“The Dog They Left Out of the Story”

The Story of Togo

In January of 1925, in the dead of an Alaskan winter, a twelve-year-old dog ran across frozen sea ice in the dark, in a blizzard, to save a town full of children he would never meet.

History gave the credit to someone else.

This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. Today, we’re setting the record straight on Togo.

Before there was Togo, there was Constance.

She was a young Belgian woman who’d come to Nome in 1905, drawn north during Alaska’s gold rush years like so many others. She met Leonhard Seppala at the races — in fact, she was crowned queen of the 1915 All-Alaska Sweepstakes, the very race that would one day make her husband famous. They married in 1908, and settled into a life shaped by dog sleds, harsh winters, and the rhythms of the North.

So when a sickly, undersized puppy was born in their kennel in 1913 — a puppy Seppala took one look at and wanted nothing to do with — it was Constance who stepped in. She nursed him through those fragile early weeks, when nobody expected him to survive at all. Later, when Seppala gave the troublesome young dog away as a house pet, it didn’t take. Togo escaped, jumped clean through a closed window, and ran several miles back to the only home he’d ever known.

That was the last time anyone tried to give Togo away.

Slowly, that stubbornness revealed itself as something else entirely — intelligence, instinct, an almost uncanny sense for danger on the trail. By age five, Togo wasn’t just part of the team. He was leading it.

By 1925, Togo was twelve years old — elderly for a working sled dog — and had already spent seven years as Seppala’s lead dog, guiding him to three All-Alaska Sweepstakes championships. And there’s one more detail worth knowing: Leonhard and Constance had a daughter by then, Sigrid, eight years old — living right there in Nome, in the middle of a diphtheria outbreak that was killing children exactly her age. This wasn’t just a heroic mission for Seppala. It was personal, in the most immediate way a parent can understand.

In the winter of 1925, diphtheria broke out in Nome, Alaska — a highly contagious bacterial infection, and one that kills quickly, choking its victims as infected tissue swells and blocks the airway. Nome’s only doctor had run out of antitoxin. A resupply order had gone unfulfilled before winter set in.

With more than 10,000 people at risk, children especially, and the nearest available serum sitting 674 miles away in Nenana, officials faced an impossible problem. Flying it in was ruled out — 1925 aircraft simply couldn’t reliably survive Alaska’s winter conditions, and a blizzard was already closing in.

There was only one option left: dog sled teams. A relay of twenty mushers and more than a hundred dogs would carry the serum across the frozen wilderness in a race against time.

Back in Nome, Constance Seppala waited. Her husband and Togo were somewhere out in that storm, and so was her eight-year-old daughter’s fate — Sigrid was exactly the age of the children diphtheria was killing fastest. There was no way to know, in the middle of a blizzard with the phone lines down, whether either of them would come home.

Seppala and Togo were assigned what should have been a straightforward round trip — meet the incoming relay partway and bring the serum home. Instead, due to a miscommunication about timing, Seppala pushed his team over 170 miles east from Nome, expecting to travel much farther still, into some of the most dangerous terrain on the entire route: a stretch of coastline along Norton Sound that mushers had nicknamed, without exaggeration, “the ice factory.”

He found the incoming relay almost by accident — a musher named Henry Ivanoff, waving frantically through the whiteout, shouting that he had the serum. Seppala took the package and immediately turned back the way he’d come.

Now he faced the decision that would define the entire mission. Going around Norton Sound was the safe choice. It was also a full extra day slower — a day the children of Nome didn’t have. Seppala chose to cross it directly. Heading out onto the ice in the darkening afternoon, visibility dropped to nothing. The wind howled so loudly he couldn’t have heard the ice cracking even if it had been right beneath him. He couldn’t see the front of his own team. He simply trusted Togo to find the way.

And Togo did something extraordinary. At one point, in the middle of that gale, Seppala gave a command to turn — and Togo, without being told to stop, abruptly halted and somersaulted backward into the rest of the team. Seppala, furious, went to scold him. Instead, he found an open channel of water, growing wider, less than six feet from where the team stood. It wasn’t visible from the sled. Togo had sensed it, or seen it, or simply known — and stopped them from driving straight into the freezing water.

That wasn’t even the worst of it. On the return crossing, disaster nearly struck for real: the ice beneath Seppala’s sled broke free entirely, setting him, his team, and the serum adrift on a floating chunk of ice, cut off from solid ground by open water. With no other option, Seppala tied a line to Togo’s harness and threw him — a twelve-year-old dog — five feet across freezing water, hoping he could reach the far ice and pull the floe back toward shore. Togo tried. The line snapped under the strain. He tried again, and this time, it held long enough to draw the floe close enough for the team to leap across to solid ice.

After finally reaching Golovin, having crossed some of the most treacherous ground in Alaska not once but twice, Seppala and Togo still had an eight-mile ridge left to climb before they could hand off the serum — completing 260 miles in four and a half days, with dogs so exhausted they could barely stand.

A story worth sitting with: the final leg of the relay — the last 53 miles into Nome itself — was run by a different team, led by a dog named Balto.

When the serum reached Nome, the country erupted in celebration. Newspapers ran the story everywhere. A statue was even erected in Balto’s honor in New York’s Central Park, unveiled less than a year later.

There was just one problem. Balto’s leg — while real, and no small feat — was the shortest, safest, and last stretch of the run. Togo had carried the serum across the longest, most dangerous distance, through the night, across breaking sea ice, at twelve years old.

Seppala never hid his frustration. In his own memoir, he wrote plainly that he resented the statue given to Balto — arguing that if any dog deserved special recognition, it was Togo. The public, and the press, had simply gotten the story wrong — and it took decades for that mistake to be corrected in the public imagination.

Togo’s story didn’t end at the finish line in 1925.

After the serum run, Seppala took Togo on an extended tour through the United States, showing the aging dog off to a public eager to meet him. But the long journey home to Alaska would have been hard on a dog already well past his prime. So in 1927, Seppala made a difficult choice. He left Togo in the care of Elizabeth Ricker, a Maine musher who’d struck up a partnership with him at the Poland Spring Resort, where the two had competed in sled dog races together.

Seppala himself wrote about that parting: on a cold, gray March morning, Togo raised a small paw to his knee, as if asking why he wasn’t coming along. For the first time in twelve years, Seppala hit the trail without him.

But Togo’s story was far from over. At Poland Spring, he became the foundation sire of an entirely new kennel line — fathering hundreds of puppies over the following years. It’s estimated that a large majority of Siberian Huskies in the United States today can trace their lineage back to Togo. Ricker even wrote a small book about him, “Togo’s Fireside Reflections,” and sold copies “autographed” with his inked paw print.

By 1929, sixteen-year-old Togo was beginning to fail. Arthritis had settled into his joints. His eyesight was going. Age — the same relentless force that comes for every living thing — had finally caught up with the dog who once outran a blizzard.

Elizabeth Ricker, who’d cared for him for two years by then, made a decision that reflected genuine devotion, even in its difficulty. Rather than let him decline further, unable to walk without help, she chose to have him painlessly put to rest while he was still, in the newspapers’ words, “proudly alert” — his ears sharp, his poise intact, exactly as the world should remember him. On December 5th, 1929, with both Ricker and Seppala present, Togo was euthanized.

Seppala, who had run beside this dog for twelve years and trusted him with his own life more times than he could count, called Togo simply the best dog he ever had.

His mounted body eventually found a permanent home at the Iditarod Trail Headquarters in Wasilla, Alaska, and his skeleton remains today in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. In 2022, Poland Spring unveiled a bronze statue in his honor — a fitting tribute to a dog who quietly became the ancestor of a breed, long after the world had already tried to forget his name.

If you want to stand where Togo’s story is still honored, you can. Nome and the surrounding trail remain accessible to travelers, particularly around the annual Iditarod each March, when mushers still run portions of the very route Togo once led through the dark. The Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome holds photographs and artifacts from the original serum run, offering a direct link back to that winter in 1925. And in Wasilla, at the Iditarod Trail Headquarters, Togo himself — mounted, alert, unmistakably himself — still greets visitors today.

[SOUND: Music swells softly under the narration — the same instrumental thread that opened the episode, now slower]

There’s a version of this story where Togo never makes it past six months old. Small, sick, unwanted — the kind of puppy the world simply lets go of. That version almost happened. It didn’t, because one woman looked at him and decided he was worth the trouble.

Everything after that was Togo proving her right.

He ran into a blizzard so dark his own musher couldn’t see the front of his sled — and found the way anyway. He stopped a team of exhausted dogs a heartbeat before they would have vanished into open water, without anyone telling him to. When the ice broke apart beneath them, and there was nothing left to do but ask an old dog to do the impossible, he did it — twice — until the line finally held.

He covered more miles, through more danger, than any dog on that trail. And when it was over, the world put a statue on a very different dog.

Togo didn’t know that, and it wouldn’t have changed what he did. He went home to a fireplace in Maine, fathered the next generation of a breed that carries his blood to this day, and when age finally caught up with him, he went out exactly the way he’d lived — proud, alert, unmistakably himself.

Some heroes get statues. Some get a devoted woman’s decision not to give up on them, a musher who never stopped correcting the record, and, nearly a century later, a podcast still telling the truth.

We say his name, and we tell his story.

Togo’s story deserved this much care, and it shows. 🐾

Every hero has a version of the story the world remembers, and a version that’s actually true. For Togo, the twelve-year-old sled dog who led his team across the most dangerous 260 miles of the 1925 race to save the children of Nome, Alaska, those two versions couldn’t be further apart. On a recent episode of Quarter Miles Travel, “The Dog They Left Out of the Story,” we traced Togo’s journey from a sickly, unwanted puppy to the true hero of the Great Race of Mercy — and uncovered why history handed his statue, his fame, and his place in the public imagination to a different dog entirely. This guide picks up where that episode left off, mapping out the real places where Togo’s story still lives today — from the frozen coastline he once crossed in the dark, to the quiet corners of three states where his memory finally caught up with what he actually did.

Why This Guide

In January of 1925, a diphtheria outbreak threatened the town of Nome, Alaska, and a relay of twenty mushers and more than a hundred sled dogs raced 674 miles across the frozen wilderness to deliver life-saving serum. Togo, the twelve-year-old lead dog of musher Leonhard Seppala, carried that serum across the longest and most dangerous stretch of the route — and for decades, watched a different dog receive most of the credit.

This guide gathers the real places where that story still lives — from the town the serum was racing to save, to the museum where Togo himself still stands watch, to the world-famous race his journey inspired. Whether you’re planning a full Alaska trip or a detour through New York City, here’s where to go to trace this remarkable piece of history for yourself.

Alaska: Where It Happened

Nome, Alaska

How to get there: Nome is not accessible by road from the rest of Alaska; visitors fly in, typically via Anchorage

This is where the story begins and ends — the isolated coastal town that a diphtheria outbreak threatened to devastate in the winter of 1925, and the town Togo, Seppala, and the rest of the relay mushers raced to save. Nome today remains a small, remote community on the Bering Sea coast, rich with Gold Rush history layered on top of this later chapter. A drive east along the Bering Sea coast follows roughly 30 miles of the historic serum run trail itself, giving visitors a genuine sense of the terrain the mushers crossed.

Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum — Nome, Alaska

Located in Nome, this local museum holds photographs and artifacts from the original 1925 serum run, offering a direct and tangible link back to that winter. It’s the natural first stop for anyone wanting to understand the event from the perspective of the town it saved, rather than just the mushers who saved it.

Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Headquarters & Museum — Wasilla, Alaska

Location: Mile 2.2 Knik Road, Wasilla, AK (near the intersection with Knik-Goose Bay Road)

Website: iditarod.com/plan-your-visit — https://iditarod.com/plan-your-visit/

Hours: Generally open year-round, Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., with extended daily hours (roughly 8 a.m.–5 p.m.) during the summer season (mid-May through mid-September); confirm current hours before visiting, especially in winter

Admission: Free museum entry; dog-cart rides available for a small fee (around $10/person) during summer months

This is the single most important stop on the entire trip: Togo himself, mounted and preserved, stands on permanent display here in a glass case — the actual dog, not a replica. The headquarters also houses decades of Iditarod race memorabilia, trophies, and photographs, and offers dog-cart rides in summer so visitors can get a small taste of what it feels like to be pulled by a real sled dog team. Located about 45 minutes to an hour north of Anchorage, this is an easy and essential day trip for anyone visiting the area.

Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race

Website: iditarod.com — https://iditarod.com

The race itself is the living legacy of the 1925 serum run — a roughly 1,000-mile course from the Anchorage area to Nome, run every March by mushers and dog teams retracing much of the same historic ground Togo and Seppala once covered. The ceremonial start takes place in Anchorage, with the competitive restart currently held in Willow, about 70 miles up the Parks Highway. If your travel dates allow, visiting during the race (early March) offers a rare chance to see the modern-day version of exactly what this history was really about.

New York City: Where Togo Is Remembered in Bronze

Togo Statue — Seward Park, Manhattan

Location: Seward Park, bounded by East Broadway, Essex Street, and Canal Street, New York, NY 10002 (Lower East Side)

Tucked into a small Lower East Side park, this bronze statue of Togo has stood at the East Broadway entrance since 2001 — one of only a small handful of statues in the country dedicated to him specifically, rather than to the serum run in general. The park underwent a major renovation in recent years, and Disney partnered with NYC Parks to add an interpretive plaque alongside the statue honoring the 260 miles Togo covered to help deliver the serum. It’s a quiet, easy-to-miss corner of the city — worth deliberately seeking out rather than stumbling upon.

Balto Statue — Central Park, Manhattan

Location: Central Park, near East 67th Street, New York, NY (Doris C. Freedman Plaza area)

Worth visiting for context, even though it tells only part of the story: this statue, unveiled in December 1925, honors Balto, who led the final and shortest leg of the serum relay into Nome. It became — and remains — far more famous than any tribute to Togo, despite Togo having run the longest and most dangerous portion of the journey. Seppala himself was famously unhappy about this imbalance, writing in his own memoir that he resented the statue given to Balto, believing Togo was the dog who truly deserved it. Visiting both statues in the same trip makes for a genuinely compelling contrast — and a good conversation starter about how history remembers its heroes.

Maine: Togo’s Final Years

Poland Spring Resort & the Togo Statue — Poland Spring, Maine

After the serum run, Togo spent his retirement here, in the care of musher Elizabeth Ricker, fathering the next generation of a sled dog line before his death in 1929. In 2022, Poland Spring unveiled a bronze statue in Togo’s honor — the newest of his memorials, and a fitting tribute given that this is where he actually lived out his final, peaceful years by the fire. It’s a quieter, more personal stop than the New York statues, tied directly to the end of Togo’s story rather than its most famous chapter.

A Suggested Way to Experience This Story

If you’re able to combine stops, consider this rough arc: start in New York, comparing the Togo statue in Seward Park with the more famous Balto statue in Central Park, to understand how public memory shaped this story from the very beginning. Then travel to Alaska — Nome first, to see where the serum was actually headed and to visit the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum, followed by Wasilla, to stand in front of Togo himself at the Iditarod Trail Headquarters. If your schedule allows a visit in early March, the modern Iditarod race offers a living, breathing continuation of the exact history you’ve just traced. And for those who want the quieter, final chapter, a stop in Poland Spring, Maine, completes the picture — from the dog who was almost forgotten, to the dog whose name is now remembered in three states.

