Brown’s Chapel Free Will Baptist Church

Named after famous abolitionist John Brown, Brown’s Chapel was the first Black church established in Arrow Rock post-emancipation. The Friends of Arrow Rock organization estimates that the church was probably constructed as early as 1869. It is suspected that the Church also served as the first school for Black children in the town. According to historian Gary Kremer, the school was founded by famed Black Missouri leader James Milton Turner during a trip to the village. The school was one of many contributions made by Turner to the education of Black people in the state, including founding Lincoln University in 1866.  After remaining shuttered for years, the church was restored by the Friends of Arrow Rock organization in 1998. In recent years, Juneteenth events have been held at the venue in commemoration of African American history in Arrow Rock.   

During the first half of the nineteenth century, a wave of white migrants from the Upper American South settled in the central Missouri River Valley. As a result, central Missouri developed distinct and powerful socio-cultural and economic ties to the Southern United States, including the institution of chattel slavery. Located in eastern Saline County, the town of Arrow Rock was one of the state's most prominent slave-owning communities before the American Civil War. In the 1860 census, 1100 enslaved people were recorded in the wider Arrow Rock township. More broadly, enslaved people made up roughly 3 percent of the total population of Saline County. Benefitting from enslaved labor, Arrow Rock was also home to several of Missouri’s most politically and economically powerful families, including the Sappingtons, Marmadukes, and the Binghams. After the Civil War, several formerly enslaved people remained in Arrow Rock, creating a notable Black community that lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. To better inform your tour of Arrow Rock, this essay will sketch the history of African Americans in the town and its surrounding areas, from the growth of chattel slavery to the ultimate decline of the town’s Black population. 

Unlike the Deep South, slavery in Arrow Rock–as in much of the region–was not characterized by massive plantations and cash crop agriculture. Although “Little Dixie” developed substantive hemp and tobacco industries, enslaved people in Missouri were often cast as live-in servants and farmhands held by comparatively small households. Due to their high-profile residents, Saline and nearby Howard counties developed larger plantations then elsewhere in Missouri. In 1860, 97 of the 222 “large-scale” platers, defined as holding twenty or more enslaved people, could be found in the two counties. However, even these holdings lagged behind behind the largest plantations of the Deep South in terms of scale. The smaller-scale nature of the institution in Missouri generated widely-held misconceptions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Proponents and later defenders of slavery in the state, as in much of the Upper South, argued that the absence of large slaveholding plantations translated into an inherently “milder” form of slavery.  

Much of these misconceptions hinge on the perception that instances of direct violence between slaveholders and their enslaved workforce were uncommon. However, as historian Diane Mutti-Burke has observed, the smaller-scale institution in Missouri led to more intense social bonds between enslavers and their enslaved workers. These intimate social relations were expressed in a “continuum of treatment from ‘kindness’ to depraved cruelty”. While noting that these close interactions sometimes resulted in “improved material conditions and physical care” for enslaved individuals, Mutti-Burke contends that the personal nature of conflicts between enslavers and the enslaved in Missouri often heightened the degree of violence in small-scale slavery houses. An example of such emotionally charged violence can be found in the memories of freedman Richard Bruner. Conducted by the United States Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1937, Burner’s testimony is one of the few surviving interviews with a formerly enslaved person in Saline County. He recalls, “Yes, they thrashed me once, [they] made me hug a tree and whipped me.” Another freedman from nearby Marshall, Missouri recalled one particularly cruel instance of punishment. He told the WPA, “A slave right here in Marshall angered his master, [and] was chained to a hemp-brake on a cold 'night and left to freeze to death, which he did.” Apart from these overt instances of torture or killing, it is also worth considering the ever-present threat of violence that enslaved people experienced. Microsocial interactions between enslavers and the enslaved, more frequent and emotionally charged than elsewhere, held the consistent potential for barbarity.  

Additionally, enslaved labor in this more intimate environment was still highly exploitative. As historian Timothy Baumann notes, “enslaved African Americans provided the primary source of labor for Arrow Rock’s economy.” On agricultural labor in Arrow Rock Township, Bruner told the WPA, “I remember being a water-boy to the field bands before I was big enough to work in the fields.” While holding his hand up to his waist, Burner continued, “I hoed tobacco when I was about so high.” Another interview from Saline County with a freedwoman named Isabelle offers an example of the labor required for domestic tasks. Observers from the WPA noted that Isabelle’s “work as a slave was almost all in the house; she was taught to sew and had to help make the clothes for the other slaves. She also was a nurse-maid for her mistress' little children and at one time was hired out to [another] family to take care of the children when his wife was ill.” Another formerly enslaved woman remarked, “I had to work in the house for them so hard, I did not have time to even look at the field.” When the inherent labor exploitation of slavery and the range of interpersonal interactions experienced by enslaved people are taken together, it is highly reductive to categorically proclaim it as a milder form of the institution.  

