In May 2022, an official Ohio Historical marker was unveiled for the village of Rumley. Pictured are, from left, Dan Schneider, of Cincinnati, John Schneider, of Lima, Shelby County Historical Society Curator Jane Bailey of Sidney, and Carol Carity, of Anna.
Luke Gronnenberg | Sidney Daily News
All that remains of the village of Rumley straddles Loramie Creek along Hardin-Wapak Road in the open fields of northern Shelby County, a few miles northwest of Anna. On the north side of the creek is a brick schoolhouse, a quarter mile to the south is a white church.
Rumley was one of a handful of black settlements that once dotted western Ohio, among them Long Town in Darke County, Carthagena in Mercer County, Middle Creek (or Upthegrove) in Paulding County and East of Wren in Van Wert County.
“Owing to a common border with the slave states of (West) Virginia and Kentucky, Ohio became a destination for people of color seeking to separate themselves from slavery. Others were brought to the state by their owners and set free,” David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker wrote in their book “Historic Black Settlements of Ohio.”
Ohio, the authors noted, “was a free state, but only marginally. There were many supporters of slavery living within its borders, but even those who were opposed to the institution did not necessarily welcome black refugees.”
The Civil War ended slavery, but racism endured. In the summer of 1867, more than two years after the war, a correspondent from the Cincinnati Commercial ventured north to dispel myths about a culture foreign to most whites.
Under the headline “The Colored Farmers in Ohio,” the report was reprinted in August 1867 in the Highland (County) Daily News of Hillsboro, which wrote by way of introduction that the correspondent, “who has just visited the colored settlements of Rumley and Carthagena, in Shelby and Mercer counties, Ohio, emphatically contradicts the report that the blacks are idle and shiftless.”
The Commercial correspondent wrote that “in thirteen days travel” and visits to “I know not how many colored farmers’ homes,” he “found that the majority more than live by the culture of their farms, that in all years of fair crops they increase in worldly gear and the goods of life. … I have found them in almost all cases blessed with a sufficiency, in many cases with abundance.”
In his “Historical Collections of Ohio” written in the mid-19th century, Henry Howe noted that the Black people around Rumley were “as prosperous as their white neighbors,” adding, “Neither are they behind them in religion, morals and intelligence, having churches and schools of their own. Their location, however, is not a good one, the land being too flat and wet.”
Rumley’s flat, wet location was courtesy of a white man, Col. Amos Evans, who had the village platted on May 19, 1837, along the old Indian trail that ran from Piqua to Lima. On the site, Evans built a hewed log house, which he used as a residence and store.
“A year later, he sold the first lot to George Goings (or Goins),” according to Meyers and Walker. “The second was purchased by Joel Weslin (or Wesley) Goings. Together, the brothers owned nearly four hundred acres. The village contained forty-eight lots altogether.” Brickmakers by trade, the brothers built the first brick building as well as many others in the vicinity.
The Goings brothers, according to Meyers and Walker, came to Shelby County by way of the Lett Settlement, a mixed-race community founded in the 1820s near Zanesville in Muskingum County. An Ohio Historical Society marker near the old church describes them as “freemen from Baltimore, Maryland.”
According to a June 4, 1953, article in the Sidney Daily News on the “ghost village” of Rumley, “Goings and his partner, Elias Spray, built the first water-power grist mill. Robert Elliott built the first sawmill. The first school was built on the land of George Speaker on the site of the present brick school.”
Rumley was the hub of several free black villages in the area, Meyers and Walker noted, and was connected to three of them – Carthagena, Wren and Middle Creek – by family ties.
Eventually, about 500 Black people lived in the vicinity of Rumley, with about 50 people residing in the village, which was a stop on the stagecoach route from Lima to Piqua and boasted a hotel, sawmill, grocery store, gristmill, brick factory, livery stables and three saloons. It also had three schools, three churches and three Black cemeteries.
In Collins Cemetery, a tight cluster of graves a mile east of Kettlersville on state Route 274, are pioneers who “came to Shelby County in 1846, as members of the Randolph colony, and others in 1860, as representatives of the Emlen colony of Mercer County. Joel Goings, buried here, was the first storekeeper and built the first brick house in Rumley. S.W. Goings, died in the Civil War, Oct. 8, 1861, age 35,” according to a July 1937 story in the Sidney Daily News.
The “Randolph slaves” were named for Virginia plantation owner John Randolph, who, when he died in 1833, not only freed his nearly 400 slaves but also set aside money to help settle them in a free state. When they arrived in New Bremen by canal boat in July 1846, ready to disembark for the final few miles of their journey to land purchased for them in Mercer County, they were greeted by an angry mob of local farmers. Eventually, after weeks of negotiation, the formerly enslaved people were allowed to settle at Rossville, in Miami County, near Piqua, with some also settling in Sidney and Rumley.
Eight years later, a group of 34 Black people from Kentucky settled in the area without difficulty.
Among those buried in the Barnett Cemetery on Lucas-Geib Road west of Rumley, is Emma Artis, “who died in October 1854, from ill treatment at the hands of her stepfather, Alfred Artis,” the Sidney Daily News wrote in 1937.
The elder Artis, the newspaper noted, was convicted of first-degree murder and hanged.
“Artis was refused burial in the graveyard by the hundred or more negro families, who considered him a bad man and rejoiced at his passing,” the newspaper wrote. Artis, according to the newspaper, was buried in an unmarked grave on his farm. Today, only a few markers are visible in Barnett Cemetery. Nothing remains of the Redman Cemetery, which was near the intersection of Amsterdam and Staley roads and was probably abandoned before 1900.
With the advent of the Civil War in 1861, “the relationship between pro- and anti-slavery factions in the area became more heated,” Meyers and Walker wrote. “Southern sympathizers found it safer to direct their anger at Ohio’s Black residents as opposed to the better-armed and more organized whites. Hoping to avoid trouble, many African-American citizens of Rumley left in search of a more peaceful abode.”
In the early decades of the 20th century, Rumley “experienced more attrition as the farmers failed to make the necessary investment in machinery and methods to keep pace with the competition. During the 1930s, Rumley disappeared entirely,” according to the history. Many left Rumley for nearby cities, like Sidney, Lima and Dayton.
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
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See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
‘A BRUTAL JOKE’
The Sidney Journal described the bit of casual cruelty as a “brutal joke.”
On a bitter January day in 1878, Jeremiah Powell, described by the Journal as a “young colored man” from near Rumley, “was sent to Minster to the mill, and while waiting for the grist, a party of fellows thought it would be a good joke to get him drunk.”
They succeeded. “Powell drank a good many times, until he finally fell in a stupor behind the stove, from which he could not be aroused,” the Journal reported Jan. 11, 1878. The town marshal was called, and Powell was taken to the jail, “which is a tumble down affair, without a fire, full of cracks and crevices, the transom out over the door, through which the wind of that bitter cold night howled and roared.” The following morning, the officer found Powell “in a dying condition.”
The Journal called it “an outrage which ought to fall upon the heads of the parties engaged in it.” An inquest found Powell had died from drink and exposure.
“The young men (who had given the alcohol to Powell) stated they had given him the whisky from a spirit of frolic, and because they expected to go on his place to hunt turkeys, and wished to get his good will,” the Journal wrote.
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