For more on the U.S. Mint State and Commemorative Coins visit their website USMint.Gov

2008 50 State Quarters Coin Alaska Uncirculated Reverse

Ever wonder how travel expert Anita Thomas chooses her next destination? Well, this year she’s just flipping a coin. For eight years, Anita has been hosting her award-winning podcast, Quarter Miles Travel. And this year on Travel with Anita, she is sharing those experiences with you. This season, Anita will take you to the states commemorated on the back of a quarter, revealing hidden hotspots and don’t-miss destinations that you might not have heard about, possibly in your hometown state. The adventure begins as he reaches into her pocket. Here’s Anita Thomas.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome aboard Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, as you know, we are the spot where we don’t just show you a destination, we take you into its history, its heroes, and the stories that make it so unforgettable. And today, we’re heading to the twin island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, a place of quiet beaches, volcanic peaks, and one truly extraordinary claim to fame. Are you ready for this? It is the birthplace of one of America’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton. Now, did you know that? Well, if not, that’s what today’s show is all about. Because now you know Hamilton from the $10 bill, of course we know that. And you may know him from the history books as the main man who shaped America’s financial system as its very first Secretary of the Treasury. Or you may also know him, if you’re one of the millions who have seen it, you may know him from the stage where a hip hop and R&B musical turned his story into one of the most celebrated works of theatrical performances in a generation. So let’s get to the information, though, about Hamilton. Because if you didn’t know about him being born on Nevis, this is gonna be a great show for you to find out a lot of great American history, but also Caribbean history. Born on the island of Nevis around 1757, Hamilton’s beginnings, well, they were anything but easy. Because we may think of one of the Founding Fathers as having an easy life from birth until the end. Well, he was raised in poverty, orphaned as a teenager, and yet through sheer intellect and ambition, he rose to become one of the most influential figures in early American history. He was a key author of The Federalist Papers. Yep, that was Hamilton. He was an aide to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. That was Hamilton. And he was the architect of the young American nation of their banking and financial system. That was definitely Hamilton. So it’s a remarkable journey, a remarkable story. And it all starts on a small Caribbean island to the center of American power. And it’s a story that in recent years found a whole new audience. Because in 2015, the musical Hamilton, well, it reimagined his life on Broadway, turning a Founding Father into a cultural phenomenon, and sending curious travelers looking for the real place where his story began. And that place is Nevis. And today we’re going to take you there. But now it won’t just be me. Joining me is someone who knows this island very, very well, and of course knows Hamilton’s connection to it better than, certainly better than I do, and almost anyone. And that would be Greg Phillip of Nevis Sun Tours. So I’d like to welcome Greg to the show for him to help us tell the story of Alexander Hamilton and Nevis Island. So Greg, thanks for joining me today. Alexander Hamilton is celebrated as one of America’s Founding Fathers. But before America knew him, he was a young boy growing up in Nevis. So tell us-

Yes… a little bit of, about what life was like on Nevis during his childhood, and how did the island, well, how do you feel the island shaped the man that he became?

So Anita, thank you very much for having me. I’m, I’m really happy to be here with you this morning, um, to talk first of all about, um, yes, Alexander Hamilton and his role, um, living here on Nevis. But in addition to that, I’m very much happy to be here to talk about Nevis in general, and also my company, Nevis Sun Tours. Um, Nevis Sun Tours, um, really we’re both a destination management company and a luxury travel enablement platform, which basically means that where it might be difficult for people to obviously find luxury when they’re traveling, we work with, um, them and, um, their travel agencies, et cetera, to ensure that they can enjoy luxury vacations here on Nevis. Now, in relation to Alexander Hamilton, um, I, I probably spend more time with Hamilton than is normal. [laughs]

And, and, and the reason, the reason I can say that is because, you know, um, for us at Nevis Sun Tours, we’ve really, um, embraced Alexander Hamilton and, and fully incorporated him into the stories that we tell about this island of Nevis. And it’s important that we do so because, you know, many people do not realize that Alexander Hamilton was born here on the island of Nevis.  Mm.

Just the fact that he’s born here on the island of Nevis really says that, um, a small island in the Caribbean have had so much to do with the, number one, the existence of America, and number two, with the way America is with its financial systems, its defense systems, et cetera. Because Alexander Hamilton is the man that had so much to do with the origins of all those things. So your question I should, I should get to that about- [laughs]

Alex- [laughs] about how, how this island would have, um, shaped him. Absolutely.  Um, that w- without a doubt. And, and I can say this confidently, with as much confidence as it’s possible for anyone to say anything. Alexander Hamilton, the man we know for all the things he has done, could not have ever become the man he became without the island of Nevis in his background. And, and, and that’s, that’s as, that’s as sure as we can be. And, and the reason for that is because, um, so many things happened here on this island that really shaped Alexander Hamilton. This island shaped the man Alexander Hamilton became.

Well, what was life like during his childhood on Nevis at that time?  Ah. Well, [laughs] I’ll say, I’ll say this, it wasn’t easy.

00:07:03,352 –> 00:07:03,792 [speaker_1] Mm. 00:07:03,992 –> 00:07:13,892 [speaker_2] Um, and um, it, it, it begins with this, and, and y- probably for many of your listeners a little-known fact. Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock.

Really? His mother and father were not married. And because his mother and father were not married, I mean, back then any child that was born out of wedlock had a very difficult road ahead.

Mm-hmm. Um, a, number one, Alexander Hamilton would have been in a situation where he could not go to school with, with other children, um, at the school here, that he should have gone to in Nevis. And, and the schools back then, education was taken care of by the Anglican Church back then, and there was absolutely no way the church was gonna have a child from a sinful union-.. go to school with other good Christian children. So if you could imagine- Yeah. here is Alexander Hamilton starting life without a clear opportunity to be educated. That’s Hamilton’s life here on Nevis when starting. But surrounding him here on Nevis are so many other things. It’s, um, the, the vibrant, um, trade and commerce that really positioned Nevis as a, as a world economic power for Great Britain, in terms of what was contributed. And, and, um, all the trade and commerce I’m speaking of related to Nevis and Hamilton’s time here would have been, um, surrounding both sugar and slavery. And um, I, I’ll tell you this though, Anita, um, when, when we talk about Caribbean travel and people coming to enjoy the Caribbean, um, the slavery issue is not something that we can ever shy away from because it is so much a part of our history. What we’ve done though, um, and in the work that we do, is to make sure that when we tell those stories, that they’re told truthfully, but they’re not told, they’re not told in a way that’s going to alienate anyone.

Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.  Um, they’re told in a way that is, that is honest, truthful, and of course, um, w- keeping the fact in mind that this is our history, and it’s a, it’s a history that must be told in a certain way, um, so that it is honored and it is honorable. And keeping in mind that no one today was involved in what was happening back then.

Hamilton’s early childhood on Nevis is very important to the development of the man who would then become such an important part of American history. I’ll stop here, but when we come back, I will continue my conversation with Greg in talking about Hamilton and the island of Nevis on Travel with Anita and Friends. Back in a minute.  Kind of a wonder how travel expert Anita Campbell keeps her travel destinations fresh. Well, this year she’s still flipping a coin. For eight years, Anita has hosted her award-winning podcast, Quarterhouse Travel. And this year on Travel with Annita, she is sharing those experiences with you. This season, Annita will take you to the states commemorated on the back of a quarter, revealing-

[Instrumental music] We know one of our Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, as the person who helped us get a treasury system set up in the United States. But what do we know about his early childhood and the conditions under which he grew up living on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean? Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends. I asked Greg Phillip of Nevis Sun Tours to tell us more about the conditions and times when Hamilton lived on the island, what was going on, those conditions, and how they go about presenting that history as part of their tours.

We, we definitely, with our stories, keep history in its true context. Never mind that we may have feelings, but whatever we feel today, um, are things that we have to embrace because, especially when we’re talking about Alexander Hamilton. If we do not embrace the feelings that we may have about certain things from that period of time, we essentially begin to cheat ourselves out of the true effect that history should have on us.

And that, and that, it, it’s, it’s part of our responsibility when we tell the stories, and it’s part of our responsibility as travelers when we consume, um, stories of history in various parts of the world, that we, number one, keep them in their true context, and number two, that we also, um, embrace how we feel about those stories in today’s modern times. But it’s what we have to do when we think about Alexander Hamilton and his time here on Nevis, and how this island shaped the man he became.

Well, Greg, you said that so well, because I, I agree so much with you about, you know, telling the history. Because you can’t tell, like, one part of history and say that that was history. You have to tell all of it.

Right. Um-  All, all of it was history. You know, I mean, we can’t- Certainly… um, you know, we can’t be time travelers and go back and, and see if we can kind of change things. We have to accept the history that, you know, that s- sort of that we were given, uh, and that is- Yeah … you know, part, part of our, our legacy. Uh, so-

Indeed … it’s very, very well said. Very well said. Well, I wanted to ask you something though, because I didn’t realize that he was born- Mm-hmm … out of wedlock. So was his- Yes … was his mother or father a, a resident- Oh … of the island? Or do, do you have a little information on- Well … on that? [laughs] Okay. Well, so, so you’re, you’re, you’re gonna, you’re gonna make me get into the story a little bit. No problem. And this is, this is it. I- Well, just a little bit of it … um, the, the more appropriate way to put it, and, and you, and you’ll see why it would’ve been such a controversial thing, especially for the church. The more appropriate way to put it is the fact that Alexander Hamilton’s mother was married, but his father wasn’t. [laughs] So, so you, you, you can see why now. That, that that in itself, um, would’ve, would’ve been such a taboo thing and, and such a difficult thing for the church to accept, number one. But definitely because of that, because of those circumstances, um, such a difficult early life situation for Alexander Hamilton himself to navigate.

Well- Mm-hmm … talk about a lit- little unknown things probably, ’cause I, I don’t know how much, you know, Americans, uh, how much we know about that. So, but anyway, that’s, that’s good. That’s great to, to share that, ’cause that does give sort of a broader picture of his-

Yes … childhood and probably the struggles that he had to, you know, to go through. Uh, not only being, you know, a child born out of wedlock, but also other situations that probably came through with the families, you know?

Yes. And everything. So I can just, I can only imagine.

Now, many Americans know, uh, Hamilton through history books or the Broadway musical. Mm-hmm. I don’t know- … if you’ve seen that or not. But few realize that they can actually visit his birthplace. So what can we see as travelers, and what can we experience today at the-… Alexander Hamilton Museum? And why is it important that we stop?  Okay. Well, well, first of all, um, the Alexander Hamilton Museum is one of the most, if not the most popular site visited on Nevis today by travelers, and the main reason for that is because of the musical.

Now, um, so m- my little history with the musical. I saw, I saw the musical about two months after it opened on Broadway with the original cast.

And… Yeah. [laughs] And that was amazing. And then I saw it again, um, when it opened in England, in London.

Nice. Oh.

That was another, that was another amazing experience. So, um, that being said, I could see why people would leave the theater and after understanding and finding out that Alexander Hamilton would’ve come from Nevis, that they would either come here or while they’re here want to delve a bit more into his history and actually see where he came from. Um, so yes, now many people visit the museum. And, um, our most hands down most popular tour, most, um, written about tour, and the tour that we have that get the most award, it, um, is our Alexander Hamilton Island Tour.

Um, that, that’s a tour that we’re, we’re extremely proud of. Um, last year we won, um, an award. Our most international award was from Azamara Cruises.

And we won a… based on, um, feedback from their passengers to them, which we had no clue about. [laughs] But, um, we were, we were awarded the best new tour worldwide for Azamara Cruises. What it is now is as a result of why I’m spending so much time with Alexander Hamilton.

[laughs] I got you now. Okay. … but earlier this year we, we had, um, the producer of, of that play in England, um, come out and did the tour, and also loved it.

So it is through this tour, um, that we take people to the museum, the Alexander Hamilton Museum. Um, you actually get a guided tour of the museum. And guided because, um, it’s a live documentary, a story, an original story about Alexander Hamilton that is actually factual that you’re in, that, that’s gonna teach you so much about Hamilton, his life here, um, his impact, um, worldwide. But in addition to that, it’s also gonna g- give you so much information and a good, um, understanding of Nevis and what Nevis was during his time and what Nevis is today, um, because of influences from things that Alexander Hamilton have done. But when you go to the museum, um, it’s, it’s about being at his birthplace. And, and I, I make a point to say that because people who know the musical would [laughs] would realize that the musical spoke about where Alexander Hamilton was from, but they never mentioned Nevis. They said that Hamilton is from a forgotten spot in the Caribbean.

[laughs]

That’s not good. [laughs]

[laughs] Yeah. So where… Nevis is a forgotten spot in the Caribbean. So I… Listen, I just, I just laugh at that because, um, if I don’t laugh I’ll cry. [laughs] But, um, we do a very immersive tour in there and it really starts from beginning to end. We delve into, um, the very important aspects of his life and some things that, um, some people wouldn’t have known about him, um, because they’re specifically related to Nevis.

Sure. Hmm.

Um, but then there’s, there’s a few other things that, um, we delve into with, uh, I’ll say a particular twist on it that really connects- Um, his time to our time today. And, and if you don’t mind, I can give you a quick example of that.

Um, you know, w- here we are, here we are today now, um, in a world where so many people are talking about trade and tariffs. [laughs] You’ve heard that word tariffs,]Yeah

… perhaps in the past couple of years?

Right.

Yeah. Um, and immigration. And if you, if you understand the history of Alexander Hamilton and, and you’ve really gone deep into it, you would recognize that Alexander Hamilton has dealt with or had to deal with all those things, and he had, he had different philosophies on them. And interestingly, his philosophies on things like immigration and, um, and tariffs, et cetera, and trade, do not necessarily match up completely now with the take that America itself has on it. But it’s just interesting to connect those things and show people where it all started.

Alexander Hamilton, you cannot deny his importance in creating a currency, a US currency, and we’ll hear more about that. But I’ll stop here and take a break, and when I come back, I’ll speak again with Greg about Nevis and Alexander Hamilton. You’re on Travel with Anita and Friends. Back in a minute. [upbeat music] Our Founding Fathers did more than just sign the Declaration of Independence. They were very instrumental in creating many things that are today just simply parts of the US that we take for granted. Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends. And today, I’m taking you to Nevis down in the Caribbean, because that is the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, one of our Founding Fathers. And his story is very interesting on not only his life there as a child, but also the influence that he gained there that he brought to America to make us the country that we are today. I asked Greg Phillip, the owner and founder of Nevis Sun Tours, to tell us the story of Alexander Hamilton. So I continue my conversation with Greg. I asked him to share how Alexander Hamilton is connected with the US Coast Guard.

This is, this is what… This is, this is how, um, the Coast Guard came about. Hamilton is a financial guy. Um, he, he’s setting up, um, the financial system, um, that America currently stands on, that the world operates on. Um, and for example, quickly, the, the fact that America has a single currency, that was Alexander Hamilton who decided that that, that is what we’re gonna have. And the reason he had to do that is because it was the world. Um, the world back then is that every colony that became a state, they all had their own currencies. [laughs]

And Alexander resolved the co- the, the chaos of that by having one currency. But while all that is going on, there’s something else happening with America. Back then, America was not a great manufacturing nation, and America was struggling. England, America’s enemy at the time, who they just defeated, England was the great manufacturer in the world. Most of the things that are being imported into America are coming from England. Hamilton created the Coast Guard simply so that he can actually have a force to guard the coast so that they can intercept all the things, the goods that are being, um, transported into America, and actually tax them. So the first… The… That’s why the first ships that the Coast Guard, um, commissioned, you know what they were called?

Tax cutters.

Oh, tax. Yeah. Tax cutters.

So what lessons do you think that Hamilton learned from living in a colonial society that later influenced his views on the American Revolution?

Now, England wasn’t out there saving the world. I mean, England had colonies because of the fact that those colonies served England well.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, back then, sugar was king.

And so m- so, so much of the trade and commerce was about, um, the sugar and enslavement. And Hamilton growing up on Nevis in the Caribbean is in the mix of all those things. Um, the stance that Hamilton have had throughout his life really, um, shows that Hamilton is by and large presented as an abolitionist, and he’s presented that way because of all that he’s dealing with, um, here in the Caribbean living on Nevis, the things he’s seeing. He would have witnessed slavery here on this island in its rawest sense because he saw when the slave ships came and when our people set foot for the first time on solid ground after leaving Africa right here on this island. Hamilton would have been there as a little boy to witness that. He saw the treatment-

… of the, of, of the enslaved.

He saw, he saw the conditions of the newly enslaved. He saw who’s coming off these ships dead, who’s chained to someone, who’s dead, who’s, who’s in very bad condition.

He hear- he, he heard the cries- Yeah

… of, of, um, of newly enslaved people who are frightened, and those things shaped him. Um, that’s why I think that he would have been an abolitionist. But then there’s another aspect of Hamilton’s life that people do not, do not recognize and do not know much about. But, um, back then- There’s a, a vibrant Jewish community here on Nevis. In fact, in the town where Hamilton is growing up in, in Nevis, there’s, um, a quarter, full quarter of the population were Jewish. And as part of our tour, we visit the, the Jewish cemetery here on Nevis. We go there because if you ever wondered, here’s a young, a young child who couldn’t go to the normal school. Well, where was he educated? Where did he get, where did he get anything resembling formal education? It would’ve been in the Jewish community.

So at, at this point, things should be co- begin to come together for you. Why does Hamilton know so much about economics and business?

Where is that coming from?

And this is, and this is not, this is not, this is not being stereotypical. This is not stereotype. These are facts-

… that Hamilton, Hamilton got a solid base because of the influence of the Jewish community right here on this island.

Um, yeah, so he experienced both wealth and those harsh realities of slavery. Um, so do you think that, that sort of been, he took that then over to America, uh, when he, when he came over with a lot of his views and his position on things?

He came to America with a lot of experience, and, and this experience that he came with would’ve been first-hand experience that he got from right here in the Caribbean, and most of it from the island of Nevis. And he was here during his formative years, so he has a base that is, um, 100% Nevisian in that sense.

And, and, and coming, coming to America now, um, he’s, he’s bringing that. And, and those are the things that are informing his, his philosophies and the way he’s actually acting and pursuing life in America and, and pursuing nation-building in America.

