Robert Winslow Gordon collected a version of "Come by Here" from Floyd Thorp, [1] with no notes on when or where he recorded it. Stephen Winick assumed it was made near Darien, Georgia in 1926 or 1927. [2]
Thorp is one of those common names that in and of themselves are meaningless. The base word is a place name. Thus, Oglethorpe is "composed of the Old Norse elements ‘odd’, point of a weapon, and ‘ketill’, sacrificial cauldron, with ‘thorp’, village, settlement, farm." [3] People of the name migrated to all parts of what would become the United States. The last name of Rosetta Tharpe, who was discussed in the post for 23 December 2017, was a variant.
McIntosh County, whose county seat was Darien, posted the titles of court cases heard between 1875 and 1925. One file box in the archives mentioned state actions against ten Thorpes, including Floyd, Alonzo, Eddie, and Nancy. [4]
Nancy Thorpe was the most important of these. Lydia Parrish said she and Alonzo " joined the Spiritual Singers Society of Coastal Georgia" after a bridge was built connecting Saint Simons Island with the mainland in 1924. [5] From that we know one branch of African-American Thorpes were singers.
Lorenzo Dow Turner interviewed her when he was doing field work on the Gullah language on Harris Neck. [6] The swampy peninsula laid between two creeks that emptied into the South Newport River that marked the boundary between McIntosh and Liberty Counties. [7] It’s located just above the "rt" in Newport in the map below.
If one assumes Nancy’s family took the surname of their owner and stayed in the general area after Emancipation, then she or her ancestors were owned by Charles Joseph Washington Thorpe or his son, Charles Courtney Thorpe. Neither were large slave owners. At most they possessed 22 individuals.
Charles Thorpe was born in Charleston, [8] and moved to Sunbury in what is now Liberty County, Georgia, after the American Revolution. He married Anne Jurdine there in 1789. [9] Charles J. W. was born in 1792. [10] By then, Charles was involved in building the road to Harris Neck. [11]
Harris Neck lands first had been granted by the Oglethorpe trustees to Daniel Demetre in 1750. [12] Representatives of George II granted him and William Harris more land. [13] Their properties were consolidated when Demetre married Harris’s widow. Edward Baker claimed adjacent land on the peninsula in 1773. [14]
Antebellum land transfer records were destroyed in courthouse fires, so no one knows quite how those grants were willed, subdivided or sold before Reconstruction. Much of Thorpe’s land had been claimed by Baker. [15] His neighbor, Jonathan Thomas, owned much of the Demetre-Harris lands. [16] He had married Mary Jane Baker. [17]
Charles apparently was established before the slave trade was banned in 1808 by the United States. [18] After that, he and his descendants had only three ways to increase their labor supply: smugglers, neighbors, or purchases from traders from places like Virginia.
After Charles died, Thomas advertised for a run away slave owned by Thorpe. Armstrong was described as a twenty-five-year-old mulatto in 1822. [19] Edward Thomas, who was born in 1840, remembered his family rarely bought or sold slaves, and he only remembered one mulatto. [20] It may be Jonathan sold those particular slaves, and one of the Thorpes may have been one of the beneficiaries.
The only other relevant thing known about Charles J. W. was his trusteeship of the South Newport Baptist Church in 1841. [21]
The Baptist first arrived in Sunbury after Charles left. Charles Odingsell Screven was the great-great-grandson of the first Calvinist Baptist in Charleston. [22] His only converts in the early years were Negroes, and the church remained predominantly African American. Screven, and his successors, preached in local plantation praise houses, [23] probably including ones on Harris Neck.
How much either Thrope encouraged religion is unknown. However, during Reconstruction one Thorpe young woman was literate enough to teach in a Freemen’s Bureau school in Darien in 1868 and 1869, and was working to establish an African-American school on Harris Neck. [24] The First African Baptist Church was built on Harris Neck a decade or so later. [25]
Eddie Thorpe told Parrish "slaves, when allowed to go to a praise-house that was out of bounds, were given passes with their promise to return before sun-up." He also told her on New Year’s Eve, the watch night began with prayers, songs, and a sermon. At midnight, individuals took turns thanking the Lord and asking for his continued blessings. "The shouting then begin, and continued until dawn." [26]
Map
Liberty County Historical Society. Its website has been abandoned and no information is available about the old map.
Table
1825. Sullivan. 213.
1850. Jack F. Cox. The 1850 Census of Georgia Slave Owners. Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 1999. 308
1860. Sullivan. 790.
1862. Sullivan. 275.
End Notes
1. Like Wylie discussed in the post for 2 June 2019, it is not clear if Thorp had changed the spelling of his name or if Gordon transcribed what he had heard without knowing the local nomenclature. I am not standardizing, but using the spellings ascribed to each individual.
2. Stephen Winick. "The World’s First ‘Kumbaya’ Moment: New Evidence about an Old Song." Folklife Center News 34(3–4): 3–10:2010.
3. "Last name: Oglethorpe." Surname Database website.
4. "Unbound Civil and Criminal Case Files of the Superior Court of McIntosh County." Record Group 198, Box 20. The other Thorpes listed in the sequence were Albert, Annie, Charles E., Josiah S. L., Luther, and W. L. One suspects these may have been tax liens.
5. Lydia Parrish. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. xxiii.
6. Lorenzo Dow Turner. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002 edition. 292.
7. Wikipedia. "Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge" and "South Newport River." These places were shown on the map published on 3 February 2019.
8. "Charles Thorpe." Geni website. 8 November 2014.
9. "Ann Jurdine." My Heritage website.
10. Carolyn Jane Crown. "Charles Joseph Washington Thorpe." Geni website. 23 May 2016.
11. Buddy Sullivan. Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater. Darien, Georgia: McIntosh County Board of Commissioners, 1990. 236.
12. Sullivan. 39.
13. Sullivan. 40.
14. Sullivan. 229.
15. Sullivan. 229.
16. "The Story of Harris Neck." United States Fish and Wildlife Service website.
17. PHH. "John Abbott Thomas." Geni website. 15 November 2011.
18. The United States ban was different from the British one that effected the trade in Africa; this ban impacted the purchaser.
19. Advertisement placed by Jonathan Thomas. 14 May 1822. Quoted by Emma Rountree. "Runaway Slave Ads, Savannah Republican, 1819 – 1823." Davenport House Museum website. 2014. Thomas may have been the executor for Thorpe’s estate.
20. Edward J. Thomas. Memoirs of a Southerner. Savannah: 1923. Quoted by Sullivan. 244.
21. Sullivan. 237.
22. William Chandler Lanier Jr. "Charles Odingsell Screven." Geni website. 27 February 2018.
Ryan Matthew McRae. "Brig. Gen. James B. Screven." Geni website. 26 November 2017.
"James Screven." Geni website. 18 November 2014.
"Samuel Screven." Geni website19 July 2017.
Lawrence Wall. "Rev. William Screven." Geni website. 12 March 2017.
23. S. G. Hillyer. Reminiscences of Georgia Baptists. Atlanta: Foote and Davies Company, 1902.
24. Sullivan. 790. She only was identified as Miss Thorpe.
25. "The Story of Harris Neck" had 1882. Friends of the Savannah Coastal Wildlife Refuges had 1879. ("Harris Neck Timelime." Coastal Refuges website.)
26. Parrish. 56.
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