Patterson Family papers

Though this collection contains the papers of many different families in the Hopewell, North Carolina area, the majority of papers are from the Patterson family, William Patterson in particular. The Pattersons owned and lived on a large plantation near Hopewell and the papers that were generated provide a significant amount of information on the lives of a wealthy, antebellum family. John Patterson, the primogenitor of this family, immigrated from Antrim, in northern Ireland, in 1789 at the age of 21. His journey to the New World took him to Charleston, S.C., then eventually to the Providence area, south of Charlotte, North Carolina. He was of Scotch-Irish ethnicity and was Presbyterian in faith. At the time of his arrival to America, he brought with him sufficient funds to purchase land and later began enslaving people. In 1794, he married Margaret Houston, whose family had already been in the Carolinas for at least two generations. Some of her ancestors had participated in the Revolutionary War on the Patriots' side. John and Margaret had nine children. In his last will and testament (dated July 6, 1831) John Patterson listed his property, including many acres of plantation land, the house, agricultural equipment, furnishings, and enslaved people (Jacob, Congo, Nan, Lucy, Jane, Adeline, Jeb, Abram). William Patterson, the fourth of John and Margaret’s nine children, was born in 1806 and died in 1886. He married Elizabeth McEwen Potts in 1828 and settled on a parcel of land a few miles west of present day Davidson, NC (much of this property is now under water, as the result of the construction of a hydro-electric dam in the 1960s). William and his wife had ten children; however, only four of those ten survived to marry (one of their children lived only one day and another, Margaret Lamira Patterson, lived to be eighty-six years old, but never married). These are Mary Adeline Patterson Houston, Lydia Lenore Patterson Wilson, John Newell Williamson Patterson, and Josephine Augusta Banna Patterson Alexander. In 1839 he, along with other planters in the area, signed a contract with a local teacher, to provide for their children’s education. In addition, his papers show that he sent at least two of his daughters on to “female colleges.” Mary attended the Salem Female Academy and Josephine Banna attended the Edgeworth Female Seminary. The only evidence that William sent any of his sons to college exists in the form of two receipts for tuition at Catawba College in 1853 and 1854 for John N. W. Patterson. William served as the executor (or administrator) for the estates of many of the people who died in the Hopewell/Davidson/Huntersville area; and some of the papers in this collection are papers that he generated in the course of settling these estates. In addition to his estate work, he also was a planter, who enslaved many people and had significant business investments and dealings. His business activities are documented by the many receipts in his papers, from such commodities as cotton, sugar, molasses, rice, salt and tea. In addition, he lived during a significant period of American history, as the debate between northern and southern political interests raged on. Unfortunately, we do not know exactly what his opinions were of the major issues of the day and can only speculate, based on his property, his position in society and a few fragmentary pieces of evidence. William subscribed to the Western Democrat and the North Carolina Presbyterian. It was William who presided over the family estate during the Civil War and who was forced to part with a significant amount of personal wealth—the people he had enslaved. One of the more significant documents in this collection is a letter detailing the way in which the enslaved people were informed of their emancipation on November 10, 1865:

"We the Undersigned freedmen and women Certify that as soon as our former Master found out that the coloured people was set free come to the field whare we ware at work and told us all 21 in number that he saw it in the papers that we ware free…". (box 1, folder 42)

The scribe for the Freedmen's Bureau who wrote out this testimony wanted to make sure that it was known that Master Patterson informed his negroes (as they were called at the time) that they had been emancipated as soon as he himself was aware of the new law. The letter went on to state that Patterson would pay the people he had formerly enslaved only if they agreed to remain on the plantation until the harvest had been brought in. Those that left at that time would not be paid at all. Patterson kept the copies of the receipts he issued to those who remained through the harvest. Along with other people who had been enslavers, he established a new working relationship with the people he had formerly enslaved, in the form of share-cropping. In spite of all of the tumult, the Pattersons still held on to their land. Another telling document held in this collection is a legal complaint, filed by Patterson, against Thomas M. Alexander on September 24, 1849 for an offense that took place on Sept. 17, because he “did profanely swear & curse to the number of twenty-two oaths, whereby he forfeited the sum of twenty-five cents for each & cursing oath or curse in all amounting to five 50/100 cts. dollars.” John Newell Williamson Patterson, mentioned earlier (one of William’s sons), married Margaret Lenora Sloan in 1861. Except for the birth of his children, there is little evidence to reveal the details of his life. He and Margaret had ten children, but this collection only contains the papers of two of them: Ona Elizabeth Josephine Patterson Cumming and Harriet Emma Patterson Bonney Hodges. Four years after the death of his wife Margaret, John sold the family land (203 acres for one dollar) to his children and their spouses, possibly as a way to avoid inheritance taxes. The daughter who is most significant to this collection is Ona, who married Dr. Calvin Knox Cumming. Her obituary (found in file 5) provides a bank of information about her life. Ona E. J. P. Cumming was born in Hopewell, NC in 1865. She was educated at what was then known as the Charlotte Female Institute, later known as Queens University. A devout Christian, she entered Christian missionary work in Japan under the auspices of the Southern Presbyterian Church. It was there that she met and married Dr. Cumming, who administered the Presbyterian mission in Nagoya. They produced three sons, one of which died in Nagoya. The Cumming family returned to the US in 1925 and settled in Davidson, NC. Dr. Cumming died in 1935 and Ona died in 1955. One of their sons was William Patterson Cumming, who earned a Ph.D. in English and became a distinguished member of the Davidson College faculty, writing several books and earning an excellent reputation in his field. It was one of his children, Robert Patterson Cumming, who donated this collection to the UNC Charlotte Library in 2004. This collection also contains a small subseries of papers of Harriet Emma Patterson Hodges, sister of Ona. Emma was able to establish a genealogical descent through Elizabeth McCuen Potts (wife of John Newell Williamson Patterson) to William Potts. According to her DAR application, Potts was a captain of militia in North Carolina. According to Emma’s correspondence, she was admitted to the Daughters of the American Revolution right around the time that the US entered World War II. The substance of the collection begins to decline after 1866, though there are a few items, including a few property deeds and correspondence, most of it dealing with genealogy.