Well, well, tell me a little bit about his teenage years, because, uh, he left in, when he was a teenager, right? I mean, what, what led-

[laughs]

… what events led to his departure and…

Alexander Hamilton left Nevis, we’ll have to call him a preteen. He wasn’t quite a teenager yet. Um, when he, when he migrated away from Nevis with his, with his mother and father, they went to St. Croix. So, um, when he got to St. Croix, of course, St. Croix has a similar economy that is based on, um, trade and commerce, lots of, um, slavery related things going on throughout the entire Caribbean. So, um, all those, all those influences, they carried over even though he would’ve, he would’ve migrated away from Nevis. And, and back then, I mean, you’re leaving really for opportunity.

Mm-hmm.

For opportunity and what, what opportunities are available and where is the opportunity located. And, um, a, a few things back then, I mean, you, you have to realize at that time you don’t need a visa [laughs]

Yeah

… to go somewhere. You don’t need a green card to show up and, and live, [laughs] you know, as a legal resident. Um, so, you know, people, people moved. The, the, the, the effort to move was, um, very much a big, big effort because you’re on a boat.

And a boat without a boat without engine. Um, so  Yeah

…you, you see. That, but that, that was the timing, and all those things are what’s, um, really shaping Hamilton throughout his childhood in the Caribbean.

So this is another question kind of going back to, to his parents.

So you said he left with his mother and father.

Yes.

So now is he still, is he still with his, his parents, or did something happen throughout his life that separated him from his mother considering, you know, the-

Oh

… conditions that he was born under?

Well, um, so Alexander Hamilton, um, his … After they got to St. Croix, after a while, um, his father abandoned the family. His fa- his father actually died in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. By that time, Hamilton was in, in America. And Hamilton, even though, yeah, his father did that, he still supported his father, um, sending remittances to St. Croix for him. At one point he did want his father to migrate to America to live with him so that he, he can have an easier life. But, um, his mother died, um, while he was a teenager in St. Croix. As a matter of fact, they were both stricken with a fever at the same time, both of them sick on the same bed, and his mother died and he survived. So that’s why, um, they would’ve called him an orphan at that time, because really his father wasn’t there- Yeah … and his mother was dead. Yeah. After, after that, I mean, you know, he’s there, he’s working, he’s, um, he’s, he’s young still, but he eventually, um, made it to America by that time.

I’ll stop here, but I’ll be back in a few minutes with more on Alexander Hamilton and his amazing story here on Travel with Anita and Friends. [upbeat music] The life story of Alexander Hamilton doesn’t begin in the United States. It begins in Nevis. Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends, and today we’re heading over to Nevis to talk with Greg Phillip, the owner and founder of Nevis Sun Tours, where he shares the story of Alexander Hamilton and how it all began in the Caribbean island of Nevis.

Alexander Hamilton was born in 1757 … the, the Declaration of Independence is 1776.

So when that happened, um, yeah, he’s, he’s in the Revolutionary War, et cetera. Um, he’s with Washington at a very, very young age. When he started out, he’s still a teenager.

Well, te- tell me this. What, what’s one of the myths about Hamilton that, that you’d like to correct? Are there any myths out there?

[laughs] Okay. Well, yeah, I mean, there’s … I, I said there are questions about, um, whether or not Hamilton was Black. His life is going a certain way, and yes, one of the myths is that you hear them talk about, um, Hamilton being Black. But I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you this, that was something being done by his political rivals. Um, they, they, they tried to shame Hamilton, um, about his, his birth in the Caribbean. They called, they called him the West Indian interloper.

They even called him, they even called him the Creole bastard. Um, it is said that some of them wo- some people still wonder was he Jewish? And, I mean, perhaps people would have had reason, um, to ask about his Jewish heritage because they might have realized that Hamilton knew a lot about, um, Jewish life and culture.

Mm-hmm.

Knew a lot, um, probably knew Hebrew. Um, but why? Because of his upbringing on Nevis. So, so, so you see, but those are just some, some of the myths. We don’t have anything that said that Hamilton was anything but, um, a Caucasian individual, a white man.

] Did he ever come back to Nevis?

When Alexander Hamilton left Nevis, he was in the same country. You have to say he was in the same country as America. Because when he’s born here on Nevis in 1757, you do recognize that Hamilton is subject to the same king as everyone in the 13 North American colonies. Yeah.

Now, if you, if you’re born in a place with … and you have the same leader as people halfway around the world from you, you’re from the same country, which is what one of the, one of the things that we delve into in the museum to resolve actually, um, this issue of Hamilton being considered an immigrant. Why is Alexander Hamilton considered an immigrant when he’s born as part of a British colony, part of the British Empire just like everyone else? So, um, but we’re talking about him not coming back to Nevis. Um, there’s no sense of patriotism. Um, Hamilton never forgot Nevis. Um, while Hamilton didn’t come back, Hamilton is there, and Hamilton is thinking about Nevis. A- and when I say thinking about Nevis, in the sense that there’s … If you read his biography, um, this book by Ron Chernow, yes, Hamilton actually spoke about, um, the United States as his adopted country. So i- it’s, it’s not that he forgot where he was from as to why he didn’t come back.

He was in a place where he is considered an immigrant, likely not by choice, but he’s considered an immigrant, and he’s doing important work. I mean, all the things that Alexander Hamilton did, you’ll, you’ll be surprised, and you, you’ll be surprised to recognize that he’s doing those things, um, and he’s not even an elected official.

Yeah.

And that law in America where they say you have to be born there in order to become, uh, have a chance to become president, um, it’s often said that that was created politically to prevent Alexander Hamilton from having a chance at the presidency. So you, you put all those things together and you, you see, yeah, Hamilton is, um, in fact, from Nevis. He never forgot Nevis, and he went b- um, to America doing some very important things to build the America that we all know today.

Um, he was married. Did he have children?

Yes.

Tell us a little bit about his, that part of his life.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Alexander, Alexander Hamilton, um, left, left the Caribbean, and w- when he got to America, eventually he, he got married to, um, Elizabeth Sky- Schuyler, one of the Schuyler sisters. And, and this, um, and this is one of the reasons why people think that, some people think that Hamilton would’ve been involved in slavery is the fact that Alexander Hamilton, uh, married into the Schuyler family, who everyone knows, um, actually had enslaved people, owned enslaved people. And that being, that being said, um, Alexander Hamilton, um, he got married. He’s, he’s with, um, Elizabeth Schuyler. They had eight children. Oh. Eight children..

Yeah. That’s a lot, that’s a lot of children, but that’s how many children they had. Now, interestingly, um, here on Nevis, H- Hamilton’s maternal grandparents were living here on Nevis, and they would have had seven children. But back then, you know, infant mortality rates back then during his grandparents’ time here on this island were very high.

So it seems, it seems that, um, it’s his mother was the surviving child out of that seven. He had eight children with his wife.

And, uh, did they all survive? A- and are there any descendants of, uh, of, uh, of Alexander Hamilton-

… that we can point to today?

Oh, yeah. I mean, there’s, there’s … Yeah, his family, his family still lives somewhere in, in America.

Um, so, so yeah, I mean, he had, he had children. I mean, one of his, one of his sons, Philip, um, we know that he died in a duel, um, before, um, before Alexander Hamilton actually died in a duel himself.

So and so Alexander Hamilton died in a duel? So tell us a little bit about that.

00:36:27,396 –> 00:37:11,706 [speaker_2] [laughs] Yeah. It was a duel against, um, Aaron Burr. He, he and, he and Burr, they started out as good friends, and, a- and, you know, the … all that is played out in the musical. They started out as good friends. Him and Burr were lawyers together. Some people say that Burr was actually a better lawyer than him because Hamilton would show up and talk for three hours to make one point, and Burr would [laughs] use a couple of sentences and his case is closed. But, um- They got to, it got to the point where, um, Hamilton just thought that Burr was very unethical, and he wouldn’t support him, um, in presidential bid. And in fact, um, at one point Hamilton had the deciding vote about , whether or not would become president.

And so they, they, they were enemies. And, you know, back then, I, I’ll tell you this, Alexander Hamilton was not well-loved during [laughs] by, by everyone during his lifetime, you know?

A lot of people… And, and so yeah, some of it is politics, but many people didn’t, didn’t love him. And, um, yes, today many people love him because they look at history in a different way, and they love him because they love the musical, et cetera. But Hamilton wasn’t l- well-loved back then. He had lots of enemies, lots of political rivals. And it, it is in fact said that Hamilton was involved in seven different affairs of honor. These are the types of disputes that would lead to duels. Seven of them.

So I mean… But the… Dueling was so interesting that, um, dueling is, [laughs] is often described as, um, polite, well-regulated, and barbaric. [laughs] Um, sometimes it was enough just to show up, um, and sh- fire the shot in the air to say, “Well, that’s it.” Um, Hamilton showed up, and Hamilton did that. Burr didn’t do that. Burr shot at him, and Hamilton died. Best place to go for, for Nevis Sun Tours is go over to nevissuntours.com. That’s our website, nevissuntours.com. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Email address is [email protected], [email protected]. Most of what we do are gonna be things that are quite custom and definitely, um, personalized. I mean that. We, we help people, um, to create luxury experiences, um, in a very authentic way. We check four boxes with everything we do. It must be authentic, must be immersive. They also must be intimate, meaning that we don’t do very large groups with these activities. And number four, they are going to be memorable.

So a big thanks to Greg Phillip at Nevis Sun Tours. And go over to the website nevissuntours.com because Greg has created, written and created a play called The Trial of Hamilton and Nelson, where you get a chance to hear all the details about the two actual people, Hamilton and Nelson, and the audience gets to determine the verdict of the trial. Exciting and fun, right? Sounds fun to me. Well, I’m ready to book a tour, that’s for sure, and go over to Nevis, and also St. Kitts, the twin island of Nevis. And check out my website travelwithannita.com. And thanks for joining me today. I’ll be back in two weeks with another great destination and another wonderful story here on Travel with Anita and Friends. Bye-bye.

You’ve been listening to Travel with Anita. For more, log on to her website travelwithanita, with two N’s, .com, and listen to her award-winning podcast, Quarter Miles Travel, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Anita will be back in two weeks with another exciting adventure for you and your travel buddies. So keep those passports updated, and remember to always travel safe and travel smart. Right, Jack? [upbeat music]

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome aboard Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, Georgia has always produced more than its share of remarkable people, men and women whose ideas, courage, and craftsmanship reach far beyond our state lines and help shape the story of our entire country. We’re going to meet four of them: an industrialist who built a town from the ground up, a woman who started a movement that still shapes girls’ lives today, and a master bridge builder who connected two states with his own hands, and a woman who broke barriers as a teacher, a nurse, and author decades ahead of her time.

Now, I’m talking about some really pretty fantastic people, some that you may know very well and others that may be new to you. Henry Ford, of course, we know him from Ford Motor Company. Juliette Gordon Low of the Girl Scouts. Horace King, who built a bridge, and Susie King Taylor, the educator who worked through the Civil War to educate people in reading and writing. Now, four Georgians, four extraordinary stories that we’ll share today. So I’m ready to really get into it now, and I’d like to start with the man that I like to say is the man who built a hill. I’m talking about Henry Ford’s Georgia legacy along the Coastal Bryan Heritage Trail. Some of us may have actually driven through Richmond Hill. It’s just a little south of Savannah in a town that is so charming you’d swear it was designed that way on purpose. And, well, it kinda was. We’re talking about Richmond Hill, Georgia, that is a place that is right off of Highway 17 or Interstate 95.

And you may not realize that you just passed through a town that is one of the most famous men in America, in American history, he- that he basically built with his own two hands. Now, Henry Ford, and that is of course the Henry Ford, the Model T Henry Ford of the Ford Company. Well, that assembly line, the man who put America on wheels, and for over 20 years, this stretch of Georgia coast was where he came to slow down. So let’s back up a little because to understand why Henry Ford ended up here, you have to understand who he really was before he even set foot in Georgia. Now, back in 1914, Ford did something that shocked the entire country. He doubled his factory workers’ pay practically overnight to $5 a day. [laughs] That doesn’t seem like much now, but at that time, that was really big money, and newspapers all over the world ran the story.

Nobody had ever seen an industrialist share that kind of money with the people actually building his products. Well, now, let’s be honest, though, because it wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds. It came with strings attached. Ford had inspectors checking up on workers and home lives, expecting them to save money, stay sober, keep things tidy. [laughs] Wow, that’s quite an involvement there, and people didn’t love that part. You can understand why. But at the heart of it, Ford believed something a lot of wealthy men of his era didn’t, that if you take care of the people around you, everybody does better. The company does better. The community does better. The individual people do better. So keep that in mind because that same instinct, that’s, that’s exactly what he brought with him to Georgia. And by the early 1920s, Henry and his wife, Clara, were spending their winters down in Fort Myers, Florida. But Florida was growing. It was growing fast, and the Fords started feeling really a little crowded. So what did Henry do? Well, what Henry always did. He asked someone he trusted.

His good friend, the naturalist John Burroughs, told him about a quiet stretch of the Georgia coast, a little place called Way Station. And Henry and Clara came to take a look, and from what history books tell us, it was Clara who really fell the hardest for that particular area. She loved the Spanish moss hanging off of those big live oak trees and the birds everywhere you looked, and that slow, easy, kind of low country charm that you get in that area. Of course, Henry saw something a little different. He saw opportunity, and before they even left Savannah, he told his secretary he… to start negotiating right away. And that was it.

By March of 1925, Henry Ford owned his first 100 acres in Way Station. Over the next several years, Ford just kept buying. Old rice plantations, overgrown farmlands, even the abandoned grounds of historic Fort McAllister. And by the time he was done, Henry Ford owned somewhere around 85,000 acres. Yep, you heard me right, 85,000. Now, that’s 120 square miles. That’s a lot of land, and for those of you who are keeping track at home, that’s actually larger than some countries. That’s pretty big. Henry Ford didn’t buy all of that land just to sit on it and enjoy the view. Way Station at that time was one of the poorest communities on the whole Georgia coast, and Ford, true to that same instinct that gave us the $5-a-day pay, decided he was going to change that. So he started a working farm, timber operations, a sawmill, and that sawmill alone put hundreds of local people to work who really had had really not that much opportunity in the past. But he ran into a problem.

Folks couldn’t get to the jobs that he was creating. The roads were just not built for it, so Ford solved that, too. He had his own sawmill start producing materials for tenant housing, designed so that the homes could go up quickly and also efficiently as, as well. Now, all told, they built over 200 houses, and Ford didn’t, he didn’t price poor families out, either. Some of the most struggling families in that area paid him just a dollar a month in rent. A dollar a month. And to keep going, a community center, a kindergarten, a medical clinic, a real medical care for people who rarely had had access to it before, churches, a bakery, a post office, and my favorite part, an honest-to-goodness industrial arts and trade school with science labs and auditorium, giving kids, um, an education that frankly a lot of the wealthier towns didn’t even have back then. He was really putting things on the map. And this wasn’t Henry’s writing checks from Detroit and calling it a day. By all accounts, he was out there walking the streets, talking to his neighbors, checking in on the schools and the sawmills himself. And Clara too. She was the one who brought in music programs and supported local artists, adding a little beauty and culture to go along with all of the Ford practicality.

So by 1936, the Fords decided to build themselves a proper home right on the banks of the Ogeechee River on the old site of the historic Richmond Plantation. And when I say a home, I mean a home. About 70,000 square feet, Greek Revival style, built out of that beautiful Savannah gray brick, sitting on 55 acres of manicured lawns and gardens, and they called it Richmond Hill. So you see? That’s why I said it’s a man who built a hill. Now here’s a sweet little twist, though, a little twist to the story. In 1941, the federal government needed land in the middle of Bryan County to build an Army training base, and what we now know as Fort Stewart. And that meant several small communities in the county had to be relocated, and a lot of those displaced families ended up resettling right here in the town that Henry Ford had spent 15 years building up. And later that same year, the town made its official way station’s name become Richmond Hill in honor of Henry and Clara Ford. Now, Henry Ford passed away in 1947, and a few years later in 1951, the Richmond family’s holdings were sold to the Union Camp Paper Company, and by the summer of 1952, Ford’s operations here officially came to a close. But the city remained the same name, Richmond Hill, as we know it today.

That grand Richmond Hill mansion was added to the National Registry of Historic Places back in 1978, and these days it’s part of a private community called the Ford Field and River Club. So it’s not open to just walk right in, but the Richmond Hill Historical Society does offer special tours throughout the year, so keep an eye out for those, ’cause you’ll definitely wanna go and check out that amazing Georgia history and American history. Now, I’ll stop here, but when I come back, I have another extraordinary Georgian here on Travel with Anita and Friends.

