By Pauline Masson –
When the Thomas and Nancy Roberts family moved to rural Missouri in 1831 from Charlotte County Virginia, they brought along their slaves, including two small children, a boy named Joe and a girl named Nancy Lane.
Joe’s age at the time is uncertain but in a 1906 interview, he said he was “a very small child,” when he was brought to Virginia Mines.
Nancy Lane’s age is also uncertain but if she was 80 in 1906, as her family reported at time of her death, she would have been born in 1826, making her five years old when she arrived in Missouri.
It seems likely that Joe and Nancy Lane were brother and sister. They were part of a surprisingly public colored family in rural Missouri following the Civil War, who had experienced the final decades of slavery, and its end in 1863. Their lives were the sutff of local news for more than 80 years.
Edward J. Roberts, scion of the plantation era slave owners, for whom the community of Robertsville is named, was fourteen when his family and their slaves arrived here.
In 1844, when Mr. Roberts was 27 and Nancy Lane turned 18, Mr. Roberts fathered a child with the young slave girl. They named the infant Richard Lane. The Roberts family never denied the paternity. Richard Lane’s Missouri Death Certificate lists his father as Edward Roberts and mother as Nancy Lane.
According to family lore, Richard Lane was gifted a large tract of land at the south edge of Pacific, along the Meramec River. Descendants never identified who “gifted” the land to Mr. Lane, but it easy to speculate that it was the Roberts family, among the largest property owners in eastern Franklin County. They owned over 3000 acres, including the entire town of moden day Robertsville, Robertsville State Park and part of Catawissa.
In Pacific Richard Lane became a community luminary. Reports of his life and his spectacular farm are extant in local newspapers and family correspondence. Well into the 20th century, visitors to the area reported including a trip to “Uncle Dick’s farm and other holdings.”
Richard married Kitty (maiden name unknown). The couple had five children, James, Elijah, Moses, Laura and Mary Aline.
In 1904 Mr. Lane built a large house on his farm, that was the site of visits by generations of Lanes.
In 1906, Joe, the former very small child from Virginia Mines arrived at the Lane farm in Pacific for an extended stay. Treated by the community as a visiting celebrity Joe was asked to sit for an interview with the local newspaper. Saying he was 80 years old at the time, Joe told a fantastical story that rivaled the goings on in Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn.
He had taken the name Joe Anderson, with no indication of where the name originated.
“The man who bears this name is one of the most intelligent and interesting. colored men we have ever met,” the interviewer said. “He was brought from Virginia to Missouri by the Roberts family when he was a very small child. He has been the property of different prominent families of this county.”
Joe recounted the time when he was sold by one of the old families to another. A jealous farmer that wanted to own him stole him and kept him hidden until his real owner came to the conclusion that he had made his escape and was probably safe in Canada. He had been purchased for $700. “Not half his market value,” the reporter speculated. As soon as the buyer had his bill of sale, the boy came out of hiding.
He made his escape some years before the Civil War by following the Meramec River to its mouth with the Mississippi, ”borrowed” a boat and crossed over into Illinois.
In Illinois he ran into trouble. He was accused of being “a runaway nigger,” and set to be returned to Missouri. Ever the fast talker Joe told the accusers that not only was he not a runaway but that he would hire himself out to work on a local farm until they could find evidence – if they could – that he was a runaway. Convinced by this self assured reasoning, the Illinois authorities let him go. He did not go to Canada as his former owner had speculated but made his way to Michigan where he settled, raised a family and owned a home.
His 1906 visit was not the first time he had returned to Missouri to visit his family since his escape, he said. To prove his claim to be a previous visitor to the area, Joe fascinated the interviewer by recounting fifty years of interesting incidents in local history.
In October of that year Nancy Lane was the subject of a chatty story about her life and death. Headline of the notice of her death read, “An Old Aunty Gone.”
“‘Aunt Nancy Lane,’ one of the very rarest relics of the old southern ‘aunty’ extant, died Tuesday evening, Sept, 25, 1906, at the home of her son William Lane, just south of the city.” (William was actually her grandson.)
“She could talk intelligently of olden times in Old Virginia, before her Master Robert’s family, came and brought her with them to Missouri,” the death notice read. “Without ever being able to read a word, she could quote scripture equal to a Campbellite preacher.” In spite of heavy rain, her funeral was largely attended.
