CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR — ANARCHA’S FINAL YEARS
[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]
In our last essay, we found Anarcha’s final resting place. She died in about 1870, and was buried in the woods on the former Alto plantation. Fifteen years later, her husband was buried alongside of her. Today, in the last installment of the Anarcha Archive, we’ll look at what can be said about her final years.
The first thing to note is that Anarcha lived until emancipation. It’s unknown where exactly the slave quarters were on the Alto plantation, but it’s very likely that it was somewhere near where she was buried.
And by 1864 she considered herself to be married. However, I don’t think she was ever formally married, even though there were many marriages of formerly enslaved people in the years after the Civil War.
I did a lot of searching for Anarcha and Lorenzo in marriage records and cohabitation records in King George and surrounding counties, and didn’t find anything official. Nevertheless, Lorenzo and Anarcha considered themselves married, and he remained loyal to her, long after she died.
In 1865, right after the war, Lorenzo and five other men entered into a labor agreement with Charles Mason, who in likelihood had been their enslaver. The contract stipulated that Mason would provide the land and all the equipment necessary to work it, and Lorenzo and the others would work the land with a 50/50 split of profits, along with providing the Mason family with milk, firewood, and so on.
It’s a little bit too much to go into here, but I eventually found evidence that the Mason home had burned during the Civil War. It’s very likely that Lorenzo and the others had rebuilt the home the Masons continued to live in.
Later documents show that Lorenzo worked about 100 tillable acres, and controlled 500 acres of woodland. This matches perfectly with the former Alto plantation today.
In 1884, Lorenzo had himself buried alongside Anarcha, right in the middle of those woods. It’s possible that one of Anarcha’s daughters, and an unnamed stillborn child born in 1867, were buried in the same area.
Anarcha’s death record indicates that she died of “asthma.”
This likely isn’t the case, but we know that in Richmond the experiments that were performed on her included the use of chloroform. Chloroform was still very experimental at this time, and the inexpert application of chloroform could leave patients with a bloody cough.
What everyone wants to know is whether Anarcha had any living descendants. By blood, that’s impossible to say.
It’s possible that her son William lived for a time in DC, but it looks like he didn’t have children. Delia doesn’t appear to have had children either, though it seems that at one point she was married to a quite important man.
The truth is, I did manage to find descendants of Lorenzo’s side of the family — so there is, at least, some echo of Anarcha living today.
But as for Anarcha, little can be said with certainty. She wasn’t ever fully cured — we know that for certain. Because she was in New York City, she may have had some idea about how important her story had become for the history of medicine.
She died with a husband beside her who appears to have loved and cherished her, and she had living children with her.
Most important of all, she experienced freedom.
When her name was entered into the books for the 1870 Census, it was the first time she was counted as a person, as a free citizen. She died free.
This grave has now been surveyed by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. It’s been identified, and work is being doing to ensure that it is protected.
And that’s Anarcha’s story — at least as suggested by the documents that prove that she truly lived. Anarcha was thought to be lost to history, but even those who have been lost can be found.
Thank you very much for reading the Anarcha Archive.