Now our next Georgian up here today on Travel with Anita and Friends, where we’re highlighting extraordinary Georgians who’ve made a difference in not only Georgia history, but American history. Well, this woman, she built something you can’t always see: confidence, independence, and purpose in generations of young girls who came after her. Juliette Gordon Low. She was deaf in one ear, restless in the drawing rooms of Savannah society, and absolutely determined to give girls a place to lead and not just follow. She started a movement in her own backyard that reached the entire world. Her name, again, Juliette Gordon Low.

Do you know that name? Well, you may not know her name, but you certainly know the Girl Scouts, the Girl Scouts of America. And I’m sure if you’re like me, you’ve bought some of those Girl Scout cookies, or you may know some young girls who’ve gone through the Girl Scout program. Here’s her story that I wanna share with you. Here’s Juliette Gordon Low. To understand Juliette Gordon Low, well, we need to step back to the early 1900s, because in those days, opportunities for women and girls w- were very limited. Women could not vote. Social expectations were very strict. Girls were often taught to be quiet, be polite, and be prepared for the traditional roles of life, and you know those traditional roles generally meant things that you did in your home. But Juliette Gordon Low believed girls deserved something, something very different, something more.

She believed that they should be curious, they should be adventurous, independent, and most of all, they should be confident. And she believed they should learn skills that would help them make a difference in the world. Well, in 1911, while traveling in England, Juliette met a man named Robert Baden-Powell. He had founded the Boy Scouts, a movement designed to teach boys outdoor skills, leadership, and service, and this idea sparked something in Juliette immediately. She saw how powerful this type of program could be, but she believed the girls deserved the same opportunities as well So she returned home to Savannah with a very, very bold plan. And on March 12th, 1912, Juliette Gordon Low gathered 18 girls in Savannah, and those girls, they became the very first troop of what would become the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.

Now let’s think about that for a minute, though, because at this time, the organization was first called Girl Guides, modeled after a similar group in Britain, but the name soon changed to Girl Scouts. Those first meetings, though, focused on things that were unusual for girls at the time, things like hiking, camping, first aid, leadership, community service, and perhaps most importantly, learning the skills or learning how to become very confident. And Juliette Gordon Low, well, she encouraged these girls to believe that they could do anything, because what started with just 18 girls in Savannah, well, it quickly began to grow. Girls across the country were drawn to this idea of adventure and service. They learned to build campfires, to navigate outdoors, to work together in teams, and to serve their communities. Now keep in mind this part about communities, ’cause that will come up again and again. Now these were skills that prepared girls not just for childhood, but for their lives. The movement quickly spread. In the 1920s, Girl Scout troops began appearing beyond the United States. There were troops formed in places like China, Syria, Mexico, and one of the earliest Native American girl troops formed on the Onondaga Nation Reservation in New York in 1921. And Mexican American girls formed a troop in Houston in 1922. So by 1925, a troop was even registered in Shanghai, showing just how quickly the movement had grown and how it had taken on a life of its own, a very good life of its own.

But now what Juliette Gordon Low started in Savannah had really become international by any stretch of the imagination. And when the Great Depression struck in the 1930s, Girl Scout troops stepped forward to help. The Girl Scout troops, they collected food, clothing, supplies for all of the families in need. They also worked to welcome immigrants into their communities, because they learned all about the importance of community service. And the Girl Scouts even printed information about their organization in several languages, including Yiddish, Italian, Polish. Now this became very helpful for the new immigrant families, because not only did this just help them understand what was being said, understand what they needed so that they could be successful now in America, and also to help them join the movement. Now inclusiveness actually became one of the organization’s core values.

And during World War II, the Girl Scouts once again stepped forward to serve. Troops across the country participated in national war efforts. The Girl Scout troops collected scrap metal, cooking fats, clothing, and they also planted victory gardens to help support food supplies. Wow. Now some of the Girl Scout troops even operated bicycle courier services, delivering important messages and supplies. Wow, just so fascinating. And the Girl Scouts, they also organized defense institutes where women learned emergency skills and ways to help children remain calm during the air raids. Even Japanese American girls held in wartime internment camps in Utah and California, they formed Girl Scout troops, demonstrating really the power of community even during difficult times for the country as well as for themselves. Now this spirit of service continued after the war. It didn’t just stop there. During the Korean War, Girl Scouts assembled Kits for Korea. Now these packages were filled with supplies for Korean citizens and Korean civilians. The organization also continued pushing for equality and inclusion.

By the early 1950s, progress toward racial integration was already happening within the Girl Scouts, even in the segregated South. And in the 1960s, Girl Scouts became increasingly active in conversations about equality and social change. The organization held Speak Out conferences across the country where girls could discuss issues of race and justice. A national program called Action 70 encouraged girls to work toward overcoming prejudice and building stronger relationships among communities. Girl Scouts were also invited guests of NASA to witness the launch activities surrounding the Apollo 12 moon mission. So you can see here, the message was very clear. Girls can dream big, and they can reach for the stars. Wow. The legacy of Juliette Gordon Low, well, it’s a really powerful one. Although she passed away in 1927, her legacy continued to grow. And today, when you think of the Girl Scouts and the organization, well, it includes millions of girls worldwide. And they continue learning those very same values that Juliette believed in and that she set as the foundation of the Girl Scouts: leadership, courage, friendship, self-reliance, and community service. And it all began with a simple gathering of 18 girls in Savannah. So the next time you find yourself in Savannah, walk through its historic streets and imagine that small gathering in 1912 with just 18 girls and one determined woman. And while you’re doing that while you’re in Savannah, make sure and go by and visit the Juliette Gordon Low home. You can visit her birthplace. It is located at 10 East Oglethorpe Avenue in the heart of the historic district of Savannah, Georgia. And it is Savannah’s first registered national historic landmark. Knowing this history should make those Girl Scout cookies taste even better.

I’ll stop here. I’ll be back in a minute here on Travel with Anita and Friends.

When you think of things that are left behind after we have made this journey here on Earth, you don’t always think of bridges being left behind. But here is the story of a man that that’s exactly what he left behind: bridges. Here’s the story of Horace King, the master bridge builder. Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends. Now, today I want to take you on a stretch of the Chattahoochee River, that long, winding waterway that splits Georgia and through Alabama as well. And if you’ve ever driven across it without giving it a second thought, well, I understand because [laughs] I drive across it quite often and don’t really think about that I’m driving over it, because most of us just do that.

But there was a time, not that long ago really, when getting a wagon, a family, or an entire town’s commerce across that river wasn’t something that you just took for granted. It took an engineer. It took vision. It took a whole lot more than just taking it for granted. And in this part of the South, for most of the 19th century, it took one particular man. His name, Horace King. Now, let’s back up a little bit and let’s talk a little bit more about Horace King before he was that bridge builder, because Horace King was born enslaved on September 8th, 1807, in Chesterfield District, South Carolina. He carried African, European, and Catawba ancestry.

So  he was quite mixed there with some of his ancestry, but he did have that desire to do something more. He had a heritage as layered and complex as the structures that he would go on to build. And in the 1820s, a contractor named John Godwin purchased Horace and brought him to Columbus, Georgia, to that area. He had land and a contract to build the very first public bridge connecting Georgia and Alabama across the Chattahoochee. And it didn’t take that long for Godwin to realize something remarkable. This wasn’t just a laborer. This was a person with a great mind. Horace mastered a design called the Town Lattice Trestle, a system of wooden planks crossed and interlocked like a woven basket pinned together with wooden pegs. But it was that way. It was very simple with the woven pattern and those wooden pegs that were pinning it together, but the math behind it isn’t simple at all. It let a bridge carry enormous weight while still being light, elegant, and really almost graceful looking. We’ve seen those covered bridges, and we’re intrigued by those.

And by the time Horace reached adulthood, he wasn’t just building bridges. He was managing entire crews of workers, solving structural problems that stumped men who’d gone to school for exactly that purpose. Now, just imagine that. Well, Godwin did. He took notice. And to his credit, he gave Horace something unusual for the time: real independence. He let Horace travel and oversee projects largely on his own. And through the early 1840s, Horace served as superintendent and architect on major bridges in Alabama and Columbus, m- and even Mississippi, without Godwin standing over him, over his shoulder at all. And in 1846, with Godwin’s backing, the Alabama legislature approved Horace’s freedom. He walked out of slavery not as a man starting from nothing, but as one of the most respected builders in the entire region, already known, already trusted, already changing the landscape of two states.

Now, I want you to pause here and be honest with yourself about something, because the full story does matter. Even after Horace gained his freedom, his relationship with Godwin stayed complicated. When he died, when Godwin died in 1859, Horace actually built a monument over his grave describing the love and the gratitude he felt for a man… History remembers as being his former enslaver. Oh, it can be very complex. Now, historians, they’ve wrestled with that for years. Some have pointed to it as proof that Harris’ story softens how he understands slavery, but I would gently push back on that a little bit, because what’s really going on, I think, is far more human, more human nature, and far more complicated. A man building a life and a reputation inside a system designed to deny him both? Okay. But his genius was real, and the fact that someone recognized it, not only recognized it, valued it, and put forth for him to be freed because of it. Now, the system that held him was still real, too, so both of these things are true all at once. But once free, Harris’s career did go on. It grew, and over the next four decades, he designed and built bridges, mills, warehouses, and public buildings across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. His work even touched portions of the Alabama State Capitol, including some of those graceful spiral staircases that visitors will stop and admire and get those selfies on. [laughs]

Yep, those. And he built massive lattice truss bridges over nearly every major river between Oconee in Georgia and onto Mississippi as well, and across the Chattahoochee itself at almost every port between Carroll County and Fort Gaines. In the mid-1850s, he built a bridge over the Chattahoochee between Newnan and Carrollton, this time accepting stock in the company as payment instead of a straightforward fee, a sign of just how much trust and standing he had earned as a free businessman. And his wife, Frances, and their five children, well, they eventually made a home right there at the bridge site, farming the land until the Union cavalry burned the span during the Civil War in 1864.

Now, the war years, well, they were complicated for Harris, as they were for so many, so not just only Harris. Columbus, well, it boomed economically supplying the Confederacy, and Harris, like other contractors in the area, he found himself pulled into that work, supplying, supplying timber, erecting buildings for the Confederate Navy, and the Alabama governor even pressed him into service against his will to place defense obstructions in the Alabama River. And yet, Harris later claimed Unionist sympathies, saying that the federal government owed him for property that the Union troops had taken. It’s a reminder that Black southerners navigating that war rarely had a luxury of simple, clean alliances. After the war and during Reconstruction, Harris even served two terms in the Alabama House of Representatives as a Republican. Though most accounts, he found politics far less interesting than his true calling. He was too busy still rebuilding wooden bridges, railroad bridges, mills, warehouses, and public buildings across a region still recovering from the war. Well, in 1872, Harris and his family settled in LaGrange, Georgia, where he continued designing and building until his death on May 28th in 1885. Newspapers in Atlanta, LaGrange, and Columbus all ran his obituary, praising his skills and marking him as someone who was very widely respected.

Now, here’s the part of the story that I really want you to sit with, because Harris’ legacy didn’t end with him. It kept building, quite literally, through his children. Harris and Frances had five children, Washington, Marshall, John Thomas, Ann Elizabeth, and George. After Harris passed, his sons carried the family trade forward under the name King Brothers Bridge Company, continuing to build bridges and structures across LaGrange, Atlanta, and East Alabama. So what’s left for us to see today? Well, honestly, less than you hope. Harris King built somewhere around 100 bridges in his lifetime. War, floods, and simple modern progress have claimed almost all of them, but not quite all, because if you make your way to Meriwether County, you can still drive across, or better yet, park and walk through the Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge, the only bridge still standing and still in use that is directly connected to Harris King himself. Standing inside it, looking up at that interlocking lattice of wooden planks, you’re looking at the very same engineering genius that once connected two states and helped bring a man to freedom. Head over to my website, travelwithanita.com, where you’ll find some photos of the Mulberry Street Cemetery project that was built in honor of Harris King. You’ll also find photos of my visit to the cemetery, as well as how you can visit LaGrange, Georgia. I’ll stop here, but I’ll be back in a minute here on Travel with Anita and Friends. Sometimes there’s a legacy that gets buried deep in the books, so much so that all of the greatness you don’t know about at all.

Welcome back to Travel with Anita and Friends, but here on today’s show, we are highlighting four Georgians that have done extraordinary things with their lives and made not only Georgia history, but American history. We’ve talked about Juliette Gordon Low with the American Girl Scouts. We’ve also talked about Henry Ford, who actually built a city, Richmond Hill, Georgia, and Horace King, who was a bridge builder, not only in Georgia, but across several states. Next up is Susie King Taylor. Her life was extraordinary, and her legacy still lives on. Here to help me tell the story is Hermina Glass Hill, the executive director of the Susie King Taylor Institute. Like myself, I was not familiar with, with Sus- with Susie King Taylor, so I’m thinking that there are probably some listeners who may not know her story as well, and why her life is so important to share.

She is Georgia’s Harriet Tubman.

Her life, having been enslaved, having been a freedom seeker

… having been, um, educated during the antebellum period, um, and then she goes on to become one of the first Black nurses, and m- and even more importantly, she, her life has this divine, um, providence that’s at work because not only does she self-liberate and flee and winds up in a contraband camp in this, on St. Simon’s Island, she becomes embedded in the very first army regiment in the history of our nation, which is the first South Carolina volunteers-

… which eventually becomes the 33rd United States Colored Troops. Now, they are the very first, during the American Civil War, they are the very first Black, colored, African-descended regiment. When the 1st, uh, when the 54th Massachusetts come down and, uh, they’re involved in, you know, Fort Wagner, they are the first Black regiment from the North.

Yes. But Hollywood has told the t- the, the, the TV version of it that they are the first Black regiment.

But actually, it was these formerly enslaved men, women, who fled from their plantations, who-

Right

… it just makes sense that they are the first to create-

… um, to become involved in what was called Hunter’s regiment. Hunter was a, a Northern abolitionist turned soldier. Uh, and, and, and she becomes embedded in that, bringing with her all sorts of cultural aspects, religion, songs, uh, food ways, of what we know today as Geechee culture.

She was, she was a part of that because her en- her entire life, we know it again today as the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, but she lived within that geographic space.

And so her life is just a, uh, just a fascinating saga, if you will. Um, every aspect of, of her life is, is actually very, very important and, and history-making.

It, I mean, it, it definitely is history-making, and it’s just so, it’s actually s- very inspiring even today.

You know, to hear of someone who against all odds was able to do all the things she was able to do. And, uh, I understand as well, she, didn’t she teach some of the soldiers to read and write?

Yes, she did, and-

See, that’s phenomenal right there, that she knew how to read and write.

And then she could teach it.

Right. Absolutely. So when she escapes and the Union Navy and Army are protecting the South Atlantic coast, which is called the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, she is rescued by one of those huge ships. And they, uh, the, the people, the freedom seekers who are picked up on these barrier islands, they are taken to St. Simon’s Island, where there is a Navy/Army base, but also there is a contraband camp in which, um, this term developed from, um, General Benjamin Butler, um, who, uh, who stated that, you know, the Emancipation Proclamation had not been issued yet. So they have escaped, but their legal status is not as free. Uh, but they are not slaves, ’cause they have left the plantation. So he termed, coined this contraband. Uh, they were contraband of war-

… until the Emancipation Proclamation. But on St. Simon’s Island-

That’s good… there is a contraband camp. These are people who have been following the Union Army. Um, they have set up camp where the Union Army is. And so in this dynamic period, um, schools are being established because the United States government has a responsibility to these people who are now following them.

And so she, a 13, 14-year-old girl, who has had six, seven years of secret education in Savannah, she’s asked, any, everybody is asked, “Is there anybody among us who can teach?” And of course, Susie King Taylor, who has had this incredible life getting an education when it was against the law to get an education, here she is a 14-year-old girl, 14-year-old girl, who’s had geography and literature and mathematics because she’s- That’s amazing.

Yes, it’s amazing. She’s teaching these people who have never touched a pencil before.

Who have never had a slate or chalk or, you know, been able to, um, uh, access the written … heard, and she begins teaching them. So that’s her first, um, uh, point of historical significance. She becomes one of the… She actually becomes Georgia’s first federally funded teacher during the war, because the, the War Department is furnishing all of the supplies that she needs to t- teach these, uh, um, freedom seekers who were in the contraband camp on St. Simons Island. So it’s just incredible. Susie King Taylor and her grandmother were enslaved here in Liberty County.

Um, on the east end of the county, uh, on a small place called Isle of Wight. It’s a small island within the, um, eastern mainland of, uh, Liberty County. Um, heavily populated because there are numerous plantations, and she and her grandmother, um, they, along with her parents and her siblings, as well as other, uh, people in their quarters or living community, were enslaved, but they were just that. They were a community, and she actually was from a relatively intact family. She had her parents, her immediate family. She had her grandmother, which is very typical in our Black community, that our grandmother-

… was a part of our household.

