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By Pauline Masson –
While many people voice confusion on the peculiarly named federal holiday Juneteenth, as a transplant to this area I see that the Franklin County east central area – Pacific, Catawissa, Robertsville and Villa Ridge – has a lot to remember on June 19, Juneteenth.
This will be the third year that Juneteenth is celebrated as a federal holiday. President Joe Biden signed the bill establishing the federal holiday on June 17, 2021. But the origin dates to June 19, 1865, when Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, proclaiming that the enslaved African Americans there were free. President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves two years earlier but the law could not be enforced in the Confederte states until the war ended.
Today, June 19 celebrations typically include family gatherings, picnics, and festivals with food and music, prayer and religious services. And that is where our region and our community can claim its Juneteenth heritage.
When the Civil War ended in 1865, very quickly seven black churches emerged in the our area; Robertsville Temple C.O.G.I.C. and Mt. Calvary Baptist Church in Robertsville; Rose Hill Missionary Baptist in Villa Ridge; Historic First Baptist and Pacific Temple C.O.G.I.C. in Pacific are all still active. Two African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Churches were once active here, one in Pacific and one in Villa Ridge. Both are lost to history.
The late Mamie Baker, a member of Mt. Calvary Baptist Church, said to me, “If you want to get to know Black people, go to church.” I eventually went to all the Black churches that are still active. Mamie became the darling of local history groups that began to take notice of Black history in our area in the early 2000s for her willingness to share the hand-written Bible where the plantation owner had listed each of her relatives that he considered his property. Mamie allowed history lovers to hold the yellowed and frayed Bible, tied together with a blue riibbon, and turn the pages, which to many represented the first real connection to slavery.
These churches formed the communities of Black families eager to create new lives as free citizens.
Before landing here I had lived on the West Coast and spent parts of many years with relatives on the East Coast, both considered somewhat progressive in an integrated America. I attended college in Murray, Kentucky, a decidedly southern community.
And I have to tell you . . . when I arrived in Robertsville and Pacific in 1987, I witnessed a melding of the races that I had not seen anywhere.
I don’t want to mislead anyone. Cetainly there was segregation here up to the 1950s. There were slights. But there was also an underlying regard.
The very first story that the late Ella Adams Villery Miller told me when she was 97 years old and living in Pacific Center was something that occurred when she was a teenager, about 1917, and working for town matriarch Mrs. Blanch Pletcher. Mrs Pletcher went to the picture show men, Henry Hirth and Lorenz Leber, and asked them to allow the colored children to see the movie about Christ, the Greatest Story Ever Told. When they declined, as a consolation Mrs.Pletcher bought Ella a book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she kept at her bedside for the rest of her life. She showed it to me as she told me the story.
Ella was the most visited resident of Pacific Care Center, by acquaintances of both races. “I worked for all of them at one time,” she said. “They don’t forget me.”
She had another story that stuck with me. When Mrs. Pletcher became severely ill, Ella said she would not go care for her because Mrs.Pletcher had said she wanted to be cremated when she died and Ella had become a Jehova’s Witness, which opposed cremation,
Mrs. Pletcher’s son Kenneth – then Surgeon General of the U.S. Air Force – went to Ella hat in hand.
“Ella, you know Mother would not want to be seen like this,” he said.” She trusts you and she needs you. Please change your mind and go up and stay with her.” And so she went.
I have to tell you . . . even to this day, these memories of an elderly Black lady sound like some romantic movie scenes. But I never doubted that they really happened.
As a widowed white woman living alone in Robertsville, I became acquainted with the large Black population there. Members of the Hulsey family were concerned at my aloneness.
“Don’t ever burn anything outside without someone here with you,” Sherwood Hulsey said.
Sherwood and Martha Hulsey became my constant friends. Martha was one of the legendary Rose Hill Gospel Singers. For anyone who likes Gospel Music, a visit to Rose Hill would fill your heart. When I attended the recent funeral of Marie Adams at Bell Funeral Home, as the singers belted out the requested song, behind me almost in a whisper a beautiful voice sang along. I finally turned around to see that it was Nina Adams. I wasn’t surrised. I first heard Nina – whose booming voice can vibrate the fixtures – at Rose Hill twenty years ago.
Sherwood Hulsey and his siblings graded my gravel road, pulled my truck to dry ground each time I absently drove into a mud mire. And they taught me what a dusk-to-dawn light was.
When my mother, was in decline and came to live with me, Lucille Washington, friend of the Hulseys and a member of their Rose Hill church came daily and cared for her. She kept my mother, also named Lucille, active, for five years. Together they cooked up and canned grape jelly. They made sweet potato pies, something I’d never seen before. “It’s a form of custard,” my Mom said in response to my amazement at its good taste.
Lucille sat on the steps that lead from the kitchen to a second floor landing, played her guitar and tried to teach me to identify the key changes by sound. Day after day she and my mother walked a circuit on the lower level of the house, because Lucille insisted that walking would keep my mother young.
I met George and Margaret Hinkle, whose son George Jr. was a famous football player at the time. They invited me to their church Robertsville Temple and told stories of how the earlier families had tied the tops of trees together to create a bower where they held church services until they built the frame church. When the church’s leather covered Bible that dated to the early years of the church became too fragile to use Margaret Hinkle sent it to a historic book preservationist and had it restored. It’s now a work of art.
George Hinkle Sr told me about Drake School for Colored Children that had burned down several years earlier. The schoolhouse and Robertsville Temple, which were identical buildings, once stood side by side on Robertsville Road. How they got to that spot was local legend. When the smaller black children didn’t like going into the woods to the Drake School for Colored Children, which stood behind the Drake School for white students, the fathers used a series of logs to roll the schoolhouse up to Robertsville Road where it stood next to the church. The children at the Black school always had hot lunches, unheard of in the white school. The mothers went to the school each day to cook. When Sherwood Hulsey was a small boy, he loved the woods. He would go through the woods to the school. On the way he frequently caught a rabbit for the mothers to cook for school lunch.
And so they thrived, relishing the absolute joy of community activities.
I went to the other Black churches and listened to the stories. At Pacific Temple they had a ritual where members of the congregation stood to testify to the good things that recently happened to them. In a world rife with racism, no hurts or regrets were testified to. I asked pastor Abram Perkins about it.
He burst into a joyous laugh. “We don’t give the devil his due,” he said.
In that Church on one Sunday when my husband Bob and I were the only white people in attendance, a tiny girl in the pew in front of us began to choke on a piece of hard candy that her mother had given her to keep her still. Her mother and others began to scream.
“Give her to me,” Bob said, reaching out his arms. The frightened young mother pushed the tiny girl into Bob’s hands. He turned her around, pressed gently on her midsection and she coughed up the candy.
As we were leaving the church, the little girl stood in front of Bob, extended her tiny hand, which he dutifully responded with a handshake.
“Thank you for saving my life,” she said.
I only included these schmaltzy memories in my recognition of Juneteenth because they illustrated the trust and ease that I came to expect between the races here.
For Bob and me, our closest connection to the Black community was with Historic First Baptist Church, where our Robertsville neighbor Rev. Jim Perkins was the pastor. His wife Verla Mae Hulsey Perkins was the youngest daughter in the large Hulsey clan that took it on themselves to look after a city girl who was obviously uninitiated to country life.
Historic First Baptist is another Juneteenth marvel in our area. The entire City of Pacific and surrounding communities joined Bob and Norbert Gildehaus in restoring small frame church that flooded too many times. When the church soon reopens after a rebuilding project that took seven years and more than $200,000 in cash, material and labor it will be a testament to the place the Black community has built here.
