Hairston and Wilson Family Papers

Family correspondence and financial and legal materials dating from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth century comprise the bulk of the collection, which documents several branches of the white Hairston, Wilson, and their extended families of Virginia and Mississippi. Financial and legal documents include bills, receipts, accounts, tax assessments, wills, deeds, indentures, agreements, contracts, ledgers, and slight, scattered business correspondence. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century financial and legal materials document the Hairston family's enslavement of hundreds of human beings, agricultural and other business interests, and extensive land holdings in Virginia and Mississippi, including Beaver Creek Plantation in Martinsville, Va., and Leatherwood Plantation in Henry County, Va. Numerous documents, including bills of sale, lists of enslaved people and tax assessments, and extracts from wills, reflect the antebellum plantation economy in the American South and illustrate the families' use of and reliance on enslaved labor from the colonial period until emancipation. Post emancipation documents include tenant agreements with African American farmers. Other materials include documents related to schools and churches which family members attended, lodges and clubs, Virginia militias in the fist decades of the nineteenth century, and the Beaver Creek Plantation household in the early twentieth century. A small number of photographs depict extended family members including Rorer James Sr., a Virginia state senator. However, most individuals who are pictured are not identified. Genealogical information, family charts, family histories, and transcriptions of nineteenth-century documents were compiled in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by members of the white Hairston family and related families.