Um, and, and they were extremely close. So Liberty County on the Isle of Wight, which is here in Midway, um, is where, um, she was from. And recently, um, the Liberty County Board of Commissioners, the Liberty County government, has, um, invested, uh, a significant amount of, um, funds into a park and renamed the park Susie King Taylor Freedom Park-

… on the island in which she was born. And so, uh, we are just really excited about, um, this park that is named for freedom, named for someone who was born in, uh, uh, born enslaved on that island, lived on that island, and then when the war actually takes place, her big mama, her grandmama Dolly, sends her right back to Liberty County on the Isle of Wight, um, to wait out the war. Uh, but, uh, she doesn’t wait out the war. She takes the risks, and it is from this place on the Isle of Wight that she actually escapes. And so with this new park, the Susie King Taylor Freedom Park, as it relates to America 250, we are celebrating freedom in a completely, from a completely different perspective, um, from, you know, the, the, the second American revolution, uh, revolutionary war, which was the Civil War, where-

Right… life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is something that is achievable and does happen- … because we know that the Emancipation Proclamation is issued, and then eventually, um, the end of slavery in 1865. And so she is the, um, the epitome, a perfect example of, um, this iconic figure, um, who seizes liberty at her own terms. She takes the risk, and we’re just so happy that Liberty County has named this park in her honor-

Absolutely

… um, uh, and in honor of freedom.

Mm-hmm. And there, there’s a place now where people can go and actually stand-

Mm-hmm

… and, and, and read about her and know about her, uh, today. So it is definitely spreading her, her story, uh, wide and far.

Yes.

Head over to my website, travelwithanita.com, where you can hear the full interview that I had with Hermina. We talked about a lot of things, more than I could fit in one segment. Also, head over to the website susiekingtaylorinstitute.org where you can learn more about visiting the museum. Uh, thanks for joining me today. I’ll be back in two weeks with another great destination and story here on Travel with Anita and Friends. Bye bye.

Version 1.0.0

[SOUND: River current, low ambient water sound. A single hammer strike on wood, echoing. Then silence.]

ANNITA (V.O.)

Somewhere along the Chattahoochee River, there’s a bridge that isn’t there anymore. Most of them aren’t. Floods took some. War took others. Time took the rest.

But the man who built them? History almost took him too.

[SOUND: River fades under.]

This is Quarter Miles Travel. I’m Annita. And today, we’re going looking for Horace King.

[SOUND: Soft acoustic guitar bed, low, under narration]

ANNITA (V.O.):

Before we get to the man, I want you to understand the river.

The Chattahoochee cuts a long, winding line between Georgia and Alabama, nearly 450 miles of water that, in the early 1800s, was less a landmark than an obstacle. If you wanted to move goods, families, or an entire town’s commerce from one side to the other, you needed a way across. And building something strong enough to survive that river, its floods, its currents, its width, required real engineering skill.

In the growing antebellum South, that skill was in short supply. The man who had it in greater measure than almost anyone else in the region was, by law, someone’s property.

[SOUND: Guitar]

ANNITA (V.O.):

Horace King was born enslaved on September 8th, 1807, in Chesterfield District, South Carolina. His ancestry was African, European, and Catawba, a heritage as layered as the structures he’d spend his life constructing.

In the 1820s, contractor John Godwin purchased Horace and brought him to Alabama, to help build bridges across the Chattahoochee. Together, in 1832, they completed the first bridge to span the river and connect Georgia and Alabama at what’s now Columbus and Phenix City.

Even in bondage, Horace’s intellect was unmistakable. He mastered the Town lattice truss, a design patented just a few years earlier, using interlocking wooden planks pegged together in a diagonal pattern, strong enough to carry enormous weight with real structural grace. It was a relatively new technique even among trained engineers. Horace didn’t just learn it, he mastered it well enough to teach it, adapt it, and improve on it.

By adulthood, he wasn’t just following instructions on a job site. He was managing entire work crews. He was solving structural problems that stumped men with formal engineering educations he never had access to.

Godwin recognized what he had. He allowed Horace to travel and build alone across the region, an almost unheard-of freedom of movement for an enslaved man in the Deep South.

[SOUND: Guitar fades]

ANNITA (V.O.):

In 1846, with Godwin’s support, the Alabama legislature passed a special act approving Horace King’s manumission.

Sit with that for a moment. A state legislature, in a state built on the institution of slavery, passed a law to free one specific man, because his talent had become too significant, too visible, too undeniable to leave unrecognized.

He didn’t step into freedom uncertain of his path. He stepped into it already renowned, a craftsman actively shaping the built environment of two states, about to expand into a third.

Over the next four decades, King designed and built bridges, mills, and public buildings across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. He constructed massive Town lattice truss bridges across nearly every major river between west Georgia and northeastern Mississippi, including almost every crossing of the Chattahoochee between Carroll County and Fort Gaines. In the mid-1850s, he built Moore’s Creek Bridge over the Chattahoochee, between Newnan and Carrollton. He worked on portions of the Alabama State Capitol, including intricate spiral staircases that still draw visitors’ awe today.

By some counts, across his lifetime, he built more than 100 bridges.

A story worth sitting with: for years, many of King’s structures were credited only to the contractors or firms that employed him — a common erasure for Black craftsmen of the era, one that often continued well after emancipation. Part of why we tell this story today is to put his name back where it belonged all along.

[SOUND: Music softens, holds low]

ANNITA (V.O.):

Here’s the hard truth about building things out of wood, along a river prone to flooding, in a region that would soon be torn apart by war: most of it doesn’t survive.

Most of what Horace King built is gone now. Lost to war. Lost to flood. Lost to the simple passage of modern development, as newer bridges replaced the old ones he’d built by hand.

Of the roughly hundred covered bridges he constructed, only one remains standing and still in use today, the Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge, in Meriwether County, Georgia.

Horace King died in LaGrange, Georgia, in 1885. His five children carried his work forward after him, including his son, George King, who continued building in his father’s tradition. In 2004, the Horace King Overlook was dedicated at Riverfront Park in Albany, Georgia, a permanent marker for a man whose actual bridges mostly didn’t survive to mark themselves.

[SOUND: soft music]

ANNITA (V.O.):

If you want to stand where Horace King stood, you still can.

Start in LaGrange, Georgia, at Mulberry Street Cemetery, recently restored, with accessible pathways and interpretive markers throughout the grounds. King’s family gravesite is there, marked with a dignified granite monument. And just steps away stands something remarkable: a section of an actual covered bridge, rebuilt by his son George and now permanently installed at the cemetery, after decades on display at Callaway Gardens.

It is, quite literally, a piece of what he built, still here, still standing, still telling his story to anyone who takes the time to look.

Seasonal walking tours in LaGrange often weave King’s story into a broader exploration of the town’s history, a chance to turn a quiet Georgia visit into something that connects directly back to the man himself.

[SOUND: Music swells slightly, then settles]

ANNITA (V.O.):

Horace King built the crossings that let a divided landscape become passable — river by river, county by county, state by state. He did it while enslaved. He did it after freedom. And most of what he built didn’t survive him.

But he did. His name did. And today, we made sure you heard it too.

We say his name, and we tell his story.

To visit the Mulberry Street Cemetery visit the website www.VisitLaGrange.com

Photos

Quarter Miles Travel shares a powerful story – Susie King Taylor – From Slavery to Civil War to her own school. Born into slavery in Liberty County, Georgia, in 1848, Susie King Taylor taught herself to read in secret, at a time when it was illegal for an enslaved child to do so.

After escaping to freedom in 1862, she became the first Black woman to teach openly in a school for African American children in Georgia — and then served through the Civil War as a nurse and laundress with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, tending wounded soldiers in the field.

In 1902, she published her memoir, making her the first African American woman to write and publish an account of her own experience during the Civil War.

Her story is finally getting the recognition it deserves — right here in her home state, in Hinesville, Georgia.

And to help us tell it properly, I’m joined by the woman who has spent years bringing that story home: the founder and executive director of the Susie King Taylor Women’s Institute and Ecology Center, and curator of the Susie King Taylor Museum in Hinesville — Hermina Glass-Hill.

Hermina, welcome to the show.

Interview with Hermina

She wrote it all down. Her own memoir — one of the only firsthand accounts by a Black woman who lived the Civil War from inside a military camp, not from a distance.

And still — most people have never heard her name.

This is Quarter Miles Travel. Today, we’re tracing the coastline she once called home — the islands, the schools, the quiet places where a girl with a stolen education became a woman history almost forgot.

If you want to walk where she walked, start in Liberty County. Waterways, historic landmarks, and the Georgia coast she knew are still waiting to be explored. Plan your trip at libertycounty — that’s L-I-B-E-R-T-Y-C-O-U-N-T-Y dot org.

Go to my website, Travel With Annita dot com, for photos of the museum.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast, and share it with other history buffs — and anyone who loves finding the little-known stories.

We say her name, and we tell her story.

Quarter Miles Travel and the U.S. Mint’s Georgia National Historic Site quarter highlight the beautiful Georgia coast.  The marine life, shore birds, natural habitat and the space where many Blacks have called the area home for generations. Among the sweet grasses, dunes and Atlantic Ocean shores men and women like Susie King Taylor have built their lives and left a legacy.

Photos from the Susie King Taylor Museum in Hinesville, GA

Susie King Taylor’s Autobiography which you can purchase on Amazon.

Susie King Taylor’s autobiography

33rd US Colored Troops

*Affiliate link to Amazon.

There were many stories on the wagon trail. To understand what Joe did, you first have to understand what he wasn’t supposed to do at all. He wasn’t a soldier. Nobody swore him in. Nobody handed him a rank.

He was, in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the man who owned him, property, a twenty-year-old enslaved man named Joe, body servant to a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant colonel named William Barret Travis.

Joe pressed his master’s clothes. Saddled his horse. Drove his carriage into town. That was the job. That was supposed to be the whole of his story.Here on Quarter Miles Travel – Well say his name and we tell his story.  

In December of 1835, Travis was ordered to the Texas frontier, to a small town built around a crumbling Spanish mission, San Antonio de Béxar. He brought Joe with him. Not as a companion. As equipment – as property. They arrived on February 5th, 1836.

Within three weeks, everything about that place would become permanent carved into American memory for two hundred years.

The mission was called the Alamo.

On February 23rd, Mexican forces under General Antonio López de Santa Anna poured into San Antonio far faster than the Texans expected. Santa Anna raised a blood-red flag over the bell tower of San Fernando Church, a message with only one meaning: no mercy, no quarter, no surrender terms.

Travis answered with a single cannon shot. For the next thirteen days, roughly two hundred men, Travis, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and the volunteers who’d gathered behind the Alamo’s crumbling walls, held out against a force that outnumbered them many times over.

And for thirteen days, Joe was there too.He didn’t get a say in whether to stay and fight or to run. He shared every hour of it anyway, the cold, the hunger, the exhaustion, the slow realization that the reinforcements everyone hoped for weren’t coming.

Historians will tell you plainly: an enslaved man’s presence during a siege like this wasn’t unusual for the era. What’s unusual, what’s remarkable is that we know what Joe experienced at all. Because almost nobody in that position ever got to speak afterward. Joe did.

Before dawn on March 6th, 1836, the assault came. By Joe’s own later account, he was asleep in the same room as Travis when the alarm went up. Travis grabbed his rifle and his sword. He shouted for Joe to follow him. They ran together to the north wall.

Travis called out to his men, one last order to stand and fight. He fired his weapon. Almost in the same instant, he was shot and fell inside the compound.

Joe watched his master go down. And then he did the only thing that gave him any chance at all, he pulled back into one of the interior buildings and kept firing from cover as the walls came apart around him.

The battle by this point wasn’t a battle in any organized sense anymore. It was hand to hand. Rifle butts, knives, bayonets. Men fighting for their own lives with whatever was in their hands. When Mexican soldiers finally broke all the way through, they moved building to building. And they called out, demanding that any Black men inside reveal themselves.

Joe stepped out. Even so, in the chaos, a soldier struck him with a pistol and drove a bayonet toward him before a Mexican officer intervened and stopped it.

He was one of only a small handful of people left alive inside those walls.The only adult male defender to survive.

Joe was taken into Béxar as a captive. He watched a formal review of the Mexican army, a display, really, meant to communicate total victory. And then he was brought before Santa Anna himself. Joe apparently spoke some Spanish. So Santa Anna questioned him directly, about the size of the Texan forces, about Sam Houston’s army, about what was left to stand between the Mexican military and the rest of Texas.

He was also asked to help identify the bodies of Travis and Bowie among the Alamo’s dead. Then, for reasons historians still debate,  he was released.

Think about the position he was in. A prisoner. Interrogated by the general who’d just ordered the deaths of everyone he’d spent thirteen days beside. No protection. No guarantee that walking out of that room meant walking out alive.

And somehow, it was Joe, not a Texan officer, not a diplomat, who became one of the only living sources of truth about what had actually happened inside the Alamo.

Joe made his way to Gonzales, traveling alongside Susanna Dickinson wife of a fallen Alamo defender, and her infant daughter. Together they delivered the news to Sam Houston and the gathering Texan forces there: the Alamo had fallen. Everyone inside was dead.

It was the first confirmation Texas had. Houston, realizing Santa Anna’s army was still advancing, ordered Gonzales burned and its people evacuated east, the beginning of what Texans still  call the Runaway Scrape.

Joe kept moving. He arrived at Washington-on-the-Brazos around March 20th, the exact place where, just days earlier, delegates had signed Texas’s declaration of independence. Now those same men crowded around a twenty-year-old enslaved man to hear, in his own words, how their friends had died.

A Texas official named William Fairfax Gray was in that room. He wrote in his diary that evening, describing Joe as composed, careful, and his word,  modest in how he told it.

Gray’s diary entry became one of the very first written records of the battle. And it was built almost entirely on what Joe said. This is the part worth sitting with. ,,,,,,The version of the Alamo that got passed down, the one in the textbooks, the movies, the folklore, that version exists because a young enslaved man walked into a room full of powerful white men four days after his master’s death and told them the truth, carefully and clearly, while still legally considered someone’s property. Joe didn’t just witness history. Joe *authored* it.

Here’s where the story turns. Despite everything, despite being celebrated for weeks as the last man standing, despite giving Texas its founding legend in his own voice, Joe received no freedom. No pension. No formal thanks from the government he’d just helped bring into existence.

He was returned to the Travis estate. Just property again, now under a new name on a new ledger,  the estate’s executor, a man named John Rice Jones.

He waited exactly one year. On April 21st, 1837, the anniversary of the battle that finally won Texas its independence, Joe escaped. Two stolen horses, an unnamed companion, and whatever nerve it takes to run twice: once from a battlefield, once from the country he’d helped build.

A reward notice ran in the newspaper for three months. Then it just…stopped. Most historians read that the way it sounds: Joe made it.

What happened after is contested, a little heartbreaking in how little of it survives. Some records suggest he reached Alabama and told the rest of the Travis family how William died. Some say he was seen in Austin, or San Antonio, decades later, an old man with an extraordinary story nobody thought to fully write down while he could still tell it.

And then, without ceremony, without a marked grave anyone has ever confirmed, Joe disappears from the record completely.

So why build an entire episode, an entire stretch of road, around one man’s testimony? Because the Alamo isn’t just a battle. It’s one of the most repeated, most mythologized stories in American history. And for generations, the person most responsible for how we know that story got reduced to a single line in the footnotes: *”Travis’s slave, Joe, also survived.” That’s not an account of a man. That’s an erasure wearing the shape of one sentence.

Understanding Joe’s role means understanding two things at once, and holding them together without letting either one cancel out the other. First,  his testimony has real, lasting historical weight. Diaries, government records, and the earliest published accounts of the Alamo’s fall all trace back through what Joe told officials in those first days.

Without him, we would know dramatically less about how Travis died, how the final assault unfolded, and what those last hours inside the walls  actually looked like. Second, none of that mattered enough, in 1836, to grant him his freedom. Both of those things are true. Texas history was built, in part, on the memory and the voice of a man history refused to fully credit or free.

That’s the whole of what we’re chasing out here, mile after mile. Not the version of the story that fits neatly on a monument. The whole version. The one that makes you stop the car, get out, and stand quietly on ground that’s still asking to be understood correctly.

Next time you hear someone say “Remember the Alamo” ……remember that the reason we can remember it accurately at all …..is because one young man survived long enough, and was brave enough, to say what he saw out loud.

His name was Joe.

This has been Quarter Miles Travel.

**”We say his name, and we tell his story.”**

Sketch of how the Alamo would have looked after battle

Sketch of Joe’s impression

The Alamo today

Hello, hello and welcome  aboard Travel with Annita.

