I Didn’t Expect to Find Slavery
What I Found Exploring My Hometown’s Old Census Records
When I started researching for this post, I didn’t think I was going to write about slavery. My intention was just to do a quick little demonstration of how you can use Census data to explore even very local questions, using the example of my hometown in Kentucky.
But when you dig around in old Census reports, you can’t help noticing what gets measured, and how it’s labelled. When I opened up the 1820 Census files, I noticed that the population was divided by just a few different variables: age, sex, and then, of course, “Free” or “Slave.”
For this post, I’ll be looking at the demographic history of Jessamine County, Kentucky, with a special focus on race. I think that this will be an interesting story as Jessamine County participated in several major demographic trends over the last few centuries. But I’ll also readily note that, in some part, this post is a way for me to wrestle with a piece of the past — of my history. I’ve written before on the topic of the Confederate flag and Southern identity, so this post will be of a kind with that one.
The Problem
The Scenery of Slavery
Anyone who’s looked through old Census data is familiar with the various ways Census categorized the population and addressed the question of slavery (for example, in most Censuses, fewer age brackets are offered for slaves and free blacks than for whites). But for me, it was particularly compelling because, here I was, hoping to do a fluffy local-interest piece, and I was staring at data showing me that fully 30% of the population of my home county was enslaved in 1820. This was not what I expected.
I didn’t exactly have a frame of reference, so I expanded my scope, tracking Jessamine County through the antebellum period. The “slave ratio” rose to 40% by 1860, before emancipation. So then I compared to other counties in Kentucky, and found that Jessamine County had the 10th highest enslaved share of the population in Kentucky in 1860.
To understand why this is a problem, I should tell you about Jessamine County. The town of 5,500 people I grew up in had a Christian college of 1,000 students, and a seminary of 1,500 students. Add in a few hundred faculty, ministers at the 13 churches within city limits (and dozens more beyond it), and all the spouses and children of those students, ministers, and faculty, and you’ve got half the town accounted for with religious institutions. This town has a worldview, and a vision of itself as a community. In other words, it was a fantastic place to grow up: culturally vibrant, socially engaged, happy, safe, and peaceful, complete with seasonal festivals, kindly police officers, the works. It was how society works when there are very high levels of public trust and a certain level of social homogeneity. Even though the town clearly advertises its “small town charm,” visitors are often taken aback by just how Mayberry it really is.
But of course, according to the 2000 Census (the Census most representative of what it was like when I lived there), Jessamine County was 93% white. The part I was from was 95% white.
Now, had I given it more thought, I might have guessed what the Census would tell me. On the road into town is a huge old mansion, complete with some separate little houses out back — slave quarters, perhaps? And of course, all of the huge farms nearby, growing corn and tobacco, raising Thoroughbred horses, have their fields lined with beautiful dry-stone masonry fences. It was pleasant, growing up, to think about how families and their neighbors must have worked together to collect all the rock for those miles and miles and fences: but of course, many didn’t.
They had slaves.
The Problem
Where Did Everybody Go?
So a question nagged at me: how did things change? I don’t mean how did slavery get abolished; I mean, how did my community come into existence? Maps from the 1870s, as I’ll show, don’t indicate a town where my hometown is. And somehow, a county that was over 40% black in 1860 fell to 7%. Where’d that 33% go? What happened to them?
But that’s not the only question. It just happens that, to tell the story of Jessamine County, we have to tell a story about slavery. But we will also have to tell stories about suburbanization, rural decline, higher education, and globalization. Slavery may be one of the earliest major demographic phenomena of interest in Jessamine County, but it isn’t the only one.
This post will be organized as follows: first, an outline of Jessamine County’s population history. Then a deeper dive into changes in racial and ethnic demographics, and an accompanying discussion of slavery. Then I’ll shift forward and look at suburbanization, and finally recent migration trends.
