Black History is More than a Month

The couple in this photograph are Hiram Overton (~1835-1911) and his wife, Evelyn (Bradford) Overton (1841-1917) my great-great-great grandparents. We opened Black History Month at Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology with a call to share personal stories indicative of who we are and our family connections to the African-American heritage we are celebrating for these 28 days. I’m joining in the effort by relaying the story of Hiram and Evelyn Overton. Together, they are the foundations of my maternal lineage, lovers of kin and country, survivors of slavery and institutional racism, keepers of the flame and inspiring #BlackEntrepreneurs.

Hiram and Evelyn were born into the system of chattel slavery and they miraculously survived with their spirits intact. They labored together on a plantation in Davidson County, TN in an area of my hometown of Nashville that is now called Crieve Hall and bleeds into Brentwood. That plantation was called Traveller’s Rest by its founder John Overton, who was personal friends with President Andrew Jackson. It sits on beautiful land with rolling hills and expansive vistas from which the Cherokee Nation was forcibly removed. This culturally significant land is the earliest known genealogical connection that my family can trace. While I hope to learn more about Hiram and Evelyn's parents, for now, the trail is rather cold. But here's what I do know.

Hiram was a blacksmith and farmer at Traveller’s Rest. He and Evelyn were married and raised a family that grew to include at least eight children, the youngest of which were born free. As a skilled tradesman, Hiram was hired out to neighboring plantations and homesteads where he served a valuable role as a technician, tool maker, and all-around fixer. Soon after the Civil War began, he and Evelyn emancipated themselves and their four or five children from the dread of forced and unpaid labor. With his wife and children safe on a small farm they had somehow rented from the Lazenby family, Hiram departed to serve the Union Army with his brother. For at least six months, Hiram spent time shodding horses and performing other tasks in the Union Army encampment in Murfreesboro, TN. Evelyn stayed behind tending to their young family in dangerous circumstances. With wartime skirmishes often around her, marauders close by, and her husband some 35 miles away, I can't imagine how she managed those uncertain months. Yet, she made it through. There is some indication that Evelyn's younger brother, Thomas, might have been sheltering with her. I, for one, hope that is true.

After the war, the Hiram and Evelyn continued to rent their small farm and run a blacksmith shop they established on Granny White Pike in the Otter Creek neighborhood just outside of Nashville's late 19th-century city limits. Within two years, the Overtons had amassed enough resources to buy farmland bordering the plot they had been renting. At the end of their lives their wills indicate that they had accumulated more than 600 acres of prime farmland off of Granny White Pike, expanded and retained ownership of the blacksmith shop, and become landlords who owned several homes in South Nashville that they rented to family and friends. I have the blessed and unusual privilege of knowing these details about their lives because their granddaughter, Willa Lee (Overton) Scales (1906-1996), was near and dear to me. She lived with my grandparents in her elderly years, and I often sat at her knee absorbing oral history and scribbling it down on index cards and in notebooks as a teenager.

I kept my family story as part of my personal remembrances for a decade always wondering if I could learn more about these brave Overtons to whom I was related. Using Ancestry.com, I found as much as I could on my own. When I moved to Boston in 2005, by happenstance I encountered the resources of the New England Historical and Genealogical Society whose researchers helped me build a robust paper trail that added to the experiential history my family knew to be true. I was grateful to learn through documents stored at the Library of Congress that Hiram was interviewed extensively in the early 1900s as part of a restitution claim he made against the federal government for valuable goods and provisions that were seized from his residence without compensation and used as supplies for Union troops. In his affidavit, Hiram testified about his involvement with and loyalty to the Union, his reasons for pursuing self-emancipation, his life in antebellum Nashville, the life he built with Evelyn after they escaped enslavement, and many other matters. One of the quotes from his interview stays with me to this day. When asked why he “walked off” the Traveller's Rest plantation in 1862, Hiram Overton’s simple and poignant response was: “Even birds want to be free.”

I thank Hiram and Evelyn Overton for their sacrifice, their vision, and their tenacity in making a way out of no way. I am because they were. I strive every day to make them proud. Here’s to freedom. For me, #BlackHistory is #MoreThanAMonth.