Parthenia Hensley

Parthenia Hensley

Lolita Cunningham

Quick Facts

Significance:

Formerly enslaved person

Date of Birth:

1843

Date of Death:

1929

Place of Burial:

Eula, AR

Cemetery Name:

Hall Cemetery

The first enslaved Africans were brought to English-occupied North America more than 400 years ago. Despite constant adversity throughout American history, African American culture and heritage strengthened each generation.

Parthenia "Thene" Hensley was born to an enslaved woman owned by John Hensley of Richland Township in Searcy County. At age 5 or 6, Thene was given to John's daughter and son-in-law, Louisa and William Wyatt, as a wedding present, with the understanding that she was Louisa's half-sister.

In 1862, 17-year-old Thene had a baby by her owner William. Newton Wyatt, just like his mother, was born an illegitimate child of slaveholder and enslaved. Thene had another child, Lucinda, 3 years later, whose father remains unknown. Thene raised Newt and Lucinda alongside her owners' many children on the Wyatt farm in the Richland Valley.

According to oral history, Thene was a spirited Christian woman who stayed with the Wyatt children and grandchildren in the Richland Valley after the Emancipation Proclamation. She walked all of the children to and from school each day and shared her famous molasses cookies with the pupils and teachers. She cared for several families in the Richland Valley during illnesses, births, and deaths, becoming known endearingly as "Granny Thene." She died in 1929, 64 years after the Union's Civil War victory, and was buried at Hall Cemetery in the Richland Valley.

As we've seen time and time again, "freed" slaves who had been born into slaveholding families often remained with their former owners after emancipation, confined by circumstances that couldn't truly be undone with the simple stroke of a pen.