Jessamine County History
Frontier, Plantation, and Suburb
Lexington, Kentucky was founded as the seat of Fayette County around 1774 to 1782, depending on how you count it. Lexington is the biggest city near Jessamine County, just over the county line to its north. In 1798, southern Fayette County separated from the north, forming Jessamine County. The county’s borders have remained consistent since 1790 (which is very convenient for statistical work). To estimate county-level population, I adopt a conceptually simple method I have described elsewhere.
Jessamine County experienced a fairly rapid settlement from 1790 to 1810, then fairly flat population until 1950. But beginning in the 1950s, the population rose rapidly. The period from 1790 to 1810 I will call a “frontier” period. From 1810 to 1870 I’ll call the “plantation” period. Then from 1870 until 1950 I will call the “rural” period. Finally, from 1950 to present I will call a “suburban” period.
The above chart compares the accumulated growth rate in Jessamine County to the rest of the Bluegrass and to Kentucky beyond the Bluegrass. All of the lines are benchmarked to 1860. As can be seen, Jessamine County and the Bluegrass leaped to their index-level population during the frontier period, while the state on the whole took more time. Then during the rural period, the state outgrew both Jessamine County and the Bluegrass, and the Bluegrass outgrew Jessamine County. In other words, the rural period was also a time where the rest of the state sort of left Jessamine County behind.
The above chart shows the 10-year lagged growth rates for Jessamine County, the Bluegrass region, and the rest of Kentucky. This makes it fairly clear that by the time my growth-rate data begins (1804, reflecting growth rates from 1799 to 1808), Jessamine County and the Bluegrass are already lagging in terms of growth. I exclude most of the 1790s because including it would create growth rates so high they blow out the scale: and that period is precisely when Jessamine County hits its stable population level. The “Frontier” period saw enormous population growth rates. But after the available land was parceled out, population growth slowed dramatically. By 1820, Jessamine County had reached population growth rates similar to other settled, developed areas, and in fact lower than today, despite much higher natural fertility.
During the plantation period, population growth was low or negative. This reflects large-scale out-migration. The county had no university, no substantial market town to speak of, and was essentially just farm-country. But not just farm-country, it was slave-country. As I’ll show below, slavery goes back as far as the state itself, especially in the Bluegrass area. But the point is, plantation-style agriculture made it hard for other white landholders to acquire and cultivate land in a financially viable fashion, so white out-migration rates were probably quite high. We don’t have much direct migration data for this period, certainly none available to me, so we’re left to some suppositions.
The post-Civil War rural period saw somewhat higher population growth despite high black out-migration rates: apparently because more whites stuck around. But the 1910s until the 1940s were hard on the Bluegrass, with population growth turning negative, especially around WWII. But, after the war, Jessamine County began to benefit from suburbanization, road expansion and increased car use, and, since 1960, has been one of the fastest-growing counties in Kentucky.
Jessamine County History
Race in Jessamine County
The racial mix in Jessamine County changed radically over time. You can explore it in more detail using this visualization, showing each decennial Census since 1820. In 1820, 30% of the county’s population was enslaved. That figure had risen to 40% by 1860.
Also, as I mentioned before, weak population growth from 1820 to 1870 was a result mostly of a declining white population in Jessamine County. Fertility rates were high, so this is a story of white people migrating. Big plantations don’t actually afford lots of opportunities for large numbers of people. The plantation economy was not in fact only a system of racial supremacy, but also a system of class supremacy. The vaunted “white egalitarianism” that Confederate apologists supported was a myth wholly dependent on ever-expanding new lands on the frontier. This new land was probably less useful as new land for slavery, and more useful as new land for whites shut out of the paths of power in plantation-land.
But then around 1880, things changed. The black population began a long decline, again despite initially high birth rates. Meanwhile, the white population grew, despite little change in birth rates. What could be happening? Well, free blacks were moving away from the land of their masters: call them the “Exodusters” and their like, or an early precursor to the “Great Migration,” at least in Kentucky, large-scale out-migration of blacks from plantation areas began nearly as soon as the fighting stopped. With black slave labor no longer available, and many blacks looking to leave, undoubtedly white hired labor became more common than previously. Thus, whites who formerly might have migrated instead stuck around and worked for wages.
