Slabtown

Slabtown was a community established near Yorktown during the Civil War for formerly enslaved people who escaped from the Confederate-controlled South and sought freedom behind United States lines. From May 1862 through the end of the war, Yorktown was occupied by United States troops, and in July 1863 Brigadier General Isaac J. Wistar reported that more than 12,000 contraband were living on subsistence from his commissary. To provide shelter and a chance for self-sufficiency, he created housing on nearby land left unoccupied by its owner and assigned troops to oversee construction of the cabins, which were built from pine slabs and gave the settlement its name. The Friends’ Freedmen's Association of Philadelphia soon sent teachers to open schools and businessmen to supply clothing, vegetable seeds, and farming tools, while army officers recruited soldiers for the United States Colored Regiments. Testifying on February 3, 1866, Dr. Daniel Norton, a formerly enslaved man born in Williamsburg, Virginia, who had fled north, become a licensed physician, and come to Yorktown about 1864 to practice medicine, called Slabtown a large settlement near Yorktown established by the government during the war for those who came within the lines, where Black residents worked at jobs they could find, including oystering. After the war, the place, sometimes called Uniontown, remained a lively community with businesses, a school, and a church, but the land reverted to its former Confederate owner, and residents did not gain the chance to buy property there until the 1880s and 1890s. In the 1970s, as part of restoring more of Yorktown’s 1781 battlefield, the National Park Service bought the lots and razed the buildings, and some residents moved less than a mile away.

Virginia · United States