Racial violence in the town also became more overt in the years before the Civil War. Starting in 1854, heightened political tension in Missouri and Kansas manifested itself in the form of guerrilla violence between pro- and anti-slavery forces across the region. Naturally, this conflict was racialized due to its connection to slavery. At one town hall meeting in 1860, a pro-slavery Arrow Rock townsman reportedly called out, “The Democratic Party is the only political organization that is able to save the Constitution and the Union ... and do battle against the Black Republicans.” For the enslaved people of Saline County, the increased political tensions resulted in the lynching of four African Americans in 1859. In Arrow Rock specifically, one unnamed enslaved man was lynched in July 1859. At another of these mob killings- a double lynching of two enslaved men in Marshall- a participant was recorded as stating that he “hoped before they hung him, they would let him see the other get burnt.” These instances of overt racial violence should serve as a reminder of the centrality of slavery to the socioeconomic structure of central Missouri in the middle of the nineteenth century. Faced with the threat of emancipation, pro-slavery Missourians reaffirmed the dominance of enslavement and white authority through racialized mob violence.  

During the war, many enslaved people fled the township as widespread instability in the region created additional avenues for escape. They often settled in the newly-formed independent African-American communities nearby, including the now-abandoned villages of Pennytown, Union Hill, Cow Creek, Elk Hill, Salt Pond, or Dresden. Still others joined groups of guerrilla fighters, volunteer infantries, or, after 1862, became recognized soldiers of the United States Army. Bruner, for example, recalled his experience joining the Union forces. He states, "Well you see I was a runaway… I ran away when I was about grown and went to Kansas. When the war broke out I joined the 18th United States Colored Infantry under Capt. Lucas.” These African American troops saw combat during the war in Missouri. At the Battle of Island Mound in 1862, Black soldiers from the 1st Kansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment won over a Confederate-aligned bushwhacking group. Their distinction of being the first Black regiment to defeat Confederate forces gained notable media attention in popular Northern outlets, with the New York Times hailing the “desperate bravery” of the formerly enslaved troops. To this end, the willingness of escaped slaves in Missouri to fight and their effectiveness at the Battle of Island Mound acted as a precursor to President Abraham Lincoln sanctioning official African American divisions within the Union Army in the January 1, 1862 Emancipation Proclamation.  

After the war, the overall population and economy of Arrow Rock declined over the next one hundred years. Once, a town of well of one thousand residents declined to a population of 170 in the 1950s. Within this context of overall decline, the Black Community of Arrow Rock ebbed in population before similarly flatlining during the middle of the twentieth century. Historians have cited an accumulation of historical circumstances for the atrophy of the once prosperous township. Postwar construction of the railroad across Missouri bypassed the town, and in 1872 and 1901, a pair of fires destroyed much of the town’s business district. Additionally, in the 1920s, the U.S. government diverted the Missouri River away from Arrow Rock as part of a flood control project, robbing the town of its lucrative connection to the waterway. However, the most significant factor in Arrow Rock’s economic decline was the widespread out-migration of enslaved workers during and after the Civil War .The town could not maintain its pre-emancipation hemp or tobacco production levels without free labor. In the words of historian Timothy Bauman, emancipation outright “stopped the town’s growth.”   

Black workers who chose to stay or did not have the means to leave were still primarily employed as low-wage live-in servants or field hands. A testament to this continuity, author Thomas Claiborne Rainey observed his uncle's plantation: “I think several of his black people had never left him.” To historian Gary Kremer, this continued exploitation of Arrow Rock’s Black workers serves as a testament to “how little the lives of many African Americans had changed since emancipation.” The collective effect of this lack of economic opportunity was such that, by 1880, the Black population of Arrow Rock was cut in half when compared to antebellum figures.

By the turn of the century, however, the Black population of Arrow Rock stabilized as a percentage of the town’s overall population. More impressively, by 1910, the African American population of Arrow Rock “had gone up to 148, or a surprising 44 percent of the village’s total population.” Reflecting the resurgence of Arrow Rock’s Black community, a new school for African-American American students was built in 1892. This structure, currently a private residence, replaced the Emancipation-era Baptist church that previously doubled as a school for Black students. During this period, Black Missourians also gained a marginally greater degree of economic mobility. Live-in servitude was phased out, and Black workers pursued employment in other industries over the next fifty years. Some of these positions included barbers, seamstresses, furniture makers, wallpaper hangers, butchers, chauffeurs, icemen, and independent farmers. The transition from live-in servitude also generated a substantive increase in independent Black households and the growth of Black institutions, such as churches or fraternal organizations. By 1911, there were a total of four Black lodges and two churches on the northern side of Arrow Rock, offering early social welfare programs to the community's needy.

