What does “The Fort” and “Seminary” Mean to Us?

What does “The Fort” and “Seminary” Mean to Us?

By Adrienne Terrell (Randall) Washington, for Ft. Ward and Seminary African American Descendants’ Society, 7/9/10

While officials and others, with their agendas and individual interests, struggle about the future of Ft. Ward Park and the appropriate uses of its 33 acreage in order to strike a proper “balance” between historic and recreational uses, one group of people, the African American descendants of “The Fort” and “Seminary” communities, have only one dutiful and determined goal, the restoration and preservation of our sacred heritage.

Where others view parcels and plots and deeds and maps and directories and census records, or canons and bastions and picnic pavilions, we see people, people buried on this hallowed ground whose blood runs through our veins, our parents’ veins, our grandparents’ veins, our great-grandparent’s veins and our great-great grandparents’ veins. The countless unmarked graves of our ancestors are buried under the very soil that joggers and dog walkers and Civil War history buffs unknowingly tread today.

Where others would dig up the dirt to discover what trinkets lay beneath it, we know what treasures will be unearthed there, the blood, sweat and tears of our departed loved ones who called this place home. 

Where others see “open space,” we see familiar faces and family memories and challenges on land that our ancestors – from slavery to freedom to Jim Crow to urban renewal -- toiled, bought and successfully seeded to grow a sustainable community through self-sufficiency with homesteads, small farms, churches, schools and community values that have contributed to the prosperity of this city and of this “more perfect nation” from more than 150 years. 

When we call the roll tracing back, we know that Shorts, McKnight, Terrell, Adams, Casey, Wanzer, Wood, Jackson, Peters, Randall, Craven, Thomas, Johnson, and Lewis among others, will answer for providing labor, learning, housing, food, clothing, comfort and especially prayer for the collective goodwill of these interrelated families that settled around Ft. Ward and Virginia Theological Seminary.

“In Seminary and up The Fort, we might have different last names, but we are all family,” says Minister Alphonso Terrell of the Oakland Baptist Church, in a familiar refrain.  

The bedrock of the African American Ft. Ward and Seminary communities is the Oakland Baptist Church, formerly built in 1898 out of a grove of oak trees and whose cemetery rests within the Ft. Ward Park today. While others might wonder about these remains, we know that those headstones of our forefathers mark but a portion of the disturbed and desecrated graves that once belonged to family burial plots peppered throughout what became the park in the 1960s.  

Ft. Ward, VTS and the Episcopal High School were the economic lifeblood of the African American “Fort” and “Seminary” communities as these institutions provided jobs for domestic and trade labor before and after enslavement. It was not uncommon for several generations of one family to be employed at VTS and EHS. Some men lived in the makeshift dormitory in the rafters above the gymnasium until they married local women. One, Douglas Johnson, a laborer, was allowed to live at VTS after being transferred by his former employer, a private school in Facquier County.  

Black labor at VTS has a long history since its founding in 1823. George Washington’s slaves were dispatched for construction at VTS. During the Civil War, “contrabands” worked as laborers in The Seminary Hospital. Later, “Mr. Charlie,” “Uncle Busey” and the Randall men were hired as cooks. Others tended the grounds or fields. Men and women worked in the laundry. Some women served as household maids and nannies. Belle Bailey, who cooked for Rev. Drs. Walker, Packard and Massie, having arrived “two years after the (Civil) war,” according to neighbor Searles McKnight.    

When we stand on the earthen fort walls and look beyond the cannons, we take pride that our ancestors, too, fought in the War Between the States to win our freedom. For only a stone’s throw away at Menokin, the home of Cassius Lee, first cousin of Gen. Robert E. Lee, our ancestors had once been slaves or indentured servants. Descendants of U.S.C.T.s William Wood, James Montgomery Peters and possibly Thornton Wanzer (?) have lived in and around Ft. Ward for generations. We know that that African American patriotism continued in successive military conflicts as our grandfathers and fathers enlisted in the armed forces to fight in WWI, WWII, the Korean War and Vietnam. We understand that the Civil War was a seminal moment in the nation’s, as well as our peculiar history. And without the U.S.C.T. and the contraband labor contributions to the Union Army, including around the Defenses of Washington, victory may have been denied and our liberty delayed. And when that freedom was in hand, we know that Burr Shorts was one of the first black men to cast a ballot in 1867.    

As African Americans living in a Southern city, which was once a major port in the slave trade and a military hub for the Civil War, our families should not have survive the many formidable challenges from outside forces that repeatedly chipped away at their hard-earned landholdings. However, they did. And they thrived through an insulated communal system, incorporating an exacting moral and social code, as documented in the 1909 Bailey v. Bailey divorce case, which afforded many of those original family bloodlines the ability to remain as the intact African American Seminary community today.

When visitors view an arboretum, a maintenance yard, an amphitheater or a row of cedar trees aligning an old road, the descendants see Miss Jessie working in her garden, Aunt Clara’s grave, or Uncle Johnny feeding his hogs, or Miz Elizabeth as a child walking down that cedar lined path to the first Seminary School. 

While we will never reclaim the valuable land that was confiscated by outside public and market forces, we are determined to reclaim our legacy and recant our history as we know it; not as others would revise it. That is our birthright alone. There is no higher authority or authenticity than the lineage of those who experienced life at “The Fort” and “Seminary” and live to tell those rich tales.

We vow not to have our history discounted or diminished. 

Therefore, we honor and hold up our collected memories and “qualitative historical data” in the form of oral histories and artifacts with pride alongside any “quantitative historical data” that completes the full history of Ft. Ward Park to include its longstanding African American inheritance.              

What does Ft. Ward mean to us? It means blood, land and life. It models faith and morality. It conveys endurance and excellence. It speaks of our struggle but trumpets our survival. 

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