African-American Pioneer Familes of Camden County, Missouri

KENOLY FAMILY HISTORY

AFRICAN-AMERICAN PIONEER FAMILIES
CAMDEN COUNTY, MISSOURI

On the following pages are stories of the Kenoly family and several other African-American pioneer families of Camden County, Missouri that became related to the Kenoly family. With two exceptions, these families came to Missouri as slaves and stayed as pioneers. The Fitts family that came after the Civil War became a part of a tragedy that was played out at a Gravois Mills (Morgan County) picnic in 1890. The Kenoly family also came to the area after the Civil War.

In 1871 the sons of Anthony Kenoly (Myers, Jake, and Harry) made a pact to leave Alabama and move their families, their mother Sarah and younger brother Wilson, to Nebraska and homestead their as neighbors. They were passing through Missouri when they ran out of money and decided to settle and homestead right where they were (Camden County).

Know all men by these present that I, 0. Cliborn of the State of Missouri and County of Camden, do this day bargain, sell and deliver unto Daniel Fulbright of the County of Laclede and the state aforesaid, a negro girl of black complexion, named Charlotta, about twelve years old, for the consideration of $700. This to me in hand paid the receipt of which I do hereby acknowledge and I, the said 0. Cliborn do further warrant the girl to be both in sound body and mind, and a slave for life. -- Dated October 26, 1853 Daniel Fulbright Estate Papers, printed in the Camden County Historian, 1983.

Most early Camden County settlers were from the southern states, especially Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina. Several of them owned slaves in the South and they brought their human chattel with them to their new home. As slavery was a financial institution, it is no surprise that the slaveholders were the most prosperous farmers and merchants of the times; their wealth was made or sustained by the free labor of their slaves. Most Camden countians did not own slaves either because they opposed the institution or could not afford to participate in it. In 1860, only forty-nine individuals (or estates) owned the 211 slaves living in the county. The slave owners were not spread evenly throughout the county, but were concentrated in Osage Township in and around Linn Creek, a thriving business center before the Civil War. So, at the end of the Civil War, just over two hundred slaves became free pioneers of the area. They were not strangers to hard work, but now, for the first time in their lives, they were working for themselves. Most freedmen received little help from their former owners, forcing them to find a way to make a living without benefit of tools or equipment or money to buy them. For the men, this meant working as unskilled farm laborers; the women became house servants, baby sitters or laundresses. Some found land to homestead and eventually settled in as farmers. A few looked to the riverboats on the Osage or Missouri rivers for employment. Others left for the bigger towns with the hope of finding alternate ways to make a living.

By the 1920's, only a handful of the African-American pioneers remained in the area. Those who departed did so for a variety of reasons. The possibility of making a better living somewhere else has always been a powerful draw on a man with a family to support. Many families moved to Lebanon, Missouri or to Kansas to work in brickyards or foundries in search of a steady wage. Some families left because there were no schools for blacks in Camden County. The vast majority of the freedmen were unable to read or write and, seeing education as a way to equality of employment; they desperately wanted their children to receive a good education. A move to Lebanon meant that their children could attend the "colored school" there.

Case Family
Fitts Family
Jones Family
Kenoly Family
North Family
Stevens Family