I am so glad you’re riding with me today — because today we are going somewhere I have wanted to take you for a long time. We are going West. Not just geographically west, but historically west. We are going to the heart of one of the most powerful, most misunderstood, and most genuinely American stories ever told.

We are talking about the American cowboy.

Now, when I say “cowboy,” I want you to set aside for a moment everything Hollywood ever showed you. Set aside John Wayne. Set aside the rhinestone shirts and the singing cowboy. Set aside the lone white man on a white horse riding into the sunset. Because the real story — the actual, documented, fascinating history of the American cowboy — is so much bigger, so much richer, and so much more diverse than any movie ever captured. And today, we are going to tell it right.

Let’s start at the very beginning — and I mean the very beginning.

Before there was ever an American cowboy, there was a vaquero. Say that word with me — vaquero. It comes from the Spanish word vaca, meaning cow, and it described a skilled horseman who managed cattle across the open range. The vaqueros were Mexican. They were indigenous. They were mestizo — a mix of Spanish and Native ancestry — and they were doing this work in Texas, in California, in what would become the American Southwest, a full century before the famous cattle drives that most of us associate with cowboy history even began.

Think about that for a moment. A century before. When the Spanish established missions in Texas in the early 1700s, they weren’t just building churches — they were building ranching operations. By 1721, there were nearly 5,000 head of cattle in the San Antonio River Valley alone, tended by vaqueros who had developed their craft into something extraordinary. By the early 1800s, California missions were operating herds that averaged 40,000 cattle each. This was an enormous, sophisticated cattle industry — and it was entirely run by people whose names Hollywood never put on a movie poster.

And here is something important: every single tool we associate with the American cowboy came directly from the vaquero. The saddle with the raised horn for roping — Mexican. The lasso — that’s the vaquero’s reata. The chaps protecting a rider’s legs — from the Spanish chaparajos. The corral, the rodeo, the bronco, the rancho — all Spanish words, adopted wholesale by Anglo settlers who learned this craft by watching, by working alongside, and eventually by hiring the people who had been doing it for generations. By the 1870s, those tools and those techniques had become so common across Texas that everyone called them simply “American” — and the vaqueros who invented them got quietly written out of the story.

Now. The moment that changed everything — that turned the cowboy from a regional ranch worker into a genuine American icon — was the Civil War. And specifically, what happened right after it.

When Confederate Texas men left to fight, the people left behind tended those ranching operations. They were largely enslaved African Americans and vaqueros from Mexico. They kept those ranches going. And when the war ended, when emancipation came, those ranches sat in the middle of an astonishing situation: millions of longhorn cattle had roamed wild across Texas during the war years, largely unbranded and unclaimed. At the same time, the expanding railroad network was pushing north into Kansas and Missouri, and the cities of the North and East were desperately hungry for beef.

So you had cattle. You had markets. And you had a distance of five hundred miles or more between them. And the solution — the human solution — was the cowboy.

Between 1865 and roughly 1895, an estimated ten million Texas longhorns were driven north along famous routes like the Chisholm Trail, the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and the Western Trail. These cattle drives became the defining image of the American West. A trail crew typically included a trail boss, eight to twelve cowboys, a cook — who was arguably the most important person on the entire drive — and a wrangler managing the extra horses. They covered ten to fifteen miles a day. They crossed rivers with thousands of panicking cattle. They rode through lightning storms with no shelter. They worked in dust so thick you couldn’t see the rider in front of you. It was hard, physical, unglamorous work — and it built the cattle industry that fed a nation.

But here is the most important thing to understand about that era: those trail crews were not the all-white crews Hollywood showed you. They were Mexican vaqueros. They were Native American riders, particularly through Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma — men who knew that land better than any trail boss on earth. They were formerly enslaved Black men who had learned to ride and rope and read cattle under the cruelest conditions imaginable, and who carried those skills into freedom and onto the trails. The American cowboy was, from the very beginning, a diverse workforce. A mixed crew. A collection of people from different backgrounds who shared one thing: they could do the work.

That era ended as quickly as it began. By the mid-1890s, three things had killed the long cattle drive. Railroads pushed deeper into Texas, eliminating the need to drive cattle hundreds of miles north. Barbed wire — invented in 1874 — allowed farmers to fence off the open range that cattle drives depended on. And a disease called Texas Fever, spread by longhorn cattle, caused surrounding states to close their borders to Texas herds. Within a generation, the working cowboy’s golden age was over.

But here is the remarkable thing. The cowboy didn’t disappear when the work ended. He became something even more powerful. He became a symbol.

Dime novels romanticized him. Wild West shows turned his work into spectacle. Buffalo Bill Cody took a theatrical version of cowboy life all the way to Europe — before the King and Queen of England — and made the American cowboy a global icon. And then Hollywood took over, and for the next century, the American cowboy became the single most powerful image of American identity in the world.

That image stood for something. It stood for self-reliance — the idea that one person, on horseback, in open country, could make their own way in the world. It stood for moral clarity — the hero who knew right from wrong and acted on it, no matter the cost. It stood for a relationship with the land that urban, industrial America was rapidly losing but desperately wanted to hold onto. The cowboy became the way America told itself the story of who it was: tough, independent, honest, free.

The power of that symbol has never faded. In our own time, the television series Yellowstone sent a shockwave through American popular culture by telling a contemporary cowboy story — a ranching family fighting to hold their land, their traditions, their way of life — and audiences couldn’t get enough. Western wear has surged in popularity to levels not seen since the 1980s. Searches for cowboy boots and Stetson hats increased by 67% in a single year. The cowboy is having a moment in 2026 that would have surprised no one who understood how deep this symbol runs in the American soul.

Because here is the truth: the cowboy is not just a historical figure. He is not just a fashion trend. He is the way America has always processed its own story — the frontier, the open land, the individual against the wilderness, the crew working together across difference to get the cattle to market. It is a story about work. About endurance. About people who came from vastly different places and built something together on the open range.

And we have only begun to tell it.

Because when we come back after the break, we are going to go deeper into that story — and we are going to meet the men whose names were left off the movie poster, whose faces were left out of the films, but whose hands built one quarter of the entire cattle industry that made the American West. We are going to talk about the Black cowboys. And I have a special treat for you — after a brief introduction, you are going to hear directly from historian and professor Ronald Davis, who has spent years documenting this history and giving it the recognition it has always deserved.

Stay with me. We’ll be right back.

Welcome back to Travel with Annita.

Before the break, I told you that the American cowboy was always more diverse than Hollywood showed us. I told you the cattle drives were built by vaqueros, by Native American riders, and by Black cowboys who made up a full quarter of the workforce on those famous trails. Now I want to spend a few minutes with you on that last part — because the story of the Black cowboy is not a footnote to American cowboy history.

It is where American cowboy history begins.

Before the Civil War. Before emancipation. Before the Chisholm Trail was ever blazed. There were Black men on horseback in Texas, riding herd on thousands of cattle. They were enslaved. Their labor was stolen. Their expertise was not their own to claim. But the knowledge they built — the horsemanship, the roping, the cattle reading, the understanding of the open range — that belonged to them. No one could enslave a man’s skill. And those skills would shape the entire cattle economy of the American West.

In the early 1850s, with one third of Texas’s population comprising enslaved people, African Americans were the majority of cowboys in Texas. Not a notable minority. The majority. They worked alongside vaqueros from Mexico in the Gulf Coast brush country, catching and tending wild cattle, breaking horses as young as ten or eleven years old, developing expertise that Anglo ranchers depended on entirely. The plantation economy of the South needed cotton. The ranch economy of Texas needed Black cowboys. And it got them — by force, by bondage, by theft of their labor and their freedom.

And then emancipation came. And those men — skilled, experienced, knowledgeable — had a choice that most freed Black Americans in the South did not have. They could ride. They could rope. They could go West. And many of them did. They joined the cattle drives. They became indispensable. They became legendary — though history would spend the next century pretending otherwise.

Their story is the American story. Their story is the Western story. It is a story of expertise earned under the worst conditions imaginable, carried into freedom, and used to build one of the most iconic industries in American history.

And I am honored — I am genuinely honored — to bring you a conversation with the man who can tell that story better than anyone I know. Professor Ronald Davis, historian, scholar, and a passionate defender of the truth about who built the American West.

Dr. Ronald W. Davis, II — welcome to Travel with Annita. The floor is yours.

Interested in reading Nat Love’s book?  The Life and Adventures of Nat Love

Photo courtesy of U.S. Mint

July 10th, 1777. Middle of the night. A small rowboat slips through British-controlled waters off the coast of Rhode Island. Forty men are packed into a handful of boats, oars wrapped in cloth to muffle the sound. Their target: a British general, asleep in a farmhouse a mile inland from his own troops.

They land. They creep to the door. And when it doesn’t open fast enough, a man named Jack Sisson puts his own head down and rams it through. No shots fired. No alarm raised. British General Richard Prescott is dragged out of bed in his nightshirt and rowed back across enemy lines as a prisoner of war.

Jack Sisson was an enslaved man from Rhode Island. And if you’ve never heard his name before; you’re not alone. Because for two hundred and fifty years, stories like his have been sitting in pension files and church records and old muster rolls, waiting for someone to go looking.

I’m Annita Thomas, and this is Patriots in the Shadows, the story of the thousands of Black soldiers, sailors, spies, and guerrilla fighters who fought in the American Revolution. On both sides. In every colony. And in almost every major battle you learned about in school, even if nobody mentioned they were there.

Let’s get into it.

Before we even get to the war itself, we have to go back five years earlier to March 5th, 1770. Boston.

A crowd is gathered outside the Custom House, taunting a group of British soldiers. Tensions have been simmering for months. And then, someone gives the order or maybe no one does, historians still argue about it, and the soldiers open fire into the crowd.

The first man to die is Crispus Attucks. A dockworker, part African, part Native American, and by most accounts, right at the front of that crowd. He becomes the first casualty of what history will call the Boston Massacre, five years before a single shot of the actual war is fired.

Fast forward to April 19th, 1775. Lexington Green. The war has officially begun. Among the colonial militia standing on that field is a man named Prince Estabrook, enslaved but permitted to serve. When the British volley hits the line, Estabrook goes down wounded. One of the very first men, of any race, hurt in the Revolutionary War.

There were other Black militiamen at Concord that same day. We don’t have most of their names. That’s going to be a theme in this episode, and it’s worth sitting with for a second. The men who are remembered are often remembered by accident: a wound, a pension claim, an officer who happened to write something down. For every Crispus Attucks, there were probably a dozen men whose entire service is just… gone.

Two months after Lexington, you get Bunker Hill, one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war. And this is where the historical record actually gets a little better, because so many officers on both sides wrote detailed accounts afterward.

At least three dozen Black soldiers fought at Bunker Hill. Three dozen. Let that sink in for a second, next time someone shows you a painting of that battle with an all-white cast.

Peter Salem, a man who’d been freed by his enslaver specifically so he could enlist, is credited with firing the shot that killed British Major John Pitcairn. This is the same officer who, weeks earlier at Lexington, had given the order to fire on the militia. Salem didn’t stop there either. he went on to fight at Saratoga and Monmouth.

Then there’s Salem Poor. Also formerly enslaved. Poor fought so effectively at Bunker Hill, he’s credited with killing a British lieutenant colonel. that fourteen American officers, after the battle, signed a joint petition to the Massachusetts legislature. Fourteen officers, vouching for one soldier. They called him, and I’m going to read this because it’s worth hearing exactly as written: “a brave and gallant soldier” who “behaved like an experienced officer.” That document still exists. It’s one of the only formal, individual battlefield commendations we have for a Black soldier in the entire war.

And there’s Barzillai Lew, six-foot-tall free Black cooper from Massachusetts, who served as a fifer and drummer. Story goes, during the actual fighting, Lew kept morale up by playing “Yankee Doodle” on his fife while the battle raged around him. He’d go on to serve at Fort Ticonderoga and was present at Saratoga when British General Burgoyne surrendered. His powder horn is still sitting in a museum in Chicago today. And here’s a fun fact,  in 1943, Duke Ellington wrote a piece of music in his honor, after learning his story from his own high school teacher.

Cuff Whittemore fought so bravely that day, he was allowed to keep a sword he’d captured off a British officer. Titus Coburn, Alexander Ames, Blaney Grusha, Cato Howe, Seymour Burr,  all there too. All in the fight. Most of them known to us today only because somebody, somewhere, wrote their name down on a piece of paper that survived two hundred and fifty years.

Now let’s go back to Jack Sisson – the guy who broke down a door with his own skull. Sisson served in what became known as the First Rhode Island Regiment,  nicknamed, at the time, the “Black Regiment.” It was formed in 1778, when Rhode Island, desperate for troops, started allowing enslaved men to enlist in exchange for their freedom.

This regiment fought at the Battle of Rhode Island later that year, and, this is the part that gets me every time, they were part of the actual assault that took British redoubts nine and ten at Yorktown in 1781. That’s the battle that ended the war.

There’s an account from a French officer who observed them and said they were some of the most sharply dressed, precisely drilled troops he’d ever seen. And there’s a moment, May 1781,  when their commander, Colonel Christopher Greene, is caught in a surprise attack. And according to one early historian, the British swords only reached him after cutting through the bodies of the Black soldiers who had surrounded him to protect him. Every single one of them died defending their commander.

That’s the unit Jack Sisson came out of. And his own operation — the Prescott capture — happened a full year before the regiment was even officially formed. He was already doing the work.

Let’s talk about espionage for a second, because this is where some of the highest-stakes stories in the whole war come from.

James Armistead, later known as James Armistead Lafayette, was enslaved in Virginia. With his enslaver’s permission, he volunteered to go behind British lines, posing as a runaway. He gained the trust of British officers, including, briefly, Benedict Arnold himself, and started feeding them false information, while secretly reporting real troop movements back to the Marquis de Lafayette.

His intelligence was critical in trapping Cornwallis at Yorktown. Lafayette personally wrote testimony afterward praising Armistead’s service, and Armistead used that document decades later to petition for his own freedom. Which tells you something pretty stark about what “freedom” actually meant after the war. Even the men who helped win it had to go argue their case with paperwork.

Saul Matthews, another enslaved Virginian, also served as a spy for the Continental Army, and he’s one of the rare cases where freedom came fast and direct. The Virginia legislature freed him by formal legislative act, specifically citing his wartime service.

Okay.  Here’s where the story gets more complicated. Because not every Black soldier fought for American independence. And honestly? A lot of them had a pretty compelling reason not to.

In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the British royal governor of Virginia, made an offer: any enslaved man owned by a Patriot who was willing to fight for the Crown would be freed. Later, in 1779, the British expanded that offer even further. And tens of thousands of enslaved people took them up on it. Historians estimate around 20,000 African Americans sided with the British over the course of the war roughly double the number who fought for the Patriots.

The most famous of them might be Colonel Tye. Born Titus Cornelius, enslaved in New Jersey, he escaped to British lines after Dunmore’s proclamation and became – by pretty much every account – the most feared Black military commander of the entire war, on either side. He led a mixed-race guerrilla unit called the Black Brigade, raiding Patriot militias across New Jersey and New York, and at his peak, he commanded around 800 men. He died in 1780 from an infected wound. But for a few years there, Colonel Tye was one of the most effective military leaders in the entire conflict, and almost nobody talks about him.

Harry Washington, and yes, that’s the same last name for a reason, was enslaved by George Washington himself, at Mount Vernon. He escaped in 1776, joined Dunmore’s forces, and served as a Black Loyalist for the rest of the war, including at the siege of Yorktown. Which means Harry Washington was standing on a battlefield, fighting against the army led by the man who used to own him.

Boston King, another Black Loyalist, actually left us something rare: a written first-hand account of his own experience. After the war, along with thousands of other Black Loyalists, he was evacuated to Nova Scotia, and later resettled in the new British colony of Sierra Leone.

The Southern colonies tell their own version of this story — and it’s shaped heavily by the fact that states like Georgia initially banned enslaved men from militia service completely.

Austin Dabney became Georgia’s most celebrated Black Patriot soldier almost by accident. He was sent to fight as a substitute for his enslaver, which, ironically, was the only legal way for an enslaved man to serve in Georgia at the time. He fought as an artilleryman and was badly wounded at the Battle of Kettle Creek in 1779. His service was so distinguished that afterward, he was formally freed, given a federal pension, and became the only Black Patriot in Georgia known to receive a state land grant.

But here’s the darker footnote: because Georgia pushed the burden of service onto enslaved substitutes, we know there were more men like Dabney,  sent to fight in place of their enslavers  whose names were simply never recorded. We’ll never fully know how many.

Virginia’s records are a little richer, thanks to surviving pension files. Reuben Bird enlisted at sixteen years old in the Virginia Regiment of Dragoons, but because he was free and Black, his own regiment wouldn’t let him fight directly, so he served in support roles instead. James Carter enlisted twice, once as a garrison guard, and then again as an artillery private, fighting at the Battle of Camden and the siege of Yorktown. And one Virginia brigade, under General Peter Muhlenberg, ended up nearly 8 percent Black, one of the most racially integrated units in the entire Continental Army.

