When we started this project, we were painfully aware of several competing versions of Sarah’s early life. Some sources said Tennessee. Others said South Carolina. Some said…well, almost nothing, to be honest. We believe that if you’re going to tell a story, you have to start at the beginning, and Sarah most certainly has a beginning to be uncovered. That became the primary mission of a recent research trip to Tennessee.
To narrow down our area of focus and define a clear starting point, we chose to start in Knoxville, Tennessee. We had good reason to believe that doing so was at least based on an educated guess, based on information that came from Sarah herself: on multiple Montana census records, she unwaveringly listed her place of birth as Tennessee, and we trust her recollection.
There is some logic behind the confusion, but the deeper we dug, the more it became clear that such confusion was a more recent phenomenon, stemming from the family that owned Sarah’s parents. We’ll discuss them in some detail in upcoming posts. For now, suffice it to say that before we dug into the Tennessee archives, there were several viable possibilities for the position of Sarah’s owner: John A. Blair was our primary suspect, but his brother, William Blair, his son, William Patterson Blair, and close friend Nathan Gammon were also potential candidates. The Blair and Gammon families shared closely intertiwned personal and business relationships, and it was not unreasonable to think that slaves might have changed hands between them prior to the Civil War.
We chose to start in Knoxville for several reasons:
1. There were Blairs living in Knoxville following the Civil War, in the period when Sarah would have left to come west.
2. Nathan Gammon was a resident of Knoxville in this period, and one often repeated story is that Sarah went to Knoxville following the Civil War to live with an aunt who was married to a Gammon slave.
3. John Luttrell Murphy, who brought Sarah west with his family in 1871, departed from Knoxville.
4. Most importantly, Sarah always maintained that she was from Tennessee, and we trust her!
As a beginning, we’ll say that for the first time, we uncovered documentary evidence that allows us to make, at the very least, a good educated guess as to where Sarah was born and raised. We have tracked down family members and scoured records that make a strong case for an interpretation supporting Sarah’s statements that this is where she came from. Coming up, we lay out our case!
Building Freedom in the Territorial West 