African Slavery in North Carolina and at Poplar Grove Plantation

A significant portion of North Carolina’s history has been tied to the agricultural plantation system of growing cash crops where enslaved Africans did the toiling in the fields and household chores. Cotton, rice, tobacco, and indigo brought wealth to plantation owners. Poplar Grove’s history until the end of the American Civil War was no exception. At Poplar Grove, peanuts reigned supreme as a cash crop.

Records indicate that the first African slaves may have arrived in present day North Carolina in 1526. Lucan Vasquez de Aylion, a Spanish explorer and slave trader, attempted to establish a colony at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. He came with five hundred colonists plus one hundred African slaves. The colony was a failure and most of the slaves escaped to live with various Indian tribes. This was the last time that Spain will attempt colonizing North Carolina. Instead they concentrated their efforts south of the Little River separating the two Carolinas.

In 1662, a group of Puritans came south from Massachusetts with African slaves to the lowlands of the Cape Fear region with an eye on cattle production. Like the Spaniards before them, the colony was a failure and the colonists left, although they left the cattle and a message for future colonists to heed, “Avoid this area as unsuitable for settlement”.

Perhaps the next group to visit the Cape Fear region never saw the message that had been posted on a tree. The new colonists from English Barbados arrived in May, 1664. With their slaves they moved further up the Cape Fear River some twenty miles from the ocean to the banks of Town Creeks in present day Brunswick County. Like previous attempts to settle the area, the colony was abandoned in 1667 due to friction with the Native American Indians.

A new wave of colonists from the north, this time from Virginia, began crossing the present day border and filtering down into North Carolina. In 1663 the number of settlers had already exceeded five hundred and most of them had slaves. In the same year, King Charles II granted a huge tract of land south of Virginia to eight Lord Proprietors. The proprietors recruited colonists from Barbados who had slaves and a knowledge of the plantation system. Records show that in 1712, there were 800 slaves in the colony of North Carolina and over four thousand in present day South Carolina. As the plantation system expanded in the colonial Carolinas, the slave population began to explode. Enslaved people in North Carolina between 1730 and 1767 grew from 6,000 to 40,000. By the time of the first United States census taken in 1790, North Carolina’s population figures showed 100,572 African slaves in the state and 288,200 white citizens. The Cape Fear region by far had the greatest number of slaves.

The Moore brothers came to the Cape Fear region in 1711 from South Carolina originally to fight the local Indian tribes. These tribes, the Tuscarora and Yemasse, were defeated in 1715. The defeat encouraged white settlement in the area. The brothers received land grants of 10,000 acres each along the Cape Fear River. One brother, Roger, established Orton as a rice-growing plantation with hundreds of African slaves working the fields. Over the next several years, other Moores were granted tens of thousands of acres of land in the Rocky Point area of present day Pender County as well as land along the coast near what is now Poplar Grove Plantation. These tracts of land were farmed using slave labor. As in modern day real estate speculation, portions of these coastal lands were sold off to numerous people over the years for profit.

In 1795, 628 acres was sold to James Foy, Jr. He acquired adjoining land in 1798. A house and outbuildings including a gristmill, sawmill, blacksmith shop, a brick kiln, and turpentine still began to form what was to be called Poplar Grove Plantation. The 1800 census indicated that twenty-two African slaves either worked the land of Poplar Grove or were employed at skilled trades. These trades included a blacksmith, a miller, sawyer, turpentine still master, a cooper and a brick maker. Adults then passed these skills along to their children.

Records indicate that the Foys bought slaves, but it does not appear that they sold slaves. Bills of purchase are on display in Poplar Grove’s Archival Room. James’s son, Joseph Mumford Foy built the present day manor home in 1850, after a fire destroyed the original plantation house. Joseph kept slave families together and allowed them to acquire goods and money. The 1850’s saw the Foys land rich and money poor especially during the bank crashes of that decade. Joseph Mumford Foy was loaned money by his slaves to pay the taxes on the property. The money was repaid to the slaves.

On the eve of the American Civil War in 1861, Joseph Mumford Foy died. He had wished to free his slaves upon his death, but laws prevented that from officially happening. After 1835, in order to free a slave, the owner had to take the slave out of North Carolina. The slave was then not permitted to reenter the state. To circumvent the law, Joseph’s family unofficially freed the slaves living at Poplar Grove Plantation. The former slaves, now freemen, remained on the plantation until after the Civil War and farmed the land as tenant farmers. Their cluster of homes, about a mile south of the present day plantation, was called Foy Town, and its residents were known by the last names of Foy, Simmons, and Nixon.

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