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Urban Slavery at the Bellamy Residence

1/19/2024

When his father died in 1826, nine-year-old John D. Bellamy inherited 21 enslaved people. By 1860 he owned 115 in North Carolina, spread across three counties. He had 82 enslaved men, women, and children working at "Grovely," Bellamy’s produce plantation in Brunswick County. In Columbus County, there were 24 enslaved men between the ages of 17-40 who lived and worked at "Grist," Bellamy’s turpentine plantation. And in New Hanover County at the 503 Market Street townhome, nine domestic enslaved workers maintained the property and served the Bellamy family and their guests. The museum is fortunate to know their names and something of their lives.

Antebellum cities of the South were like urban plantations where the lives of rural planters, town merchants, and enslaved workers were enmeshed.

At Bellamy's Grist plantation, slaves distilled turpentine from pine sap. They cut the sapped trees into large sections and floated them down the river to Wilmington’s lumber mills.

The 1860 county slave census detailed the enslaved person's age, sex, and if they were "black" or "mulatto" beside the name of their owner.

In the 1860 slave census for John D. Bellamy’s Wilmington townhome, shown here, we can glean the following: Sarah, age 45, was the cook/housekeeper; Joan, 37, wet nurse/nanny; Rosella Simmons, 21, laundress; Mary Ann Nixon, 14, maid; Guy Nixon (the only “mulatto” - a person defined as being of mixed Black and White ancestry), 20, butler/coachman; Caroline (Joan’s daughter), 7, maid; and three unnamed girls, age 4, 3 and 1. Newly discovered records indicate that two of the youngest girls were Rosella’s daughters Charlotte and Harriett Potter. Ellen also recalled Tony Bellamy, an enslaved handyman, who likely lived at Grovely and came to the city when maintenance was needed.

At the Bellamy residence in Wilmington, Sarah readied coffee and began meal preparations each day at 5 o’clock in the morning in the townhome's basement kitchen pictured at right.

Mary Ann collected chamber pots from the mansion and emptied them into the privies. Guy’s first job was to pump water from the backyard cistern to a holding tank in the mansion, which supplied water to the second floor bathroom.

The Bellamys moved into the home with their eight children, who ranged in age from a 19-year-old daughter, Belle, to 18-month-old Chesley. Primary care of the youngest Bellamy children was the responsibility of Joan, an enslaved wet nurse and nanny. Joan’s young daughter, Caroline, was described in a family memoir as matriarch Eliza Bellamy’s “little maid” who followed her “foot to foot.” She likely helped Mrs. Bellamy with her morning routine while Joan roused and tended to the Bellamy children.

As coachman, Guy cared for the carriage as well as the horses. Each morning he prepared to drive Dr. Bellamy to his properties, or take Mrs. Bellamy and the children to visit friends or relatives. He ran errands in town and needed written permission from the Bellamys to legally purchase goods. Laws regulated where and when enslaved people could go, with whom they could do business, and with whom they could spend their leisure time. Wilmington’s slave owners nevertheless often disregarded the laws if it benefitted them.

Similar to the image of an enslaved worker shown at left, Rosella spent most of her 16-hour workdays as a laundress. She washed and dried linens and clothing for the Bellamys and their guests in the slave quarters’ laundry room. She was likely assisted by Mary Ann; together they ironed in a basement room in the mansion. The youngest enslaved girls likely helped carry laundry bundles and fold napkins.

The slaves used these exterior stairs to move between the mansion’s floors as their daily work required. The enslaved women and girls who were not preoccupied with the Bellamy children, meal preparations, or laundry spent their afternoons climbing the slave stairs as they cleaned, dusted, polished silver, and readied the mansion for guests.

Guy served the evening meal, while Caroline used a “shoo fly” to ensure diners’ meals were insect free. They would then tend to the needs of the family and their guests after dinner in the parlors while Sarah tidied the kitchen and Mary Ann washed dishes. Joan put the Bellamy children to bed, and after all guests left for the night, the slaves retired to their bed chambers. Their workday ended around 10 o’clock, but they were on-call 24 hours a day. After a few hours’ slumber, the market house bell rang and another day began.

Source: Bellamy Mansion Museum Slave Quarters Exhibit.

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February 1861: Moving Into the Mansion

1/16/2024

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Elevation drawn April 20th, 1860 by Rufus Bunnell, assistant architect.

John Dillard Bellamy.

Eliza McIlhenny Harriss Bellamy.

In February 1861, Dr. John D. Bellamy, his wife Eliza, and their eight children (with another on the way) moved into their new five-story home at 503 Market Street, Wilmington, NC. The Bellamy household was a large and labor-intensive one, with nine enslaved workers living on the site to attend to the family.

Ellen Bellamy, age 8.

Mary Elizabeth "Belle" Bellamy.

John and Eliza’s daughter Ellen, just eight years old at the time, remembered the new house vividly in her memoirs, which were written many decades later. She noted that the house was “complete in every detail and furnished from basement to attic,” including the dining room, kitchen, and other service rooms on the bottom floor to the four high-ceilinged formal rooms on the main floor, four large bedchambers above, and attic chambers and playroom above that. A belvedere atop the roof completed the structure.

Although the family brought with them possessions from their old home a few blocks away, much of the furniture and decorations had come from New York following John and Eliza’s shopping trip to the city in 1860. Ellen tells us that her parents took teenage sister Mary Elizabeth, known as 'Belle', and baby brother Chesley on that trip, “carrying to nurse him, Aunt Betsy Kedar, an old freed mulatto woman, thinking it unwise to take our regular slave nurse as the country was so excited just then on the slavery question.” [The Bellamy’s enslaved “nurse” Joan served as nanny and wet nurse. The term wet nurse in this context means lactating, enslaved women who cared for and nourished babies for a family.]

The main rooms glowed with color — flowered carpets in the parlors, mahogany furniture “done up in red silk damask,” and at the immense windows, brass cornices, lace curtains, and heavy silk draperies of red, green, or gold. White marble and black slate mantels framed the fireplaces, and mirrors in gilded frames reflected the gas light of brass chandeliers.

A complex water system allowed water captured from trough roof gutters to be pumped from a cistern under the back yard to supply running water within the house. The careful arrangement of doors and windows and vents brought cooling breezes from the shaded porch up through the house and out through the belvedere. Separate service zones and a back porch service staircase gave discreet access to the work yard, carriage house, and slave quarters at the rear.

Although free Black and enslaved artisans built much of Wilmington’s architecture at the time, the Bellamy house was singled out by observers as having been constructed principally, if not entirely, by local Black workmen, including carpenters, masons, plasterers and interior finishers. Moreover, to a degree unusual in antebellum construction projects, the names of many of them have been identified. Among them were William Gould, Henry Taylor, George Price Sr. and Jr., Elvin Artis, Alfred and Anthony Howe, and members of the Sadgwar and Kellogg families.

Built on the eve of the Civil War, the Bellamy mansion evoked an image of the archetypal columned southern home, a full-scale rendition of the moonlight-and-magnolia myth. It featured Greek Revival and Italianate styles and was occupied, in Ellen’s words, by the family of a “Southern Gentleman, A Rebel, and a large Slave Owner.”

Ironically, just four years later with the surrender of Wilmington to Union troops on February 22nd, 1865, it became the temporary home to Union generals and their military staffs for the next six months.

Sources: The Bellamy Mansion by Catherine W. Bishir and Back With The Tide by Ellen Bellamy.

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Urban Slavery at the Bellamy Residence

February 1861: Moving Into the Mansion

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