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By Eugene Scheel
Sunday, September 17, 2000; Page V03

On a summer day in 1890, several African American families gathered just west of Hamilton, at the farm of Fayette G. Welsh, a Quaker, and celebrated the first of 77 annual Emancipation Days. By 1910, the celebration was held Sept. 22, the date on which President Lincoln read the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet in 1862.

At the close of his matter-of-fact address, Lincoln simply stated that on Jan. 1, 1863, "all persons held as slaves" in the Confederate states would be "then, thenceforward, and forever free."

Loudoun County's Emancipation Day was one of many activities that took hold among the South's population of former slaves in the decades after the war. When the prolonged agricultural depression of 1873-79 led the federal legislature to retreat from its effort to reshape the South, blacks banded together to protect and further their own interests.

Minutes of the 1899 meeting and several ensuing meetings bear the heading "Gallielon Fishmon Hall," without doubt the hall of Hamilton's Gallilean Fishermen, a black fraternal organization. The Emancipation Society's president was then James R. Hicks, of North Fork, and the secretary was Howard W. Clark, of Hamilton.

Other early leaders were from diverse parts of central and western Loudoun: George Anderson, of Lovettsville; Henry Chinn, of Mount Gilead; Jesse Moton, of Leesburg; William Sinkfield, of Hamilton; Luther Stewart, of Purcellville; Madison "Mac" Taylor, of Middleburg; and Isaac Waters, of Hillsboro.

The Loudoun County Emancipation Association incorporated in December 1909--to "establish a bond of union among persons of the Negro race," according to its charter, "to provide for the celebration of the 22nd day of September as Emancipation day, or the day of Freedom, to cultivate good fellowship, to work for the betterment of the race, educationally, morally and materially."

By issuing stock (120 shares at $5 a share), borrowing $800 from Benjamin Franklin Fenton, a white Purcellville resident, and passing the hat at Emancipation Days, the association was able to buy 10 1/2 acres south of Purcellville for $1,250, about three times the land's market value. This black neighborhood was known then as Cub Run, after a small stream and its branches. After the 1920s, the area would be called "The Line," meaning the town's color line.

The association named the tract Lincoln Park, but it would become known in the vernacular as the Emancipation Grounds. At 6 p.m. Friday, a state historical marker will be dedicated at the site on 20th Street where Emancipation Days were celebrated for nearly 60 years.

In spring 1910, Sally Hatcher sold the association an old log cabin on her place north of town for $15. John Furr, Lewis Rector and Linden McWashington dismantled it and moved it to Lincoln Park, where Joe Cook and Furr rebuilt it to serve as the association's headquarters.

For the first several years, much of the annual celebration took place in a tent erected to shelter speakers, church choirs and instrumentalists. The next building to rise on the grounds was The Tabernacle. Round Hill's master builder, Arch Simpson, designed the building, a miniature of the one he built for the 1904 Bush Meeting--what is now the skating rink at Fireman's Field. With help from Joe and Bud Cook, Furr, Rector and Washington and others, the "baby" tabernacle was open for the 1914 meeting, with room to seat 1,200.

Festivities often began with a parade that stepped off from Mount Zion Church in Hamilton, the heart of the black community. Led by an "Uncle Sam" or "John Brown" bearing a U.S. flag and a band, the revelers walked three miles to the Emancipation Grounds. Others traveled by horse and buggy, often loaned from whites. Washington & Old Dominion excursion trains brought hundreds from the capital city and Northern Virginia.

At The Tabernacle, filled to overflowing, speakers included such luminaries as educators Nannie Helen Burroughs; Mary McLeod Bethune, president of Florida's Bethune-Cookman College; Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, president of Howard University; and Charlotte Haxall Noland, headmistress of Foxcroft School. Miss Noland was the one known featured speaker who was white.

Before 1919, jousting tournaments provided spectacle, though one might think that an unusual choice of sport since ex-Confederate cavalrymen popularized the event. At a concession stand, built shortly after The Tabernacle was finished, Washington's "Fussell's Real Cream Ice Cream" was the favorite treat, and the Emancipation Association always managed that franchise. A three-scoop cup cost 5 cents.

