Andrew Carpenter
Life of Andrew Carpenter
Tracing ownership of Black-owned land presents a significant challenge; however, archivists at the Historic Records Center of the Fairfax County Circuit Court and librarians from the Virginia Room of the Fairfax County Public Library have offered valuable strategies to overcome this difficulty. To begin, we leveraged the racial biases of the time period to identify Black landowners. By examining land tax records that categorized land ownership by race, we could more readily locate African American landowners. Starting in 1891, localities began documenting landowners and the taxes they paid on written pages marked as "white" and "colored." This distinction persisted through the mid-twentieth century. Using these records as a starting point simplifies the process of determining the landowner's race and provides guidance for researchers to explore annual land tax records and discover clues regarding where to find more about Andrew Carpenter’s life.
The class started by examining a digitized copy of the 1894 "Table of Tracts of Land for the Year 1894" from the Mount Vernon District. These records contain information about the individual responsible for land tax payments, the quantity of acres owned, a general description of the property's location, its assessed value, and the corresponding tax amount. Employing these records enables researchers to navigate through different time periods, facilitating the observation of both the earliest and latest instances when landowners fulfilled their tax obligations for their properties
Andrew first appears in the full listing (non-segregated) 1884 land tax records as paying taxes on one and a half acres of land in Potomac. The deeds show that Andrew purchased this land from James Smith on 24 December 1884 for $100. Smith purchased land at auctions after the Civil War in 1861. There are hints that Andrew lived in Fairfax County before this purchase since in 1867 Andrew Carpenter appeared on “A List of Colored Voters Voting in the Third Magisterial District of Fairfax County. All eligible voters were able to vote in this election. Below on the right the list of the Mount Vernon District records his name as number ninety seven of two hundred twenty seven Black voters who cast their votes in the region
[1] Google.(n.d.).GoogleMaps.Googlemaps.https://www.google.com/maps/@26.1467152,-80.2432831,15z?entry=tt
[2] Fairfax County Land Tax Records, 1897, “Table of Tracts of Lands for the Year 1894, Fairfax County, Mount Vernon District, Colored,” Fairfax County Circuit Court, Historic Records Center, 55-57.
[3] “A List of Colored Voters Voting of the Third Magisterial District of Fairfax County, Va.”Military Rule Election Records of the Virginia Secretary of the Commonwealth, 1867, 1869, Box 11, Folder 15, and Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative. http://rosetta.virginiamemory.com:1801/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE143828