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Ned  

Steven J. Niven

slave, blacksmith, and inventor, is known only through his owner's application for a patent for the “Stuart Double Plough and Double Scraper,” which Ned invented on a Holmesville, Mississippi, plantation in the late 1850s. Ned was a slave of Oscar J. E. Stuart, a prominent lawyer and planter in Pike County in the piney woods section of southeast Mississippi, on the border with Louisiana. While the growth of the slave population and the rise of cotton culture was less dramatic in the piney woods than in other parts of the Magnolia State like the Delta—where nearly 90 percent of the population were slaves—by 1860 African American slaves accounted for 45 percent of all Pike County residents The less fertile land in the piney woods led planters there to seek new technologies to compete with planters elsewhere in the state since the Delta s salubrious productive soil had created ...

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Redding, Anderson  

Walter C. Rucker

inventor, blacksmith, and farmer, was born Anderson Augustus Redding in Juliette, Georgia, to Anderson and Jane Darden Redding, former slaves and sharecroppers. Though his parents had been slaves on the plantation of James P. Redding—the son of a Virginia planter who fought alongside George Washington at Yorktown—the young Redding managed to acquire his own plot of land in Juliette and was relatively wealthy by the time he turned forty-five. He created a lucrative set of operations that included a syrup mill, a blacksmith shop, and a series of distilleries. In addition, Redding grew a combination of sugarcane and corn on a sizable landholding. He could often be seen in a buggy pulled by his white stallion, George, in Juliette in the 1910s and 1920s—a rare sight indeed in the midst of the so-called Black Nadir.

Redding married a total of three times but his first ...

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Ruth, William Chester  

Bruce D. Bomberger

inventor of agricultural and other machinery, was born on his parents' farm in Ercildoun, Pennsylvania. His father, Samuel Ruth (1850–1937), was born a slave on the plantation of Robert Frederick Ruth in Beauford District, Saint Peter's Parish, South Carolina. Samuel Ruth came north after being swept up by the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry as a thirteen-year-old and subsequently served as a water boy and then as a personal servant to First Sergeant Stephen A. Swails, later an important figure in the South during Reconstruction. In 1865 Samuel traveled north with two army friends from the Fifty-fourth and the same year married Maria “Louisa” Pinn, the sister of one of his friends and the daughter of the Baptist minister, attorney, and war veteran Robert Andrew Pinn The young newlyweds followed other Fifty fourth veterans to settle in the Pennsylvania Quaker area near the town of Chatham Following ...

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Temple, Lewis  

Gary L. Frost

Lewis Temple was born in Richmond, Virginia. Nothing is known about his parents or about any formal education he might have had. According to one biographer, he was unable to sign his name. Sometime during the 1820s, Temple migrated to the whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he married Mary Clark, a native of Maryland, in 1829. Their first child, Lewis Jr., was born in 1830, followed by a daughter, Nancy, in 1832. Several years later, a third child, Mary, was born, but she died at the age of six.

What little is known about Temple suggests that he was a resourceful and principled individual Whether he escaped Virginia as a slave or left as a freeman is uncertain but in any case he had a better life in Massachusetts than the one he would have led in Richmond apparently finding work in New ...

Article

Temple, Lewis  

Gary L. Frost

blacksmith, abolitionist, and inventor, was born in Richmond, Virginia. Of his parents and formal education, nothing is known; according to one biographer, he was unable to sign his name. Sometime during the 1820s Temple migrated to the whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where in 1829 he married Mary Clark, a native of Maryland. In 1830 their first child, Lewis Jr., was born, followed by a daughter, Nancy, in 1832. Sometime later, a third child, Mary, was born; she died at age six.

What little is known about Temple suggests a resourceful and principled individual Whether he escaped Virginia as a slave or left as a freedman is uncertain but in any case he had a better life in Massachusetts than the one he would have led in Richmond apparently finding work in New Bedford soon after his arrival Town records indicate that ...