Area black churches and such mutual aid societies as the Daughters of Ruth, Gallilean Fishermen, Odd Fellows and Good Samaritans received the other concession proceeds, along with a share of the goodwill offerings that followed speakers. The Emancipation Association kept 10 percent, the biblical tithe.

It was a rare occasion when this annual gala, so important to the morale of the African American community of Loudoun and surrounding areas, was reported in a newspaper. Then, the wording often took the tone of this Loudoun Mirror snippet after the 1918 meeting: "Emancipation Day was observed in an orderly manner by our colored people on the 21st. Some crap shooting was carried on in the public road. It is hoped that their arrest will follow."

An orderly Emancipation Day was of paramount concern to the organizers, for the white community's perception of the black community often came from newspapers ever bent on reporting the trivial transgressions of a few. Thus, the Emancipation Association had its own police. The 1902 association minutes noted that any association police officer who took a drink on Emancipation Day--or even smelled of alcohol--would not be paid. The association's stationery of the teens and later years bore the heading: "Good behavior Guaranteed" and "No intoxicating Liquor Allowed in Grounds."

After World War I, Loudoun's population was 23 percent black. Yet, of the county's 473 who served in the military, about 36 percent, or 172, were black, and in those days, Emancipation Day speakers became increasingly militant. An early-'20s broadside distributed on the grounds expressed the thoughts of many:

"What about America? We want an answer. Germany thought with its infamous propaganda to ally us against you. Germany knew the story of our wrongs, but to her pleadings we turned a deaf ear. We forgot our long night of misery, your lynchings and your burnings, your 'Jim Crow' cars, your vote suppression, forgot all but our duty to our country.

"We are a hopeful, God-fearing race of people, and we expect to continue so, but we warn you that the hour may come when you may need us again . . . and we promise you that we will answer every call of duty with the same alacrity in our hearts beating high with the love of country, as we have done in the past. All we ask in return is that you discharge your obligation to us with the same fidelity that we have discharged ours. More than this we do not ask, less than this will not satisfy us."

As a reminder of African American participation in the war, the U.S. Army's all-black 10th Cavalry, known as the "Buffalo Soldiers," drilled before the crowds. Army and black college recruiters courted the young men. Baseball replaced jousting, and, about 1925, Wilmer Carey laid out a field. Teams from as far as Washington, Alexandria, Charles Town and Warrenton played there, reconciled to anonymity by newspapers that didn't report non-white sports.

Willisville's Emma Reid recalled the banner years of Emancipation Day: "People just walked around, laughed and talked and met friends. . . . They'd take a lot of pictures. They'd have singing inside The Tabernacle. It was a big day."

Crowds waned as the Depression took its toll in the late '30s. And as the association chose not to take an activist role toward achieving local goals--mainly equal educational facilities and opportunities--other groups formed: Purcellville's Willing Workers Club in 1917, the countywide League of Negro PTAs in 1935 and Loudoun's NAACP chapter in 1941.

By 1960, The Tabernacle was structurally unsound. Gatherers then met on the baseball field, where Elder Solomon Lightfoot Micheaux, a stalwart from previous decades, preached, and the world's most famous gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson, sang. The final Emancipation Day celebration was held in 1967.

Four years later, the association directors decided to sell the grounds for $20,000 and to distribute the proceeds to 293 shareholders. The interested buyers were Basham Simms, the town's first black council member; Beatrice Lyles, a store and funeral home owner; and Samuel Murray, an upholsterer who in 1957 had integrated the county library.

Simms told me they put their request to Thomas E. Thompson, the association's last president, and later, at a funeral at Mount Olivet, Thompson asked Simms whether their offer still held. Simms said yes, and Thompson told him he'd forward the offer to the directors.

But instead, the directors sold the grounds to William Jones, a white garbage collector from Sterling. "I was shocked," Simms told me. The Emancipation Grounds, as they say in rural Virginia, "had passed into the hands of strangers." The Tabernacle caved in a few years later, and the headquarters was sold for its logs in 1993.

After several owners, the Blue Ridge Bible Church bought the old grounds in 1998. The surviving remnants are the old stone entrance wall and posts and a plaque without names, save for that of President Lincoln. The marker to be dedicated Friday will remind passersby of what those remnants represent and all that once went on in this place.

Eugene Scheel is a Waterford historian and mapmaker.