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Hairston and Wilson Family Papers, 1800-1906

Title: Hairston and Wilson Family Papers, 1750-2017

Original deposit: The bulk of the original deposit consists of letters to Elizabeth "Bettie" Perkins Hairston. Correspondents include her mother Ann Hairston, who wrote chiefly from the family plantations near Martinsville, Va. between the 1850s and 1890s; her sister, Ruth Stovall Hairston Wilson, who wrote from Danville, Va.; her brother, John A. Hairston, who wrote from school in Staunton, Va., from 1855 to 1857; and her cousin, Jeb Stuart (1833-1875), who wrote from West Point, from 1853 to 1854, and while fighting against the Comanches in Texas, 1855. During the Civil War, Bettie lived with relatives in Yalabusha County, Miss., where she received letters from her family about life on the home front. There are also letters to Bettie, written after her marriage in 1873, from her husband, J.T.W. Hairston in Lowndes County, Miss., where he was trying to run a cotton plantation without enslaved labor. Other significant family correspondence documents the westward movement of various Hairston family members and includes some papers of George Hairston of Halifax County, Va., from circa 1800 to 1820. In addition to correspondence, several account books document family life, including the involvement of family members in at least two stores in Henry County and Danville, Va., from 1800 to 1829. A household account book, dated 1831 to 1869, provides detailed information about weaving, livestock raising, gardening, and other household production. Other financial and legal materials include scattered bills, receipts, depositions, lists and other records of enslaved people, and labor contracts with freedpeople. Additions of 2015: The 2015 additions consist of letters of Anne Wilson, from Dan's Hill (1887-1892); farming contracts, indentures, and assorted sales records; 5 ledgers from the 19th century, at least three of which pertain to the Beaver Creek Plantation in Martinsville, Va.; and other related family papers. Additions of 2016: The bulk of the 2016 additions consists of financial and legal documents, including bills, receipts, accounts, tax assessments, wills, deeds, indentures, agreements, contracts, and slight, scattered correspondence. Materials pertain largely to Hairston and Wilson families' agricultural business interests and their extensive land holdings in Virginia and Mississippi. Numerous documents, including bills of sale, tax assessments, and extracts from wills, reflect the antebellum plantion economy and illustrate the families' use of and reliance on enslaved labor from the colonial period to emancipation. Post emancipation documents include tenant agreements with "colored" farmers. Documents related to land transactions often include surveys of property bought and sold. The bulk of the family correspondence in the additions dates from the 1870s to the 1920s. Bettie Perkins Hairston and Annie Marshall Wilson James are the chief recipients of the letters from this time period. Other papers relate to schools attended by family members, Virginia militias in the early national period, churches, funerals, lodges and clubs, genealogy, and Beaver Creek Plantation. A small number of photographs depict extended family members including Rorer James, Sr. However, most individuals who are pictured are not identified. Addition of 2017: The addition contains genealogical information; family charts; family histories and anecdotes; and transcriptions of nineteenth-century family letters and a household ledger. Most materials were compiled by members of the white Hairston family and related extended families in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Also includes letters written by members of the family that pertain to the book The Hairstons An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wiencek (1999).

ArchivalResource: 19.5 feet of linear shelf space (approximately 7100 items)

https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/03149/ View