After 120 Years, Still Flourishing
Whitesboro, N.J., then and now.
This is my first attempt at publishing a regular newsletter online, so forgive me …
I have recently decided to try my hand at a regular newsletter-blog. After years of writing for publication — first newspaper articles, then journal articles, book reviews, and six books — I wanted something a little different: establishing direct contact with people who might share my historical interests. For now, it is envisioned as weekly postings of general interest — and will be free for the moment.
Those of you who already know me will probably chuckle and say, “more updates on George Henry White.” And you would be right, at least to start with. I have been chasing Mr. White’s legacy in and after Congress for more than 25 years, and a lot of you probably think there is little left to print about him, after four books and a few journal articles on his life and contemporaries.
So I promise, he will not be the only focus here. There is, of course, an awful lot of U.S. history that deserves a second look — and a new perspective — in my humble opinion as a historian. But because it is Black History Month, I thought it might be useful to start off with my latest research — leading to a new book, later this year — about the all-black town he founded in southern New Jersey after leaving Congress in 1901.
Whitesboro is still around, 120 years later, still small, but is undergoing a renaissance of sorts, with annual homecoming festivals and lots of local activity aimed at drawing visitors and helping improve the daily lives of its residents. George White founded the town as an investment — both for financial gain, attracting a group of likeminded African American men and women, and equally importantly, for social embetterment of Southern “pioneers,” willing to pull up roots in the segregated, disfranchised South and start over again in a promising new environment, unlikely as it seemed.
My new book will trace the development of this tiny village out of a literal forest on a former slave plantation in New Jersey, between the Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean — just north of the thriving Victorian tourist resort of Cape May City. By the end of its first year, the village then called simply “White,” sandwiched between two north-south railroads, has attracted perhaps 40 such pioneers, most from the Columbus County swamps of eastern North Carolina.
That year, the New York Tribune published an intriguing, full-page feature in its Sunday magazine supplement: “Carolina Negroes Settling in New Jersey.” It showed the town’s unofficial engineer and first postmaster, a North Carolinian named Henry W. Spaulding — site supervisor for the George H. White Land and Development Company — and four other residents at the town well, in front of the town’s hotel, soon to be called the Odessa Inn.
The quality of the photograph, taken from microfilm of the Tribune’s November 8, 1903, edition, is admittedly not great — but imagine that only a year or so earlier, this land has not even been cleared, and that these people had literally carved their homes out of a forest. The unidentified writer accordingly took some pains to describe the new village in an engagingly positive way:
One feature of Whitesboro is impressive for a country town. There are no fences about the farms or the village
building sites. The neat barnyards and the pigsties are enclosed, but not the houses, fields, or gardens. Livestock does
not run at large there. And there is no need of fences. The poultry range at will and roost in the trees or on the
barnyard fences. …
Superintendent [Henry] Spaulding says the forty persons constituting the colony are the most thrifty and contented
community of his race he has ever seen. “There will be eight more families here in the spring [of 1904] ,” said he, and
all I can ask is that they shall be as as good workers and take as much pride in their new homes as those we have here
now.” …
In another part of his article, he gently poked fun at one resident, who blamed her garden’s lack of success on automobiles: “If it wasn’t for the automobiles in the summer, my garden would have been better, though. The automobiles knocked it off nigh until half.”
He questioned her reasons for saying so, giving her the last word, with a witty, self-deprecating response, reproduced in dialect as heard:
Lord bless you, child … how kin you expect folks as never saw such things before to keep a weedin’ and a hoein’ when one of them things with fine ladies and gentlemen a laughin’ and chattin’, comes a snortin; down to the Cape [May
City] and up from it every few minutes. I never saw no such rippin’ and tearin’ down in old Carolina, and me and my
man lost half the summer a lookin’ at ‘em."
Today, the small town is struggling mightily to maintain its heritage, amid encroachment by spreading suburbs. The railroads are long gone, and the modern Garden State Parkway whisks much faster automobiles to and from Cape May without disturbing gardens or farmers.
But its old schoolhouse, constructed in about 1910, still stands at the core of its little community — refurbished as a community space, after being discontinued for educational use in 1967 — and still paying heartfelt tribute to generations of schoolteachers in an older, segregated era.
The Whitesboro Grammar School, built by George White in 1910.
(Courtesy of Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro.)
Next time: The Concerned Citizens of Whitesboro step up to the plate to save their town.