Race and Place in Appalachia: The Watershed Project at Emory & Henry College

Guest contributor: Talmage Stanley

Through its Watershed Project, Emory & Henry College tries to tell an honest story about Southwest Virginia and central Appalachia. Place is the narrative engine and scaffolding for this immersive and non-linear digital story. The Watershed Project begins with the foundations of the earth, before any human habitation, to tell stories about this unique place as an ongoing, dynamic interaction between the natural environment, built environment, and human culture and history. One aspect of this honest storytelling of place is to focus on slavery, remembering that Emory & Henry College, founded in 1836, is the oldest educational institution in Southwest Virginia. Through their work on the project, students are learning to raise difficult questions that come without easy answers.  

Coordinated through Emory & Henry’s Appalachian Center for Civic Life, the Watershed Project’s first step to recover the local history of slavery was the digitization of the college’s earliest account books and registers. Students began this work in 2022. In the spring semester of 2023, the Appalachian Center and the Interdisciplinary Program in Civic Innovation offered a new course on “Emory & Henry and the Slave Society.” During this project-based course, student teams combed through these digitized records, identifying more than 317 enslaved persons who labored at Emory & Henry from its founding to 1865. As we worked together on the research and production of a short documentary, the students came to understand that memory requires more than just removing enslavers’ names from buildings.  The documentary, A Remembrance, was released online in April 2023. On October 17, 2023, the Appalachian Center hosted the first public screening during An Evening of Remembrance, which featured descendants of the enslaved laborers and students involved in the Watershed Project 

There is a widespread misperception that in Southwest Virginia and the rest of Appalachia, chattel slavery was gentler, more benign than elsewhere in the South. While it is true that there were fewer absolute numbers of enslaved people in the region (compared, say, to Virginia’s Piedmont and Tidewater regions), the per capita numbers of enslaved persons was significant. One of the things that I have come to understand—and that I try to get students to see very clearly—is that looking at slavery only in terms of numbers obscures the complexity of the issue. “Relatively few slaves” is just an easy answer—not necessarily an honest one—that reduces everything to simplistic labels of guilt and innocence. 

Virginia perfected a system of slave codes. These codes were in effect in every county and town in the Commonwealth and shaped Black people’s and White people’s daily lives. Every economic and social relationship was predicated on and shaped within these codes; in turn, the slave codes shaped the consciousness of the people of this place over time—shaped, reshaped, and reshaping constantly. The Watershed Project seeks to bear witness to this honestly.

Virginia’s principal economic resource and export in the antebellum period was enslaved persons. With wealth produced by enslaved labor, early benefactors helped keep Emory & Henry financially solvent. Some students paid their tuition with the labor of enslaved persons held by their families and sent to work for the college while the student attended classes. An 1843 loan from the Virginia Literary Fund, made possible in part by the “transportation sale” of enslaved persons, saved the college from ruin. (Indeed, the college was founded within sight of the primary overland route along which thousands of persons were marched to slave labor camps in the Deep South.) By the 1850’s, Emory & Henry was the intellectual center of southern nationalism in Southwest Virginia.

At the October 2023 event, students also premiered a Watershed Project exhibit focused on the college’s location along the route of the Second Middle Passage. Emory & Henry continues to work towards a permanent memorial that restores this history and the legacies of enslaved people to the civic memory of this institution—i.e., an integration of memorialization into the ongoing practices and policies of our college.

As a window into post-emancipation struggles for racial justice, students are now using the digitized records to document persons of color who labored at Emory & Henry between 1865 and 1965. Students have digitized more than a thousand oral histories held in the Appalachian Oral History Project, some of which offer direct testimony from persons who had living memories of people who had been enslaved. Drawing from a range of resources, students are gathering data on agricultural and industrial production in the region from 1790 to the present; the rise of industrialization in furniture, textile, and coal mining; the environmental damage industrialization brought to the region; incidents of racial terror; the movement of African Americans away from Southwest Virginia; and place-grounded, grassroots struggles for social and economic justice.  

Most of the work of the Watershed Project is done by students enrolled in my courses and the courses of other teaching faculty, or as part of the Bonner Scholars Program. We also have some work-study employees and student volunteers. This spring, there are 45-50 students working on some aspect of the Watershed Project every week. 

I end on a personal note. Parts of my family have been in Southwest Virginia, living along the New River, since the mid-1700s. I know this place. The Watershed Project rests on my lifework: the body of intellectual work I have done over my career, my published works, every aspect of my teaching, my civic participation, my spiritual life, and what I have learned about myself as a pilgrim in Southwest Virginia. It is rooted in my identity in this place and is shaped by my own family’s stories. The Watershed Project isn’t perfect—it has its flaws and imperfections—but it is trying to be honest. 

Talmage Stanley is a professor of civic innovation and coordinator of the Watershed Project at Emory & Henry College. The views expressed here are his own, not necessarily those of Emory & Henry College or the Council of Independent Colleges.