image

play
Show Caption

  • The Ross County Historical Society is looking for old photos from African-American families.
  • There are families with lineage from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

CHILLICOTHE ― Sometimes all someone needs to spark an idea is an old photograph, and that is exactly what happened to Alicia Gray, archivist at the Ross County Historical Society.

While looking in the archives, Gray discovered an old 1907 photo of a group of children taken at a Frankfort school. In this photo were two African-American boys, the names on the back of the card identified them as Cecil and Arnold Piper.

“I started digging,” Gray said. “Come to find out they are the grandchildren of a slave who came to Ohio from Louisiana. He [Philip Piper] came here, he owned slaves. There are the slave records of who he owned and the deed of Manumission that freed Nellie, their [Cecil and Arnold’s] grandmother, and four of her children, his children.”

Gray said one of the four children that came out of Philip and Nellie’s relationship was Alexander, who would eventually move to Ross County, married and had Cecil and Arnold. The two boys would later on become soldiers in World War One.

This is one of many stories Gray has in the new exhibit that is set to open June 21 called “Unheard Voices”, which tells the history of African-American men and women in Ross County.

“You hear about the Hemings and all of them that have moved here, and their descendants live here. But there are other families as well,” Gray said. “What we have on the wall so far is a listing of those African-Americans heads of households who were living here in 1830.”

The exhibit has records of African-Americans who were freed from slavery and moved to Ross County, books and history of many others who lived or passed through Ross County. Some in these stories have links to Gray herself.

Gray said it is important for an exhibit like this to exist in Ross County.

“We need to know who we are, so that we can be proud of who we are,” Gray said. “Our children definitely didn’t know that we had all of these people. There are more that I wasn’t able to include this time, and we’d like to be able to include them as we go on.”

Gray said she wants to build the exhibit with people’s old photos, Bibles and memorabilia from African-American families that may have been sitting in boxes for years.

If interested, Gray said to call the Historical Society at (740)772-1936.