The white population continued growing to the end of the rural period, while the black population shrank more and more. By the 1920s and 1930s, reductions in the black population outweighed growth among whites, so the county saw negative population growth overall.
But then, in the 1950s, the growth rate in the white population shot up, despite only a slight increase in fertility. High population growth for whites has continued to the present, despite declining fertility. As I’ll show below, this is due to migration: local migration from suburbanization, but also growing international migration due to globalization. Note that the population of Hispanic or Latino origins, as well as Asians and other races, grew rapidly in the last 30 years. Jessamine County is shifting from the classic suburbanization story (including “white flight” from the cities) to a globalizing story of immigration and transnational identities.
Answers in the Census
Slavery Was Here To Stay
I was going to make a map of slavery rates by county in 1860. Then I found one that the Census made in 1861, and that was used by Lincoln as he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. Way cooler. As can be seen pretty clearly, central Kentucky, the Bluegrass region, was sort of an outpost of the deep south, in terms of slavery’s prevalence. But if you get the original map and look at it closely, you’ll notice something else: every county in Kentucky had at least a few enslaved people. Yes, Appalachia had fewer slaves, but there was no innocent region. Slavery was ubiquitous, existing in every single Kentucky county. Throughout the slave states, the only counties without slaves were low-population frontier counties in Texas or Missouri, and the northernmost county in what would eventually become West Virginia. And remember, the western counties of Virginia actually seceded to form a free state.
But despite the universality of slavery, if you get on the Wikipedia page for slavery in Kentucky, it says that slaves declined as a share of Kentucky’s population from 1820 until 1860, largely because Kentucky farmers shifted to less labor-intensive crops, and so they sold their slaves to the “Deep South.” That story of slavery’s natural decline is almost certainly wrong. Where slavery was most prevalent in Kentucky in 1830, it became more prevalent over time, rather than less. It declined as a share of total population simply because lots of white folks moved into Appalachia, Louisville, Covington, Ashland, Lexington, etc, not because slave-holders had some economically advantageous shift away from exploitation of black slaves.
Nine out of the 10 counties with the highest enslaved population share in 1830 had even higher enslavement rates in 1860.
Meanwhile, 8 out of the 10 counties with the lowest enslavement rates in 1830 had even lower enslaved shares in 1860. Among counties with rising enslavement rates from 1830 to 1860, the average 1830 enslavement rate was 24%. For counties with a falling enslavement rate, the 1830 rate averaged 16%. In other words, where slavery was practiced the most, it was becoming ever more entrenched.
This is important. Kentucky slaveholders don’t seem to have been engaged in some kind of gradual shift away from slavery. Maybe some farmers reduced slave usage, but the main driver of a declining slave share of the population seems to be urbanization in northern Kentucky and Louisville, especially by recent immigrants.
Answers in the Census
Post-War Rurality
The maps below show southern Jessamine County in 1877, and then from Google Maps today. On the 1877 map, major farms are marked with dots, and the names of farmholders are included. Growing up in the area, I found quite a few names I recognized. At the same time, the whole county has changed. Old population hubs like Sulphur Well and Brooklyn are gone, and new towns like Wilmore have emerged. Suburbs have grown, and the old place names survive in now-meaningless road names, like Pekin Pike.
Several areas are just gone in the modern Google map: Pekin, Brooklyn, Sulphur Wells, Hanly, and others. And totally new towns have sprung up, like High Bridge and Wilmore. Old place names survive in some road names (“Hunter’s Ferry Road,” “Sulphur Well Road”), but the center of population has moved. Nicholasville suburbs are clearly visible in the top of both maps. Wilmore dominates the map at left. No substantial settlements of any kind appear in the map at right. In other words, the countryside slowly emptied out, while Nicholasville and Wilmore grew.