As an indication of family prominence, in 1909 when Richard and Kitty’s daughter Mary married Grant Tayes, principal of the Douglass School for colored children, the event was reported like a modern day society wedding. The wedding took place in Historic First Baptist Church at 11 o’clock on Sunday, May 30. The attendants were named, the groom and brides clothing described, the pastor named, the wedding lunch at the bride’s parents’ home noted, and the couples departure for their new home in Warrenton added.
When Richard Lane died in 1923 he bequeathed all his property to his wife Kitty to be used in her lifetime. On Kitty’s death the bulk of his property would go to his son James, including a large tract on the Meramec in Pacific. Elijah received $100. Moses $250. Historic Baptist Church $250 and one unnamed granddaughter received $50.
James Lane married Fannie Stone. James worked at St. Louis Material and Supply. He bought a large tract of land on Hwy 100, four miles east of Gray Summit across from Fiddle Creek Road. He and Fannie lived in a large house, across a creek from an 80-acre parcel of their land known as Spring Valley Farm, for the large number of springs on the property.
The couple had two daughters, Melvina Lane Frazier and Mollie Lane Curtis. Their granddaughter Rosemarie Brison described the house James and Fannie lived in.
“The ‘old house on the creek’ was a two story house with beautiful wooden ceilings and floors. Upstairs were two bedrooms,” Ms. Brison said. “It also had a sun porch and a basement under the house, that was entered from outside. My great grandfather and great grandmother moved into Pacific for a time and lived at the Grimm property. They rented the house to a family that made “hooch or moonshine” in the basement to sell to neighbors to supplement their income…..until the ‘revenuers,’ as my grandma Vinnie called them, came and blew up the still and the sun porch on the back of the house.”
The house burned to the ground in April 1924 while James and Fannie were visiting in Pacific. A telephone call alerted family members of the fire. Mr. Lane rushed home to find his home “a smoldering pile of ashes.”
On his death, James Lane, deeded acreage to each daughter. Melvina received the beautiful Spring Valley Farm. Mollie was deeded acreage in the town of Pacific along the Meramec River across from Grimm Farm on the lower end of town, where the Brundick family lived. “My paternal grandmother, Mahalia “Haley” Ellis nee Henderson, worked for the Brundick family,” Ms. Brison said.
Melvina Lane Breardon married Henry Frazier, and the couple had one daughter, Fannie Evangeline. Melvina had two sons from an earlier marriage, Samuel and Frank Breadon.
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Fannie Frazier had one son Michael Lawrence, and one daughter Evangeline Ellis from previous marriages. She later married George Adams, Sr and had four daughters, Sonja Adams Thompson and Fawn Adams, Rosemarie Adams Brison and Angie Adams Davison and one son, George Adams Jr.
Angie Davison and Rosemarie Brison provided the material for this article.
“Our dad remembered our great-great grandfather Richard Lane as well as our great grandfather James, because he was born in 1910. (My mom was born in 1928.),” Ms. Brison said. “My dad said great-great grandpa Richard Lane had blue eyes. [No family pictures of him are extant.] He said great-great grandfather would walk to church every Sunday, tapping his walking cane and singing.”
“My great grandfather James’s cousin, Richard Layne (his family chose this spelling of the last name, instead of Lane), grew up in the house owned by the Kenny Johnson family, directly across the street from the Historic First Baptist Church, Pacific”
“My sister-in-law, Barbara Clark-Lawrence began researching our family in 2010,” Ms. Brison said “In her findings, she reported our family may be the only direct descendants (thru Richard Lane, father of my great grandfather James Richard Lane) of Edward James “E.J.” Roberts eponymous of the Robertsville Township.
be patient with an old mans fading memory, but I remember that a census of the area north of Villa Ridge, around 1900 , listed approximately 3,100 residents as ‘ slaves’. such were the times.
There was no slavery in the United States after 1865, when the Civil War ended. Prior to the end of the war, throughout the 1800s there were families, like the Roberts family that moved to Franklin County from southern states and brought their slaves along. The 1900 slaves of your memory would have had to have been from an earlier time.