housing tracts after World War II. Jobs for African-Americans in Northern Virginia soon became as hard to find as equitable schools and decent housing in the white-dominated suburbs. Oppressive segregation kept Gum Springs residents from enjoying the amenities of life that people in adjacent neighborhoods took for granted—sewers, running water, streetlights, and paved roads.
Buoyed by the 1960s civil rights movement, civic activists in Gum Springs began pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. They lobbied successfully for drainage systems, formed a community action association, resisted heavy-handed urban renewal by the county, and pooled their land for the construction of new homes to replace the shanties. Slowly, a better life returned to Gum Springs residents, seventy-five per cent of whom were African-American in 1990. Despite the many challenges, the community somehow kept its unique character and history.
The identity that Gum Springs residents have fought to keep is being eroded by the very prosperity they have achieved. Growing numbers of non-black homeowners are moving into town homes in the Village at Gum Springs and brick colonials built off Holland Road. At the time of the last census in 2000, the African-American population was down to sixty percent, and future demographics of Gum Springs might even approach those of surrounding neighborhoods.
The Beginning
The founder of Gum Springs, a mixed race man named West Ford, began his life as a slave. His path to freedom started when his owner, George Washington’s younger brother, John Augustine, died in 1787.
John’s will left a third of his slaves to his wife Hannah, including a couple named Billy and Jenny, their daughter Venus, and her son West. Upon Hannah’s death in 1801, her will stipulated that young West be freed when he reached the age of twenty-one. She also asked her heirs to inoculate West for small pox and bind him to a “good tradesman.”
Hannah’s son Bushrod assumed ownership of West, then sixteen or seventeen. Also, Bushrod inherited Mount Vernon when Martha Washington died in 1802, and he moved there and took West with him. Following Hannah’s will, Bushrod freed West in about 1805. According to oral family history, West adopted the surname Ford upon gaining his freedom.
Ford remained at Mount Vernon, working as a wheelwright and carpenter. He could read and write, and ultimately became foreman of the house servants and a guardian of Washington’s tomb. In 1812, he married Priscilla Bell, a free black woman from Alexandria. Because of her status, their four children—William, Daniel, Jane and Julia—were also free.
Virginia required freed slaves to register, and the 1831 entry for West Ford described him as “a yellow man about forty-seven years of age, five feet eight and a half inches high, pleasant countenance, a wrinkle resembling a scar on the left cheek . . .” Ford was a mulatto, a term of the time that was used to describe a person of one African and one European parent.
Bushrod Washington died in 1829. An associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for thirty years, Washington left West Ford 119 acres of land on the south side of Little Hunting Creek.
Ford sold his inherited land and used the proceeds in 1833 to purchase Samuel Collard’s Gum Spring Farm, a 214-acre tract on the north side of Little Hunting Creek. Collard sold the property to Ford for $500 and five annual installments of $84.80.
In 1857, Ford deeded his Gum Springs land to his four children, dividing the tract into equal parts of 52 ¾ acres. The property lines of those parcels coincide exactly with many of today’s lot lines, as well as the main north-south roads in Gum Springs—Holland, Andrus, and Fordson.
By 1860, Ford and his daughter Jane’s husband, Porter Smith, were growing cash crops of corn, oats, and potatoes. The total tract was assessed at $1,800 in 1860, making West Ford the second-most wealthy freedman inFairfaxCounty.
Ford was near death in the summer of 1863 when staff members at Mount Vernon brought the weakened man back to the estate for his final days. He died on July 30 and The Alexandria Gazette marked his passing: “He was, we hear, in the 79 year of his age. He was well known to most of our older citizens.”