Tennessee community founded by freed slaves fights extinction

CELINA, Tenn. — Tucked away in the wooded hallows and ridges of Celina in the Upper Cumberland region, freed slaves and later their descendants have lived for two centuries.

It is called Free Hill, or often Free Hills, and this unincorporated enclave in tiny, poor and otherwise mostly white Clay County is one of Tennessee’s last remaining black settlements established by freed slaves.

People in this county along the Tennessee-Kentucky border — about two hours northeast of Nashville — tell the story of a white slave owner named Virginia Hill of North Carolina who bought the property to free her slaves and give them a secluded place to live.

Historians aren't certain about all the facts or years, and what might be part folklore, but documents prove that free blacks had settled at Free Hill before the Civil War.

Poverty has always been rampant here. Free Hill’s elders had dirt floors, no electricity and used donkeys to get around on dirt streets. But a place that was once home to around 400 people between 1920 and 1950 now survives with 70 or so residents these days.

It has been shrinking for years, one of numerous Civil War-era black towns in the Southeast that have declined or died out entirely as the nation has integrated.

For the people of Free Hill, that reality put added significance on this past weekend, when an estimated 300 other descendants who now live elsewhere returned to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Free Hill Church of Christ, the historic heart of the community. Activities during the three-day reunion — an annual event on the second weekend in July — included a church and dedication, history and celebration, and song and dance.

The theme of this year's homecoming: “Remembering our past to preserve our future.”

People here are proud of their roots, they prefer the gritty, rural lifestyle, and they hope their past isn’t one day forgotten.

“It scares me that one day it’s going to be a ghost town, but it’s happening all over,” said Ollie Page, 62, owner of a restaurant called Ollie’s Place, which is a 10-minute drive from Celina’s downtown. “The younger people are moving out and nothing is keeping them here. We know more people dead than alive in this community.”

Free Hill centerpiece

The centerpiece of Free Hill is the church, but the original 1816 building no longer exists. There’s the 1920s-era Rosenwald school building that is used today as a community center and received a recent $50,000 boost from Lowe’s.

But besides the homes scattered across the foggy hills, most other signs of life are gone.

Free Hill’s last restaurant, Hill Top Cafe, shut down in the 1990s. Juke joints where people came to drink beer and play blues music — with names like Bud’s Snack Bar, the Blind Pig and the Tip-Toe Inn — were boarded up years before. Today's residents, who are mostly seniors and include few families, go into Celina for groceries and other needs.

Free Hill’s decline matches the larger trend in battered Clay County, where a depleted garment manufacturing industry and high unemployment have reduced the entire population, black and white, over the past two decades.

“Practically everybody from here moved away from here back in the day,” said Dave Garrett, 77, who grew up working tobacco and other farms near Free Hill. “Some of them have moved away and never came back.”

Garrett, the son of the town butcher, said growing up in Free Hill was tough.

“Some of these people were so poor they could hardly eat,” he said.

He said he and other kids bused 40 minutes to Cookeville to attend school during segregation, and Free Hill also was the occasional target of the Ku Klux Klan.

Still, Garrett looks back at Free Hill in those days fondly. He said many black residents came from surrounding towns to visit on weekends to have fun, especially at the juke joints.

“People would come from Bowling Green, Glasgow, Indianapolis, Coe Ridge, Livingston, Cookeville to come over here and party,” Garrett said. “We’d party from Friday night until Monday. That’s how great it was. They’d play them blues — belling-rubbing music.”

Establishing history

History is the lifeblood of Free Hill. Last names like Page, Burris and Philpott on the gravestones of the Free Hill Cemetery are some of the same names that carry on today.

And the story of its founding explains the unlikely occurrence of an African-American community arising in an area that can seem like Appalachia.

Accounts of Free Hill residents vary. They almost all begin with a North Carolina slave owner named Virginia Hill, who most say came to a forest near the Cumberland and Obey rivers (then part of Overton County) sometime before 1840, purchased 2,000 acres and set her slaves free.

Some say the slaves took control of the land themselves. Others say the slaves that Virginia Hill bought were her four biracial children, and that she was seeking to avoid a scandal.

They took her surname Hill — a name that is documented as the earliest African-Americans in Free Hill — and named the community after her.

The story goes that Free Hill became known as a safe haven for runaway slaves leading up to the Civil War and for freed slaves after the war. The names Free Hill and Free Hills have interchangeable meanings: descendants of the Hill family or a hilly area where freed slaves lived.

“A lot of what is said I think is based on what was transferred from one generation to the next generation,” said Wali Kharif, a history professor at Tennessee Tech University. “It’s a combination of folklore, partially substantiated by some facts. It’s not 100 percent authenticated, but it’s plausible.”

But what is indisputable, Kharif and other historians say, is that blacks were living in Free Hill decades before the Civil War.

“I see it very much as sort of an established fact,” said Carroll Van West, Tennessee state historian and a history professor at Middle Tennessee State University. "It just fits the pattern that you see of free black communities that find a sort of safe place within the landscape.

“They were certainly there as an established free black community before the Civil War,” he said. “So, however you cut exactly where they started, it’s one of the oldest free black communities in Tennessee.”

North of Free Hill in Kentucky was a freed slave community called Coe Ridge. In Tennessee, there was Promise Land in Dickson County and Freedonia in Fayette County in West Tennessee, among others.

Clay County Tennessee is Trump country

According to a recent Washington Post story on the decline of such towns, about 200 all-black communities existed by 1888, but they are nearly extinct today.

Irene Hurt, 83, was among the many Free Hill residents who moved to Indianapolis years ago. She worked as a nursing assistant and a foster parent before returning to Free Hill around a decade ago after her husband died.

“I always thought that when I got a certain age that I would come back home if I was healthy enough,” Hurt said. “I’m glad I made the change.”

Hurt, discussing the significance of last weekend's Free Hill celebration and reunion, said she and others want young people with Free Hill ties to remember this is their home as well.

“People who have lived on this hill have lived good,” Hurt said. "Everybody was poor, but everybody was poor and happy.

“It’s in the back of everybody’s mind that one day it could disappear, but hopefully this 200th birthday for it will help it out and bring people back home.”

Reach Joey Garrison at 615-259-8236 and on Twitter @joeygarrison.