Still, the overall population of the township trended downward, and this trend ultimately extended to Arrow Rock’s Black community. Following this brief turn-of-the-century resurgence from 1890 to 1910, there were another fifty years of atrophy following the formalization of Jim Crow segregation in the town. Memories of segregation in Arrow Rock feature prominently in a series of oral history interviews conducted by Kramer in the late 1990s. One interviewee, Pearl Adams, recalls, “Our parents taught us where we could go.” Mary Burge, another interviewee, described Arrow Rock as a “city divided” on issues of race. The only interruption in the downward trajectory of Arrow Rock’s Black population was a brief spike in the early 1930s. Kramer attributes this aberration to a nearby WPA rock quarry, which offered another avenue of employment for Black workers in central Missouri during the height of the Great Depression. Yet, the effects of the Great Migrations of the 1920 and 1940s sandwiched this brief resurgence. Due to the United States’ entrance into both World Wars, industrial jobs in nearby Kansas City attracted Black and white workers to the manufacturing center. As, Kremer writes, “Racial integration resulting from the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the civil rights acts of the 1960s, combined with increased economic opportunity in urban areas such as Kansas City, attracted away most of the African Americans who had called Arrow Rock home.” In 2009, Sue Hall, the final Black resident of Arrow Rock, passed away.  

In recent years, the Friends of Arrow Rock organization has engaged in a series of local preservation efforts to highlight the town’s Black history. Some of these initiatives include renovating Brown’s Free Will Baptist Church, the town’s first Black church, and recognizing the Sappington African American Cemetery as a Missouri State Park. Beginning in 2021, the town has held an annual Juneteenth event in honor of the community’s Black history. This driving tour highlights important sites related to slavery, emancipation, Black community formation in Arrow Rock and its surrounding areas, and modern-day preservation efforts.  

Baumann, Timothy E. “An Historical Perspective of Civic Engagement and Interpreting Cultural Diversity in Arrow Rock, Missouri.” Historical Archaeology 45, no. 1 (2011): 114–34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23070207.

Gorrell, Kayla. “Missouri’s Little Dixie African American History Tour - Arrow Rock J. Huston Tavern and Main Street.” Historic Missouri. Accessed December 11, 2023. https://historicmissouri.org/items/show/130.

Hannibal Daily Messenger. “Negro Lynching in Sallene (Sic) County.” July 24, 1859. https://www.newspapers.com/article/hannibal-daily-messenger-nero-lynch-in-s/136322006/.

Hurt, R. Douglas. Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie. Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 1992. http://archive.org/details/agricultureslave00hurt.

Kremer, Gary R. ““The Black People Did the Work’: African American Life in Arrow Rock, Missouri, 1850–1960.” In Race and Meaning : The African American Experience in Missouri. University of Missouri Press, 2014.

Missouri Department of State Parks. “Rural and Small Town Schools in Missouri.” Missouri Department of State Parks, n.d.

Missouri Department of Natural Resources. “Sappington African American Cemetery in Arrow Rock Dedicated as New State Historic Site.” Accessed November 16, 2023. https://dnr.mo.gov/communications/news/sappington-african-american-cemetery-arrow-rock-dedicated-new-state-historic-site.

Mutti-Burke, Diane. “A Contested Promised Land: Mormons, Slaveholders, and the Disputed Vision for the Settlement of Western Missouri.” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 36, no. 1 (2016): 13–34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26316812.

———. On Slavery’s Border : Missouri’s Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865. Early American Places. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=nlebk&AN=343600&scope=site&custid=078-820.

Mutti-Burke, Diane, and Jonathan Halperin Earle, eds. Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri : The Long Civil War on the Border. University Press of Kansas, 2013.

New York Times. “Affairs in the West.” November 19, 1862.

Phillips, Authorene Wilson. Arrow Rock: The Story of a Missouri Village. First Edition. Columbia: University of Missouri, 2005.

Rainey, Thomas Claiborne. Along the Old Trail ... Pioneer Sketches of Arrow Rock and Vicinity. Marshall, Mo., Marshall chapter, Daughters of the American revolution, 1914. http://archive.org/details/alongoldtrailpio00rain.

Selby, Sandy. “Arrow Rock’s Hidden Black History.” Missouri Life Magazine (blog), November 8, 2017. https://missourilife.com/arrow-rock-black-history/.

———. “In Arrow Rock, the Old Tavern Tradition Lives On.” Missouri Life Magazine (blog), April 8, 2019. https://missourilife.com/j-huston-tavern/.

U.S. Office of the Census. “1850 Slave Schedule, Saline County, Missouri.” Census, 1850. Missouri State Archives. https://s1.sos.mo.gov/records/archives/census/pages/slave.