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Description |
John N. Benners (1820-1866), son of Lucas Benners, was born on the thousand-acre family plantation, Rosev ille, lying on the north side of the Neuse River estuary about four miles northwest of Wilkinson Point (now the southern tip of Pamlico County). The elder Benners died at the close of 1836 leaving several minor children; as a result final disposition of the plantation did not occur until ten years later, when it was purchased from the other heirs by John N. Benners for $1900. From his arrival at the plantation at the beginning of 1857 Benners began to keep a journal. The entries are very nearly daily from February 5, 1857, to June 27, 1859. After a brief hiatus lasting from June 28 to December 31, 1859, the journal resumes with entries for every four or five days from January 3 to the last entry on November 13, 1860. Most of the entries in the 104-page journal provide a record from day to day to day of the life of the plantation. In addition to the manuscript volume, 157 loose manuscript items there are also 31 pieces of correspondence, 1922-1971, and 126 xerographic, typescript, and manuscript items of genealogical interest. (The volume is half-bound in calf and marbled paper containing an index, 144 pages of accounts, 104 pages of journal, and 8 leaves and flyleaf of accounts, with a single sheet laid in showing hire of slaves in 1860 and 1861. Young Benners took a wife in 1843, Cassandra Dudley, who died in 1845 after having borne him a daughter, Sarah Frances. On the same day that he purchased the family plantation, Benners married as his second wife Rebecca Jane Perkins, daughter of a prosperous neighboring farmer, William S. Perkins. For reasons that are not explained, Benners sold Roseville plantation to his father-in-law, and his father-in-law then created a cestui use trust in the plantation for the benefit of his daughter, Rebecca Benners and her children. Perkins subsequently confirmed and enlarged the trust in his last will and testament by adding to it a total of seventeen slaves. The result of these transactions was to leave Benners propertyless in his own right. Seven years into their marriage, and after having produced two sons named William Lucas Benners and George Attmore Benners, the second Mrs. Benners died toward the close of 1853. Benners was left essentially indigent by the death of his wife, for there appears to have been serious question as to what right, if any, he might still have to use Roseville plantation as if it were his own. In December, 1853, his late wife's brother, Benjamin S. Perkins, was appointed guardian of the children's property, valued at $7,500, and early in the new year Benners and his two sons left Roseville to board at a nearby plantation while he sought means of raising an income. Having taught in the common schools of the county in 1850 and 1851, Benners again turned to teaching at the end of 1853 and continued until the autumn of 1855. Sometime in that year he sent his sons to live with their uncle Benjamin, and in 1856 he left the state for Alabama to visit a brother who promised to educate his daughter. If there had been a question of Benners's right of courtesy in the plantation while in a cestui que trust, the question appears to have been resolved before his return from Alabama at the close of 1856. On February 5, 1857, Benners returned to Roseville, and hiring slaves from his late wife's trust and collecting his sons from their uncle, he set about putting the plantation in operation again. Here he remained until his death in 1866. Family tradition holds that the name for the plantation was "Good Hope" rather than the earlier "Roseville", and one sees in the journal entry for Oct. 31, 1858, that a new Methodist Church six or seven miles to the northwest on Goose Creek was dedicated and named "Good Hope". From his arrival at the plantation at the beginning of 1857 Benners began to keep a journal. The entries are very nearly daily from February 5, 1857, to June 27, 1859. After a brief hiatus lasting from June 28 to December 31, 1859, the journal resumes with entries for every four or five days from January 3 to the last entry on November 13, 1860. Evidence from the journal indicates that the plantation, which had been rented during the absence of Benners, had fallen into a state of disrepair. While one slave was put to scraping turpentine, all others fell to mauling rails and putting up fences around areas from which livestock was to be excluded. Windows and kitchen had to be repaired, a new spring dug, curbed, and boxed, a wharf built, a new barn constructed, and farm roads cut. During the second year a new slave house was constructed. The various steps of construction from the getting, barking, and hauling of logs, the cutting of sills, sleepers and rafters, the riving of boards to roofing the structure, constructing and plastering the chimney, and weatherboarding the house are laid out in entries ranging from January 7 to February 26, 1858. The seasonal work of the plantation from seedtime to harvest, the scraping and boxing of turpentine, the shipping of cord wood and turpentine by various schooners, the rafting of logs to market--all are reported in the journal, Master, hired hands, and slaves all worked together. For the most part the slave women at work on the plantation were those whose condition (health or pregnancy) precluded them from being offered at the annual hiring. Instead the estate in trust belonging to the Benners children let them out to whomever bid lowest for their annual upkeep. Nevertheless, one finds the women, too, doing what they could on the plantation-,--grubbing, putting up fences, covering seed as it was planted, shelling corn, gardening, handling logs and otherwise helping in the construction of new buildings as they were able. Little of life outside the plantation is reflected in the journal. The entries for January, 1857, include remarks on the remarkable winter storm of January 17-18 that froze Neuse River over for more than a week and drove ice from the southeastern shore inland for a distance of two miles and a depth of six to twelve inches. Attendance of religious services at local meeting houses is recorded, as are the obsequies of a member of the Sons of Temperance, the failed effort to establish a subscription school in the neighborhood and the maintenance of a private tutor for his children, the visit of the census taker in 1860, and occasional performance by Benners of his duties as a justice of the county (he had been in the com�mission of the peace from as early as 1847).. It was as a justice that he conducted a pre--trial hearing and commitment in a case in which Allen, slave of William D. Fulford, was charged with causing the death by drowning of Dick, slave of Vincent W. Dixon (entry of July 25-26, 1858). Otherwise, most of the entries in the 104-page journal provide a record from day to day to day of the life of the plantation. The volume in which journal entries were made was originally used by Benners for keeping various accounts. During the years from 1844 to 1852 he seems to have shipped turpentine, wood, bark, bricks, coal, and similar wares for various producers in the neighborhood on their paying him for freighting their goods. Some of the freighting appears to have been done by his own schooner, the Henry Clay, or his canoes Rough & Ready and Bravo. The schooner Star and two slaves to help sail her were hired from the owner. Accounts for the various vessels are among those entered into the front of the volume. So are accounts for the hire of a number of free blacks during the period 1848--1859: Jesse Mitchell, Joseph Hoover, Josephus Lindsay, Josiah Martin, and Joseph Banton. Benners seems to have kept a store during the course of the year 1845 from which he sold pork, corn, potatoes, herrings, molasses, coffee, sugar, flour, meal, snuff, tobacco, soap, brandy, rum, quinine, shoes, shirting, mauled rails, nails, shot, drag nets, net corks, anchors, and similar goods. His customers included both blacks and whites. The accounts show that he accepted payment in kind and in labor as well as in cash. A single sheet laid into the front of the volume contains a record of the hire in 1860 and 1861 of the slaves belonging to the two Benners children. In addition to the volume of accounts and plantation journal, the collection includes letters and copies of original materials (and some translations) relating to the Benners family and families connected by intermarriage. The family had been Dutch citizens seated in St. Eustatius, engaged in the West Indian trade, for a century or more before one of them planted a branch of the family at a 2000--acre plantation called Golden Grove, on the south side of Neuse River estuary between the mouth of South River and Turnagain Bay in easternmost Craven County near the end of the eighteenth century. There are copies and translations of four original documents, 17691777, in the Rijks Archief in Zeeland relating to the Benners firm in St. Eustatius and the Commercial Company of Middelburg and their involvement in the slave trade. Correspondence, 1922-1971, and notes and copies of other documents in the collection are genealogical in nature and relate to the Benners, Lovick, Norwood, Vail, and Vail-Blount families. |