But before that, let’s return to that 1877 map. It’s meaningful that it focuses on farms. That’s because farms are where the people lived. The county was largely rural. Numerous villages and hamlets and farms existed around the county to support dispersed agricultural populations, and these communities were all getting whiter over time as “small town life” in these farm towns apparently was more attractive to whites than blacks.
Answers in the Census
Schools and Education
There’s a green space at west side of the map at right. It’s Camp Nelson, a large Union camp and refugee site during the Civil War, and now a cemetary from the war. West of it, on the 1877 map, there’s a place called “Arial.” This was a black community based around the “Arial Academy,” a relatively large school for black students supported by local church missionary societies and the Freedmen’s Bureau. The school continued at least until the 1920s, though the segregation of nearby Berea College in 1904 hampered its efforts. I’m unsure exactly what is in the area today, but it may be notable that the major road Google notes is called “Poortown Road,” and the only two marked sites are a distillery, and a nature preserve owned by a distillery. For this community, a school wasn’t enough to overcome the obstacles put in its way.
But there’s another school that redefined Jessamine County. Asbury College was founded in 1890 and, with it, the city of Wilmore was born. A history of Jessamine County I recently read suggests that “[Wilmore’s] existence practically began with the foundation of Asbury College.” As I mentioned above, probably half the population of the town is somehow connected to its work. Before Asbury, the railroad crossing near the home of a “J.D. Scott” was called “Scott’s Station,” but the town of “Wilmore” was named for the nearby Wilmore family. Both families can easily be found on the 1877 map near present-day Wilmore. In 1877 however, there’s no town at Wilmore. Just some farmhouses and a small railroad corssing. But by 1900, Wilmore had 600 residents, including 300 students and dozens of college faculty and staff. As Asbury grew, so grew Wilmore.
Higher education has been a source of local demographic strength from the 1800s to the present day. Towns with schools can often resist general rural decline, while towns without often struggle.
That growth trajectory for Wilmore is not typical of farming communities over the period. Nor is it typical of suburbs, that have usually seen a sudden uptick around the 1960s. Wilmore’s growth is fairly linear, while its surrounding countryside (Census District 2, or “Lee”) saw flat or even declining population. Some of this decline is due to Wilmore expanding to include some county populations, but much is due to predominantly rural black populations migrating away while a mostly white academic population settled in Wilmore.
This explains part of the whitening of Jessamine County: a brand-new town grew up around higher education, attracting students and teachers, even as the surrounding countryside struggled and lost people.
Recent Migration Trends
Suburbanization
The above chart shows population in Wilmore, the Wilmore surroundings, and the rest of Jessamine County, indexed to 1950. The remainder of Jessamine County has much higher population than the Wilmore area, but I wanted to show the different population trajectories in the area. Wilmore’s growth has been fairly steady. The greater Wilmore area tracked the rest of Jessamine County very closely until around 1950, when it declined fairly quickly. I mentioned out-migration of blacks, but another factor may be urbanization, as rural people moved into Nicholasville. But that can’t explain all of “remainder” growth. Something else has to explain it.
The answer, of course, is suburbanization. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, northern Jessamine County and Nicholasville began to form closer ties with Lexington. Meanwhile, Lexington grew southwards. Today, the major road between Nicholasville and Lexington has maybe 1000 yards of green space between the two cities, but give it a few years, and it’ll be continuous development. Away from the roads, there’s still open space, but developers are filling it in. This process is the recognizable pathway of suburbanization: commuters use the large roadways built or expanded over the last few decades to live in one town and work in another.
Just how many commuters?
The Census Bureau’s Journey to Work Survey from 2006–2010 found 22,509 employed people in Jessamine County. Of that group, 9,996 commuted to Fayette County (Lexington).
Almost 45% of the employed people living in Jessamine County work in Fayette County.
