Centre County Government

8. The Black Experience

Philip Fithian, who visited James Potter on his plantation at the very start of settlement in Penns Valley in August 1775, gives the earliest written mention of Blacks in the County (August 6, 1775, I rise early, before any in the Family except a Negro Girl), and goes on to relate a story about her:

"No, Madam, I must dry the Butter first." —Mrs. Potter's Girl was bringing a Plate of Butter yesterday Morning from the Spring-House. It rained, & Butter will retain the Drops on its Surface—Innocent Miss, therefore, with great Care for Neatness, was holding the butter close to a very large fire. —What are you at there says Mrs. Potter to Peggy? "I am drying the butter, Madam!"

Fithian describes Potter's workforce as "Four Men Servants, two Boys" all busily clearing and ploughing land. Some or all of them were undoubtedly Black, and not only that, were slaves. Gen. Potter left six slaves to his children at his death, and other owners of large farms in Penns Valley were slaveholders. All slaves were eventually freed under Pennsylvania's gradual emancipation law; but until 1830 there were slaves in the County.

The industrial north of Centre county depended increasingly on Black labor, particularly to do the heavy work in mining and handling iron ore and woodcutting for charcoal. In 1840 there were 266 Blacks in the IO iron-making townships, 91% of the Blacks in the County. That year 11% of Bellefonte's population was Black, several times the percentage of Philadelphia. Of the 192 Blacks living in Bellefonte and nearby Spring Twp. when the 1860 Census was taken, 13 were servants living in the households or inns they served. The rest lived in company houses or boarding houses in several neighborhoods, with 31 households headed by "day laborers" (4 women), 2 forgemen, and 5 farm laborers, all but one working for William Thomas. Most were mill hands. The iron industry in the South was similarly dependent on Black labor, but there the Blacks were slaves.

With such a large resident Black population for support, and an active Quaker element favoring abolition of slavery, it is not surprising that Centre County has a number of houses that were way stations on the Underground Railroad. Linn records that on May 16, 1833, "a coloured woman, who had lived in Bellefonte for over six years, married, and having several children, was remanded into slavery by the court in Bellefonte." After the Dredd Scott decision was made, raids returning Blacks to slavery in the South became frequent. In the 1850s, a few Black men were sent from Bellefonte to remote farms in the county for safekeeping until the Civil War put an end to slave-catching. Twelve Blacks served in the Sixth Colored Regiment in the Civil War; three of them gave their lives.

In 1833 a Black Methodist congregation formed and rapidly outgrew a succession of home meeting places. St. Paul's A.M.E. built its first church in 1859, on a lot donated by William Thomas. The parish thrived as long as the iron industry provided jobs, then dwindled slowly in this century. Bellefonte had a Black school for many years.

The most famous Black family in the county was the Mills family. William Mills, Sr., was one of the early trustees of the church. His grandchildren, the four Mills Brothers, became national recording artists. Don, the last surviving brother, died in 1999.

Black students at Penn State have had to reintegrate the county almost from scratch in the past 30 years. It has not been easy. Welcomed as athletes, cultivated as academics, liked as neighbors but feared as symbols of street crime, Blacks experience mixed receptions even today.