Article

Black History at Big Thicket: Relying on the Landscape After Emancipation

By Savannah Peterson, African American Experience Intern

Emancipated people settled in the Big Thicket and survived off the land, using the woods of southeast Texas for homesteading, hunting, and foraging.

history black and white photo from the early 1900s showing 2 men sitting at the base of a wide tree trunk. — Two employees of the Thompson Brothers Lumber Company, early 1900s.
East Texas Research Center

Once chattel slavery was abolished, emancipated people either chose to stay with their enslavers or leave and build a life utilizing resources from the landscape. Many formerly enslaved people considered that period to be a bad time as most of them didn’t know where to go or what to do.¹ Many emancipated people made the difficult choice to remain with their enslavers due to the protection they offered from Klan-like groups and the security of room and board. Those who fled to the woods had to utilize the landscape’s natural resources to provide housing and food for their family as well as products to sell for profit. Homesteading, hunting, and foraging were vital practices for emancipated people relying on the Big Thicket landscape, for the practices served as a means of putting food on the table as well as a source of community building and recreation in the Black communities formed post-emancipation.

Land acquisition was the first step to establishing a homestead. Some emancipated people had saved up money and were able to purchase land once they found someone willing to sell to them, but more common was acquisition by the law of adverse possession, more commonly known as squatter’s rights.² The land acquired could be a personal plot for a homestead where a family could build a house, grow a vegetable garden, and have access to the forest for resources like meat, plants, and more.

These family plots could also be the beginnings of freedom colonies where many Black families settled in the same area and formed a community, such as Fresenius in Hardin County. Homesteads were vital for the survival of many emancipated families, but these communities provided more than just shelter or a roof over their heads. They provided a sense of belonging, a sense of freedom, and safety from a history of chattel slavery and the reality of living in the Jim Crow South.

historic black and white photo of a large tree looming above and a small cabin in the distance across an open field. — Old cabin near Batson, Texas, 1965
Herkenham Photo

In addition to housing, the Big Thicket’s rich landscape and biodiversity offered emancipated people a variety of natural resources. Hunting was a necessary practice for these early Big Thicket settlers. Before stores were easily accessible, hunting was the only way to ensure they had meat to eat. “Since slavery times, African Americans had specialized in nocturnal, silent, no-gun hunting methods, and they ate some small animals that whites would not eat.”³ They would eat opossums and raccoons, typically served with sweet potatoes or yams. Multiple slave narratives from the Library of Congress confirm opossum and sweet potatoes as a staple food for people during enslavement, so they carried this knowledge of hunting and food preparation with them in their post-emancipation practices.⁴

Beyond just putting food on the table, hunting served as a recreational bonding activity for men and boys; “Boys went out on all-night, opossum hunting excursions, returning at first light with several live opossums in a sack.”⁵ This required a familiarity with the area they were hunting in and well-practiced skill for catching opossums and raccoons.

In addition to hunting, foraging was an important practice and community bonding event which allowed emancipated people to supplement the foods they could not grow, hunt, or fish for. Josie Brown, a formerly enslaved person, reveals in her oral history that while enslaved, her family would forage for grapes to use in jelly and wine; people in Big Thicket still forage for grapes to make jelly and wine to this day.⁶ Similarly, Jesse Truvillion shares in his article, “A Child of the Big Thicket,” his story of foraging for blackberries to use in a pie, and later to make wine to drink for the Lord’s Supper.⁷

A sassafras plant with green leaves that look like dinosaur footprints.

Every family had such remedies … sage, sassafras, mullein, pine leaf, or pine root teas for fevers and chills; pepper and corn-shuck teas for various ailments; and peppermint tea for common indigestion.

—Thad Sitton and James Conrad, in Freedom Colonies (book)

Image credit: Sassafras (NPS Photo)

As with hunting, foraging required knowledge of the landscape and a sense of direction. It was important to know which locations were safe for foraging. Truvillion continued to share that in his expedition for blackberries, he ended up on land held by a white owner who threatened to “shoot any Black man seen on his property.”⁸ It was also important to know which plants were safe to forage for and know how such resources could be used. For instance, many plants could serve as natural remedies; “Every family had such remedies ... sage, sassafras, mullein, pine leaf, or pine root teas for fevers and chills; pepper and corn-shuck teas for various ailments; and peppermint tea for common indigestion.”⁹

A person holding a handful of brown, rough hickory nuts in their cupped hands. — Hickory nuts
NPS Photo / Kennie Merbach

Hickory nuts were another common item to forage. The “fall hickory-nut gatherings, hunting, fishing, or foraging on the free range occasionally rose to the level of community social event, but families normally did these things to collect resources for home consumption.”¹⁰ Foraging brought the emancipated community together in the same manner hunting did.

Life after emancipation held a new set of challenges for Black people, from living off the landscape to interacting with a society they were not welcome in. Still, “the forest empowered Black woods dwellers to exploit forest resources for their own profit.”¹¹ The landscape offered them access to their survival needs such as food and shelter, but it also provided entry into the economy they were not expected to participate in. Living off the landscape and utilizing practices such as hunting, homesteading, and foraging in Big Thicket posed unique challenges to emancipated people, but the landscape also offered them a freedom many had never known and protection from the racism found in southeast Texas after the Civil War.

Footnotes

Minerva Bendy, Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams-Duhon. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn161/.
Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad, Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 29.
Sitton and Conrad, Freedom Colonies, 57.
Allen Thomas, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 4, Sanco-Young. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn164/.
Sitton and Conrad, Freedom Colonies, 57.
Josie Brown, Federal Writers' Project, Part 1, Adams-Duhon.
Jesse G. Truvillion, “A Child of the Big Thicket,” Journal of Folklore Research 37, no. 2/3 (2000): 145. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3814630.
Truvillion, “A Child of the Big Thicket,” 136.
Sitton and Conrad, Freedom Colonies, 71.
Sitton and Conrad, Freedom Colonies, 60.
Stephen Andrew Reich, "The Making of a Southern Sawmill World: Race, Class, and Rural Transformation in the Piney Woods of East Texas, 1830-1930," (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1998), 70-72.