William Flora was hailed as a hero at the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775, one of the first major Patriot victories of the whole war. Fifteen documented Black Patriots fought at the Battle of Cowpens in 1781. And Spencer Bolton fought under Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” in the South Carolina swamps.

I want to close out the individual stories with one that always gets me: James Forten.

Forten was just fourteen years old when he joined the crew of a Philadelphia privateer. He was captured by the British and spent months as a prisoner aboard the HMS Jersey, a notorious prison ship where thousands of American captives died from disease and starvation. Fourteen years old. On a death ship.

He survived. He came home to Philadelphia. And he went on to build one of the city’s most successful sailmaking businesses, becoming a major abolitionist and philanthropist for the rest of his life. Of everyone we’ve talked about today, Forten might be the closest thing we have to a story where the postwar chapter actually matches the promise of the war itself.

Most veterans didn’t get that chapter. And, yes, these soldiers are veterans.

So here’s the hard part. Here’s the part where the story doesn’t wrap up neatly.

For all of this:  Bunker Hill, Yorktown, Saratoga, the spies, the raids, the prison ships, most of these men did not get what they were promised.

Loyalist veterans, like Harry Washington and Boston King, did get their freedom. But it came with exile – Nova Scotia, and for a lot of them, eventually Sierra Leone. Patriot veterans had it worse in some ways. A few, like Austin Dabney, got land and pensions. Most came home to find their promised freedom delayed, denied, or tangled up in decades of legal petitioning.

And then in 1792,  just nine years after the war ended, Congress passed a law formally banning African Americans from military service. A policy that stuck around for generations.

When pension programs finally opened up in 1818, and again in 1832, a lot of these men were already dead. Their widows spent years fighting to prove their husbands’ service even happened.

Here’s a number that I think says it all. Black soldiers made up roughly 4 percent of Patriot manpower. But on average, they served four and a half years each, that’s eight times longer than the average white soldier’s term. Which means, in terms of actual time spent fighting and supporting this war, their contribution was closer to a quarter of the entire Patriot war effort.

Four percent of the people. A quarter of the effort. And, for most of them, a fraction of the reward.

So…..Crispus Attucks, falling in a Boston street five years before the war even started. James Forten, surviving a prison ship as a teenager. Peter Salem, firing the shot that killed the officer from Lexington. Colonel Tye, leading raids against the very army Salem was fighting for. Jack Sisson, breaking down a general’s door with his own head.

Two sides. One war. And a version of American history that’s been sitting in the footnotes for two hundred and fifty years, waiting for someone to read it out loud.

That’s the story. Or….most of it, anyway. There are dozens more names in the show notes for this episode if you want to go deeper, soldiers we didn’t have time to get into today, but whose service is just as real, just as documented, and just as worth remembering.

Thanks for listening … until next time!

The story of Black soldiers in the American Revolution is not a single story at all. It is Crispus Attucks falling in a Boston street five years before the war began, and James Forten surviving a British prison ship as a teenager. It is Peter Salem firing the shot that killed a British officer at Bunker Hill, and Colonel Tye leading raids against the very army Salem fought for. It is Jack Sisson breaking down a general’s door with his own skull, and Reuben Bird, barred from combat because of his race, serving anyway. Their war was fought on both sides of a line that history has often flattened into a single narrative, and their reward, more often than not, was a freedom that arrived late, incomplete, or not at all.

What remains consistent across every name recovered from the margins of muster rolls and pension files is this: the American Revolution was never fought by white colonists alone, and its full history cannot be told without them.

Below in this appendix are names of many brave soldiers who stepped forward to fight for freedom. These veterans deserve recognition and honor for their service.

Appendix: Quick-Reference Summary

Listed alphabetically for easy reference.

Alexander Ames — Fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, one of roughly three dozen Black soldiers present at the battle.

Austin Dabney — Enslaved artilleryman who fought as a substitute for his enslaver in the Georgia militia; severely wounded at the Battle of Kettle Creek (1779) and later emancipated, pensioned, and granted state land, the only Black Patriot in Georgia known to receive one.

Barzillai Lew — Free Black fifer and drummer who fought at Bunker Hill and later at Fort Ticonderoga and Saratoga; a French and Indian War veteran and skilled musician whose powder horn survives in a Chicago museum.

Bazabeel Norman — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records.

Blaney Grusha — Fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 alongside fellow Black soldiers.

Boston King — Formerly enslaved Black Loyalist who escaped to British lines, later wrote a firsthand narrative of his wartime experience, and resettled in Nova Scotia and then Sierra Leone.

Caesar Robbins — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records.

Caesar Tarrant — Served as a naval pilot for the Virginia State Navy, guiding ships through dangerous coastal waters during the war.

Cato Howe — Fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.

Cato Mead — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records.

Col. Louis Cook (Joseph Louis Cook) — Son of a Black father and Native American mother; served as a colonel in the Continental Army and fought at both Quebec and Saratoga, one of the highest-ranking Black or Indigenous officers of the war.

Colonel Tye (Titus Cornelius) — Formerly enslaved New Jerseyan who escaped to British lines and became the most feared Black guerrilla commander of the war, leading raids across New Jersey and New York with his mixed-race Black Brigade until his death in 1780.

Crispus Attucks — Killed during the 1770 Boston Massacre, five years before the war formally began; remembered as an early martyr and the conflict’s first casualty.

Cuff Whittemore — Cited for bravery at Bunker Hill and permitted to keep a sword he captured from a British officer.

Cyfax Brown — Enslaved man who fought in the Prince Edward County, Virginia militia alongside fellow Black soldiers Isaac Brown and George Kendall.

Dick Pointer — Helped defend Fort Donnally (in present-day West Virginia) against a Native American and Loyalist attack in 1778.

Edom London — 33-year-old enslaved Massachusetts man who fought under Col. Thomas Marshall’s Continental Regiment and was present at Saratoga.

Edward “Ned” Hector — Free Black teamster and bombardier in Proctor’s Third Pennsylvania Artillery, responsible for keeping Continental artillery supplied through key campaigns.

Fleet (Fleetus) Hull — Served in Colonel William Shepard’s 4th Massachusetts Regiment and is officially documented among the Black soldiers present at Saratoga.

Fortune Conant — Enlisted soldier who witnessed both the British surrender at Saratoga and the later surrender at Yorktown.

Fortune Freeman — Enlisted alongside Fortune Conant and witnessed both Saratoga and Yorktown.

George Kendall — Fought in the Prince Edward County, Virginia militia alongside Cyfax Brown and Isaac Brown.

George Middleton — Served in a Massachusetts regiment and became a prominent leader of Boston’s free Black community after the war.

Harry Washington — Enslaved by George Washington at Mount Vernon before escaping to join Lord Dunmore’s forces; served as a Black Loyalist through the siege of Yorktown.

Isaac Brown — Fought in the Prince Edward County, Virginia militia alongside Cyfax Brown and George Kendall.

Jack Sisson — Enslaved Rhode Islander who served as boat pilot for the 1777 raid that captured British General Richard Prescott, reportedly breaking down the general’s door himself; later served in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment.

James Armistead Lafayette — Enslaved Virginian who posed as a runaway to infiltrate British General Cornwallis’s camp as a double agent, feeding false information to the British while relaying critical intelligence that helped trap Cornwallis at Yorktown.

James Carter — Enlisted twice, serving as a garrison guard and later as an artillery private in the 2nd Virginia Regiment; fought at the Battle of Camden and the siege of Yorktown.

James Forten — Teenage privateer captured and held aboard the British prison ship HMS Jersey; survived to become a successful Philadelphia sailmaker and a leading postwar abolitionist and philanthropist.

James Robinson — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records.

Jehu Grant — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War pension records.

Jim Capers — Free Black South Carolinian who served as Drum Major in the 4th South Carolina Regiment.

Jude Hall — Formerly enslaved New Hampshire man who secured his freedom through service at Bunker Hill, Ticonderoga, and Saratoga.

Lambert Latham — Died a hero’s death defending Fort Griswold, Connecticut, in 1781.

Lemuel Haynes — Served briefly as a Massachusetts minuteman before becoming one of the first Black ministers ordained in the United States.

Nero Hawley — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records.

Oliver Cromwell — Free Black soldier in the 2nd New Jersey Regiment who took part in the crossing of the Delaware, several major campaigns, and the siege of Yorktown.

Peleg Nott — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records.

Peter Salem — Formerly enslaved militiaman credited with firing the shot that killed British Major John Pitcairn at Bunker Hill; also served at Saratoga and Monmouth.

Prince Estabrook — Enslaved militiaman wounded at the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775, among the first men of any race wounded in the Revolutionary War.

Prince Whipple — Enslaved man who crossed the Delaware alongside George Washington and was present at Yorktown, later advocating for his own freedom.

Primus Hall — Served in a Massachusetts regiment and became a prominent figure in Boston’s postwar free Black community.

Reuben Bird — Enlisted at sixteen in the Virginia Regiment of Dragoons; barred from direct combat due to his status as a free Black man, he served in support roles throughout the war.

Salem Poor — Formerly enslaved soldier whose heroism at Bunker Hill — including killing British Lieutenant Colonel James Abercrombie — earned a rare formal commendation signed by fourteen American officers; also fought at Saratoga.

Saul Matthews — Enslaved Virginian who served as a spy for the Continental Army and was freed by direct act of the Virginia legislature in recognition of his service.

Seymour Burr — Fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.

Shadrach Battles — Fought under George Washington’s command, alongside his brother William Noel Battles; son of Thomas Cottrell.

Silas Royal — Documented Black Patriot soldier known primarily through Revolutionary War muster and pension records.

Spencer Bolton — Fought under Patriot guerrilla commander Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” in South Carolina.

Thomas Cottrell — Father of soldiers William Noel Battles and Shadrach Battles, who both fought under Washington.

Titus Coburn — Fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.

Toby Gilmore — One of the longest-serving Black veterans of the Revolutionary War period.

Wentworth Cheswell — New Hampshire schoolmaster who rode to warn colonial militias of British troop movements, in a ride historians have compared to Paul Revere’s; later became New Hampshire’s first archaeologist.

William Flora — Free Black soldier in the 2nd Virginia Regiment hailed as a hero of the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775, one of the first major Patriot victories in Virginia.

William Noel Battles — Fought under George Washington’s command alongside his brother Shadrach Battles; son of Thomas Cottrell.

The 1st Rhode Island Regiment (“Black Regiment”) — A Continental Army regiment composed primarily of formerly enslaved and free Black soldiers; fought at the Battle of Rhode Island (1778) and in the decisive assault on British redoubts at Yorktown (1781).

The Black Pioneers — An organized British Loyalist unit of Black soldiers who served as scouts, laborers, and combat troops throughout the Southern colonies.

Virginia State Navy sailors — Up to 150 Black men served as sailors aboard Virginia state naval vessels and privateer ships during the war.

America’s 250th: Three Events, One Story

Welcome to Travel with Annita. I’m so glad you’re here with me today, because we’re starting something a little different, a deep look at America’s 250th anniversary, what we’re actually celebrating, and why getting the story right matters more than you might think.

Here’s where this segment came from. Over the past while, I’ve had listeners ask me, more than once, and I mean that with real warmth and no judgment at all, whether the Revolutionary War and the Civil War were the same event. One listener asked if the Declaration of Independence was signed to end slavery. Another asked if George Washington fought against the Confederacy.

I want to be really clear about something before we go any further: there is absolutely nothing embarrassing about these questions. American history, especially when you didn’t grow up steeped in it or it’s been a while since school, can blur together. We’ve got founding fathers and generals and documents and wars all crowded into the same few centuries, and honestly, our own history hasn’t always done a great job of teaching it in a way that sticks. So today, we’re untangling it together, gently, clearly, and with the respect this story deserves.

So let’s lay out the three big events we’re going to be living with throughout this show.

First: the Declaration of Independence. Adopted July 4, 1776. This is the moment the American colonies formally declared they were no longer subjects of the British Crown, a political and philosophical announcement, made in writing, asserting that they intended to become a free and independent nation.

Second: the Revolutionary War. Now here’s the first surprise for a lot of folks, the war actually started before the Declaration, back in April 1775, at Lexington and Concord. The fighting had already been going on for over a year by the time Congress formally declared independence. The war then continued for eight more years, finally ending with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

Third: the Civil War, and this one happened a full 78 years after the Declaration, and 80 years after the Revolution began. It started in 1861 and ended in 1865. This was Americans fighting Americans, over whether the union would survive and whether slavery would continue to exist in this country.

Now, why does the order and the spacing here matter so much? Because each of these events answers a completely different question. The Declaration answers the question: can a people declare themselves free, and define what they believe a government owes its citizens? The Revolutionary War answers the question: will that declared freedom actually be won and defended? And the Civil War answers a question the founding generation left unresolved, does “all men are created equal” actually mean what it says, for everyone, or just for some?

That’s the heart of it. The Declaration made a promise. The Revolution fought to secure the right to make good on that promise. And the Civil War, eight decades later, was the price the nation paid for not having kept that promise the first time around.

Why July 4, 1776 and Why That Date Is More Layered Than It Looks

This year, 2026, is the Semiquincentennial,  the 250th anniversary, and it’s anchored specifically to the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. Not the start of the war. Not the end of the war. The moment America declared, in writing, what it intended to become.

But here’s something worth knowing, because it surprises almost everyone the first time they hear it: July 4th isn’t actually the date the colonies voted for independence, and it isn’t the date most signers actually signed the document either. Congress voted to approve independence on July 2, 1776. Two days later, on July 4th, Congress formally adopted the final edited text of the Declaration, that’s the date that’s printed on the document, and that’s the date we celebrate. But the actual signing of the parchment copy by most delegates didn’t happen until August 2, 1776, nearly a full month later,  and a few signatures weren’t added until early the following year.

So when we say America turns 250 on July 4, 2026, we’re really celebrating the day Congress agreed on the wording of a promise, not the vote, and not the signing. It’s a small distinction, but I think it’s a beautiful one, because it means we’re celebrating the moment the *idea itself* became official, independent of the political vote that came before it, and independent of the individual men who later put their names to it one by one over the following months.

And here’s one more date worth knowing: John Adams himself believed history would remember July 2nd, the day of the actual vote, as America’s true day of independence, not July 4th. He even refused for years to attend July 4th celebrations on principle. There’s a strange and rather wonderful postscript to that stubbornness: Adams died on July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the Declaration’s adoption, and so, in a twist of fate, did Thomas Jefferson, on the very same day. Two of the document’s most important architects, gone on the fiftieth anniversary of the day their words became official.

I think that’s exactly the kind of detail that makes history feel alive rather than just memorized, and it’s exactly why this anniversary is worth more than a passing mention on the calendar.

Why This Matters for All of Us? Here’s why I think this anniversary matters, for every single person who calls America home, regardless of your background, your politics, or how your own family’s story intersects with this history. America has never been a finished project. It was declared into being as an unfinished sentence, “all men are created equal”,  and every generation since has had the job of trying to close the gap between those words and the lived reality of this country. Sometimes we’ve made extraordinary progress. Sometimes we’ve failed each other badly. The road to freedom in this country has been filled with real struggle, real heartbreak, and real disappointment, and it’s also, genuinely, one of the most remarkable experiments in human self-governance the world has ever seen.

Both of those things are true at the same time. And I think honoring this anniversary means holding both of them, the pride and the honest reckoning, together, without flinching from either one.

So over these next three segments, we’re going to dig into the Declaration itself, why it was needed, who wrote it, and some details you may never have heard. We’re going to look closely at the 56 men who signed it, including some real complexity around slavery that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. And we’re going to walk through the Revolutionary War itself,  the protests, the battles, and how it actually ended.

Stay with me. This is going to be a good one.

The Declaration of Independence: Why It Was Needed, and How It Came to Be

Welcome back to Travel with Annita. Let’s dig into the document itself, the Declaration of Independence. Where it came from, why the colonists felt they needed it, and some details about the people and the room where it happened that I think you’ll find genuinely fascinating.

Why Independence Felt Necessary – To understand why colonists wanted independence, you have to understand what it actually felt like to live as an American colonist in the years leading up to 1776, because this wasn’t abstract politics for ordinary people. It touched daily life directly.

After Britain’s expensive victory in the French and Indian War, Parliament looked to the colonies to help pay down the war debt. Starting with the Stamp Act of 1765, Britain began directly taxing colonists for the first time, and I mean directly touching everyday transactions. Newspapers needed a stamp. Legal documents needed a stamp. Even playing cards needed a stamp. Imagine every receipt, every deed, every contract suddenly costing more because of a tax imposed by a government three thousand miles away, in which colonists had no elected representation whatsoever. That’s where “no taxation without representation” comes from, and it wasn’t an abstract slogan, it was colonists experiencing, in their pocketbooks, day after day, a government making decisions about their lives without their consent.