Now, in fairness, some people commute from Fayette County to Jessamine County. But Fayette County is much larger: of the 148,000 employed people residing in Fayette County, just 4,100, or under 3%, commute to Jessamine County for work.
The rapid growth seen in Jessamine County has largely been driven by commuter-centric patterns of suburban development. Those suburban commuters have been the subject of enormous sturm unt drang, especially since they’re overwhelmingly white. “White flight” is a term often used for this movement and, in the case of Jessamine County, it is genuinely remarkable how the white population just takes off like a rocket, while the black population continues its decline.
But, more recently, things have started to change.
Recent Migration Trends
Globalization Comes Home
International migration has risen dramatically since 1990. I don’t have detailed data prior to 1990, but the upward trajectory at least until the mid 2000s is fairly clear. Since then, there has been a decline, but not nearly so much of a decline that it even close to offsets recent gains. International migration rates remain higher today in Kentucky than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
The result of these higher migration rates (especially to Fayette County, but Jessamine County makes a strong showing) is a shift in the ethnic and racial balance of the region. Above, I showed a chart of racial and ethnic groups in Jessamine County. After 1990, Hispanic and Latino, as well as other ethnicities (especially Asians) made up a growing share of the population. This is a direct result of rising international migration. How this trend of globalization will play out in the future remains to be seen. But right now, it looks like 2000 may have been the “peak whiteness” year for Jessamine County. In other words, there’s a strong chance my childhood was the “whitest” time Jessamine County had ever, and possibly will ever, experience. Is that necessarily “bad” or “good”? That depends on the result, but it makes me wonder how many other counties, especially around the south, may have had a similar experience. Even though the nation on the whole has been getting more racially and ethnically diverse for decades, I wonder how many counties are experiencing or have recently experienced their least diverse moments?
Recent Migration Trends
Globalization Comes Home
Jessamine County’s total migration rate has declined in recent years, and has done so much more steeply than the rest of the Bluegrass or the rest of Kentucky. It’s not entirely clear why this may be, but one possibility is a lull in suburbanization. I’m on record as a pretty strong skeptic of the “urban revival” thesis. But I’m not not above admitting when there’s contrary evidence. Jessamine County had a much steeper decline than the Bluegrass generally, which would seem to suggest that Lexington performed better. In other words, there appears to be something to the claim that there was a real shift in migration preferences over the last few years.
However, Kentucky’s statewide domestic migration rate fell more steeply than either the Bluegrass or Jessamine County: which implies there’s something else going on here as well. While maybe there was some change in the preferability of urban versus suburban living, a statewide trend seems to be occurring as well.
Conclusion
For those willing to do the leg work, Census data can be used to illustrate interesting stories in local history. As an example, I used my own home county in Kentucky, and what I found surprised me. Slavery was far more prevalent in Jessamine County, and throughout Central Kentucky, than I expected. And, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, slavery was becoming more prevalent, not less. Commonly held narratives of natural decline in slavery seem unlikely to be generally applicable, and may also hide the role of urban immigrants in reducing the enslaved share of the population.
After the Civil War, Jessamine County experienced a period of black out-migration and white rurality. This was a period of slow or low growth for the county on the whole. However, by the 1890s, some areas like Wilmore experienced rapid growth due to the growth of higher education. The role of universities and schools in propelling local economic and demographic success goes back long before the modern “knowledge economy.” What’s old is new. From the 1950s to the present, Jessamine County has seen rapid growth thanks to suburbanization, although this growth saw a lull in the late 2000s. Meanwhile, international migration has risen dramatically since 1990, altering Jessamine County’s the demographic balance. This participation in globalized migration patterns is not truly new for the area, however, as the mass enslavement of Africans was one of the original globalized flows of human labor and capital.
See my fairly personal post on being from the South.
See my last migration post, on European migration.
See my post charting out the long-term history of migration in the US.
Start my series on migration from the beginning.
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I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