Then came the Townshend Acts, taxing glass, paper, paint, and tea. British troops were sent to enforce order in cities like Boston, and having armed soldiers stationed in your town, watching your streets, created constant friction. That friction exploded into violence in March 1770, when British soldiers killed five colonists in what became known as the Boston Massacre, including a man named Crispus Attucks, who was of African and Native American descent, and who became the first person to die for the cause of American independence.

Then in December 1773, colonists boarded British ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea into the water, the Boston Tea Party, protesting a tea monopoly that was undercutting local merchants. Britain’s response was the turning point: rather than treating this as an isolated incident, Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, closing Boston Harbor entirely and stripping Massachusetts of its self-governance. And here’s the key thing, this terrified colonists everywhere, not just in Massachusetts, because it proved that Parliament could punish an entire colony’s self-government over a single act of protest. If it could happen to Massachusetts, it could happen to anyone. That fear is what finally pulled the colonies together.

Drafting the Document – By 1776, the Second Continental Congress had been meeting in Philadelphia for over a year, managing a war that had already begun at Lexington and Concord. In June 1776, Congress appointed a Committee of Five to draft a formal declaration of independence: Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert R. Livingston of New York.

Here’s a detail a lot of people don’t know, Jefferson was actually the junior member of that committee in terms of reputation at the time. Adams and Franklin were both far more famous. But the committee asked Jefferson to write the first draft, partly because of his elegant writing style, and partly, by Adams’s own later account, because Adams thought Jefferson should get the credit, and because, frankly, Adams knew he himself was disliked by enough people in Congress that his authorship might hurt the document’s reception.

Jefferson wrote the draft largely alone, in a rented room in Philadelphia, over about seventeen days in June 1776. Franklin and Adams reviewed and made small edits before it went to the full Congress.

The Editing Process and a Detail Most People Never Hear – Once Jefferson’s draft reached the full Congress on June 28, they spent several days editing it extensively, cutting roughly a quarter of his original text. Jefferson, by his own account, found this process genuinely painful, he sat through it mostly in silence while his words were debated and cut.

The most significant deletion, and this is something I think deserves much wider attention, was a long passage where Jefferson condemned King George III for perpetuating the slave trade. It was removed specifically at the insistence of delegates from Georgia and South Carolina, whose economies depended on slavery, along with some Northern delegates whose merchants profited from the slave trade as well. So even in the drafting of America’s founding document of liberty, the question of slavery was already present, already contested, and already being set aside rather than confronted.

The Building and the City – The Declaration was debated and adopted in the Pennsylvania State House, the building we now call Independence Hall, in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia was the largest city in the colonies at the time, with around 30,000 to 40,000 people, and its central location and established institutions made it the natural meeting place for delegates traveling from as far as New Hampshire and Georgia.

A little-known detail: the famous chair John Hancock sat in while presiding over Congress is still in that room today, carved with a sun on its crest rail. Benjamin Franklin reportedly remarked, after the Constitutional Convention met in that same room eleven years later, that he’d spent the whole summer wondering whether that carved sun was rising or setting, and had finally decided it was rising.

When It Was Finalized, and When It Was Actually Signed – This is where the calendar gets interesting, and where most people’s assumptions are slightly off.

July 2, 1776 — Congress actually voted to approve independence.

July 4, 1776 — Congress formally adopted the final, edited text of the Declaration.

This is the date on the document, and it’s the date we celebrate — but it marks the adoption of the text, not a dramatic mass signing ceremony with everybody in the room at once.

August 2, 1776 — Most delegates actually signed the formal parchment copy, nearly a full month later.

A few signed even later than that, as new delegates arrived in Philadelphia. The very last signature is believed to have been added in early 1777.

So that single date, July 4th, that we treat as the day everything happened — it’s really the date Congress agreed on the wording. The actual signing was a much longer, messier process spread out over almost a year.

Other Important Dates to Know

July 8, 1776 — the Declaration was read publicly outside Independence Hall for the first time.

July 9, 1776 — Washington had it read aloud to his troops in New York City, and that same evening, crowds pulled down a statue of King George III, reportedly melting the lead down into musket balls for the army.

And one fun, related myth to clear up: the famous Liberty Bell did not ring out to announce the Declaration’s signing on July 4th, despite the popular story. There’s no contemporary evidence for that. The bell hung in that very building’s tower and was likely used to call people together generally, but the dramatic image of it tolling at that specific moment is a later embellishment. The bell’s strong association with liberty actually came later, championed by abolitionists who pointed to its inscription — “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants Thereof” — as a pointed reminder of America’s unfinished promise.

Next segment, we’re going to meet the 56 men who put their names — and their lives — on the line by signing this document. Stay with us.

The Signers: Who They Were, and the Uncomfortable Truth Behind Their Names

Welcome back to Travel with Annita. We’ve talked about why independence was declared, and we’ve talked about the document itself. Now let’s talk about the 56 men who actually signed it — because I think when most of us picture “the signers,” we picture a single, unified group of patriots standing together. The reality is more complicated, and honestly, more important to understand.

A Quick Word Before We Begin. I want to say this clearly: looking honestly at the signers’ relationship to slavery isn’t about tearing down history or judging people centuries removed from us by today’s standards alone. It’s about telling the whole truth of this moment — because the most quoted line in the entire Declaration is “all men are created equal,” and a remarkable number of the men who signed those words held other human beings in bondage while they did it. That contradiction isn’t a footnote to the story. It is part of the story, and it’s part of why, eighty-some years later, this country tore itself apart in a civil war to finally begin reckoning with it.

The Numbers – Of the 56 signers, the historical record shows that the overwhelming majority — somewhere in the range of 40 or more — owned enslaved people at some point in their lives, either at the time of signing or before. A handful are documented as never having been slaveholders. And for several, especially among lesser-known signers, the record is simply uncertain — historians haven’t been able to confirm one way or the other.

But the real story isn’t just the raw number. It’s the pattern, and that pattern breaks down very clearly along regional lines.

New England — The Most Likely Region to Have No Slaveholders

Massachusetts gives us our clearest cluster of non-slaveholders: John Adams, Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, and Robert Treat Paine all signed without ever owning another human being. But even Massachusetts isn’t perfectly clean, John Hancock, the most famous signer of all, the man whose giant signature gave us the phrase “John Hancock”, he himself was a documented slaveholder.

New Hampshire shows the same complexity in miniature. William Whipple, a merchant and ship captain from Portsmouth, enslaved a man named Prince Whipple — the same Prince Whipple believed to be the Black figure in that famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. William Whipple did eventually free him. But Prince crossed that icy river, by every reasonable account, as an enslaved man serving the master who would one day sign a document proclaiming all men created equal.

Connecticut leans non-slaveholding too — Samuel Huntington and Roger Sherman, who helped draft the Declaration itself alongside Jefferson, are both listed as not slaveholders.

The Middle Colonies — A Mixed and Surprising Picture

This is where it gets genuinely interesting, because people often assume the North was simply “anti-slavery” and the South was simply “pro-slavery.” New York tells a different story entirely. Every single one of New York’s four signers — William Floyd, Francis Lewis, Philip Livingston, and Lewis Morris — was a slaveholder. New York City and the surrounding region had a significant enslaved population well into the founding era, a fact that often surprises people.

New Jersey is similarly mixed, including John Witherspoon , a clergyman and college president, the man who led what’s now Princeton University, who was a slaveholder.

And Pennsylvania, home to the strongest Quaker abolitionist tradition in the colonies, still produced slaveholding signers: Robert Morris, the financier who personally helped fund the Continental Army, owned enslaved people. So did Benjamin Rush, a physician, though Rush’s story has a redemptive turn, because he later freed the man he enslaved and became one of the era’s most prominent abolitionists. And Benjamin Franklin himself enslaved people earlier in his life before becoming, in his later years, a genuine abolitionist voice. These are stories of people whose views actually changed over time, which matters, because it shows the moral question wasn’t settled or static even within individual lives.

The South,  Near-Universal, and at an Entirely Different Scale

When we move into Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, the picture shifts from “mixed” to “nearly universal”, and the scale of slaveholding becomes dramatically larger.

Virginia’s delegation is almost entirely slaveholders: Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton, and of course, Thomas Jefferson himself, the man who wrote “all men are created equal,” who enslaved roughly 600 people over the course of his life and freed fewer than a dozen. I think that number is worth letting sit in the air for a moment. Six hundred people. Fewer than a dozen freed. The author of the line that has inspired liberation movements across the entire world.

Maryland gives us Charles Carroll, one of the wealthiest men in all of America, who enslaved hundreds of people on his estates. South Carolina’s entire four-man delegation, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward Jr., Thomas Lynch Jr., and Arthur Middleton, were all slaveholders, all wealthy planters from the Charleston area.

Georgia’s Signers — Since We’re Broadcasting Right Here at Home

Let’s bring this close to home, because Georgia’s three signers tell a particularly Georgia story.

Button Gwinnett was a merchant and planter on St. Catherines Island, and he enslaved people on his plantation there. He’s also got one of the more dramatic personal stories of any signer — he died in a duel just a year after signing, in 1777, following a wartime political dispute, making him one of the first signers to die after putting his name on the document.

Lyman Hall was a physician and planter from Sunbury, Georgia, also a documented slaveholder — and interestingly, Hall wasn’t originally from Georgia at all. He’d relocated from Connecticut, which tells you something about how fluid and new Georgia’s colonial population still was at the time of the Revolution.

George Walton was a Savannah lawyer, and his record is listed as uncertain — historians haven’t been able to confirm definitively whether he held enslaved people, which is actually true for a fair number of the lesser-documented signers across all the colonies.

So two of Georgia’s three signers were confirmed slaveholders, fitting the broader Southern pattern we’ve just walked through — and Georgia’s economy at the time, like the rest of the Deep South, was already deeply structured around enslaved labor, particularly in the rice and indigo plantations along the coast, near where Gwinnett and Hall both lived.

Why the North-South Divide Looked the Way It Did

Here’s the thing I want to leave you with on this topic, because I think it explains so much of what came afterward, including the Civil War we’ll get into in a future episode. The Northern colonies’ economies were increasingly built around trade, shipping, and small-scale manufacturing,  slavery existed there, as we’ve just heard, but it wasn’t the engine of the regional economy the way it was in the South. The Southern colonies’ entire economic and social structure, their wealth, their political power, their whole way of life, was built directly on enslaved labor producing tobacco, rice, indigo, and eventually cotton.

That difference in economic dependence is exactly why, when the Declaration was being edited in Congress, it was specifically the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina who insisted on removing Jefferson’s passage condemning the slave trade. They weren’t being subtle about it. They understood precisely what was at stake for their own economic system, and they made sure the final document protected it.

So when this document declared “all men are created equal” and was signed by 56 men, more than 40 of whom enslaved other human beings — that wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t really even a contradiction the founders failed to notice. Many of them noticed it explicitly, debated it explicitly, and chose, for reasons of money, power, and political survival, to leave it unresolved. That unresolved question is the one this country would spend the next 89 years not addressing, until the Civil War finally forced the reckoning.

That’s the story of the signers, heroic in some ways, deeply human and deeply flawed in others. Next segment, we move into the war itself: the protests, the battles, and how independence was actually won. Stay with me.

The Road to Revolution: Protest, the Liberty Tree, and How the War Was Won

Welcome back to Travel with Annita. Let’s finish out our 250th anniversary special with the story of how ordinary colonists organized themselves into a movement, and how that movement became a war, and ultimately, a victory.

Everyday Protest and the Liberty Tree

Long before any shots were fired, colonists were already building a culture of resistance,  and one of the most fascinating parts of that story is something called the Liberty Tree.

In August 1765, Boston colonists protesting the Stamp Act gathered beneath a large old elm tree and hung an effigy of a hated tax official from its branches. That tree quickly became known as the Liberty Tree, and it turned into the central meeting place for the Sons of Liberty, colonists organizing resistance to British policy. Notices were nailed to its trunk. Crowds gathered beneath it for speeches. And here’s what’s so remarkable, nearly every colony eventually designated its own Liberty Tree, or where no suitable tree existed, a Liberty Pole. This created an entirely decentralized communication network, operating completely outside official government, that let news and organizing strategy travel between colonies through letters, newspapers, and word of mouth at a time when news moved by horse and ship.

That network is directly tied to the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, when colonists, protesting a British tea monopoly, dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Britain’s punishing response, the Coercive Acts, is what finally pushed the colonies to convene the First Continental Congress in 1774. You can draw a straight line: Tea Party, to Coercive Acts, to First Continental Congress, to the actual outbreak of war.

Where the War Actually Began

The first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, more than a year before the Declaration was even written. British troops marched to seize colonial weapons and were met by militia at Lexington; no one knows for certain who fired first, but by the time the British retreated back to Boston, 73 of their soldiers were dead. The war was on.

Two months later came the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, technically a British victory, but at such a staggering cost that it proved colonial forces could stand against professional British soldiers. That changed everything about how seriously this conflict was taken on both sides.

Key Battles and the Path to Victory

The Continental Army, under George Washington, struggled mightily through 1776, nearly destroyed at the Battle of Long Island, retreating across New Jersey with the cause looking close to lost. Then came Washington’s legendary Christmas night crossing of the Delaware River in 1776, surprising and capturing the Hessian garrison at Trenton, followed quickly by another win at Princeton. Those twin victories saved the Revolution at its lowest point.

The real turning point came at Saratoga, New York, in 1777, where American forces forced an entire British army of nearly 6,000 men to surrender. That victory convinced France to formally enter the war as America’s ally,  and without French money, French soldiers, and especially the French Navy, the war very likely would have ended differently.

After a brutal winter at Valley Forge, where the army was reshaped into a true professional fighting force, the war’s focus shifted south, to brutal, often guerrilla-style fighting in the Carolinas, with figures like Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” harassing British forces from the swamps.

How the War Actually Ended —Yorktown

The decisive moment came at the Siege of Yorktown, Virginia, in the fall of 1781. Washington, the French general Rochambeau, and the Marquis de Lafayette converged on a British army of about 8,000 men under General Cornwallis. The French navy, under Admiral de Grasse, defeated the British fleet just offshore, cutting off any escape or resupply by sea. With nowhere to go, Cornwallis surrendered his entire army on October 19, 1781.

That was, for all practical purposes, the end of major fighting. But the war didn’t officially end until the Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783,  nearly two full years after Yorktown. And the very last British troops didn’t actually leave American soil until November 25, 1783, when they finally evacuated New York City, their last major stronghold in America, which they had held for more than seven years, the longest British occupation of any American city during the entire war.

New Yorkers still celebrated that day, Evacuation Day, for generations afterward. And in one of my favorite small details from this whole era, Washington and his troops marched into the city that day down an ancient path that Indigenous Lenape people had used for centuries, called the Wickquasgeck  (we quaz guess) Trail. The Dutch later called it the Heere Straat, the English eventually called it Broadway,  yes, that Broadway, in Manhattan, still one of the most famous streets in the world. Also the Lenape named the area Manhatta.

Georgia’s Role in the Revolution

Now, since we’re broadcasting to folks right here in Georgia, let’s bring this home. Georgia was actually the most vulnerable of all thirteen colonies, the southernmost, the most exposed. Savannah fell to the British in December 1778 and remained under British control until July 1782, one of the very last cities the British gave up before the war’s end. There was a major joint French and American attempt to retake Savannah in October 1779 that ultimately failed, with heavy losses, including the death of the Polish cavalry commander Casimir Pulaski.

Despite Georgia spending most of the war under British occupation, Georgian patriots Button Gwinnett and Lyman Hall signed the Declaration of Independence, and Georgia militia fought throughout the brutal Southern campaign that eventually turned the tide of the entire war.

So next time you’re standing in Savannah, or anywhere across this state, remember, Georgia carries some of the deepest, hardest-won Revolutionary history of any of the original thirteen colonies.

That’s our show for today. Join me next time as we continue this journey through America’s 250th, because understanding where we’ve been is how we appreciate where we are. I’m Annita, and this has been Travel with Annita.

U.S. Mint Coins related to the show

Research and information from the following.

1. The National Archives — “America’s Founding Documents”

2. The Massachusetts Historical Society / Adams Papers

3. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997)

4. The National Park Service — Independence National Historical Park

For the signers’ slaveholding data specifically (Segment Three), the most commonly cited modern source is the Monticello/Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s research on Jefferson’s enslaved community combined with biographical entries compiled by the National Archives’ “Signers of the Declaration of Independence” series and individual state historical societies — these are the sources behind figures like Jefferson’s roughly 600 enslaved people over his lifetime, and Charles Carroll’s documented wealth and slaveholding in Maryland.