Six Generations of a Black Family in DC
I was born in the year A.D. 1773 11th of October in Frederick County Maryland. I was born a slave and continued one for 19 years.
Capt. George Pointer
Introduction
Captain George Pointer was born enslaved on a tobacco plantation in colonial Maryland. He and his descendants were participants in many events in American history from the 18th to the 20th centuries. The lives of his six generations gave them a uniquely human perspective to well-known major events in American history.
When George Pointer was born, tobacco was the most important cash crop at the time and slavery was the most important source of farm labor. Maryland growers wanted to use the Potomac River to ship the heavy crop to Georgetown, one of the largest tobacco ports in the mid-Atlantic. The river, however, had too many rapids and waterfalls for a safe journey.
After the end of the Revolutionary War George Washington formed the Potomac Company to improve the river, and it eventually became one of the biggest transportation projects in young America. At age 13 Pointer’s owner rented him to Washington’s company and Pointer on several occasions met the future president. He also accompanied Washington’s good friend, Colonel George Gilpin, on the first formal survey of the upper river.
At age 19 Pointer bought his freedom and continued working for the Potomac Company; he eventually becoming a supervisory engineer and earned the title of “Captain.” He married and raised three children in his cottage at the Little Falls of the river in a community of Black, white and immigrant families. In 1828 he and his granddaughter piloted President John Quincy Adams to the ceremonial groundbreaking of the successor of George Washington’s canal, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company.
Pointer’s granddaughter became the matriarch of three succeeding generations whom she and her husband raised on a 2-acre farm in rural Washington, DC. Her family survived the DC riots after Nat Turner’s rebellion, periodic cholera epidemics, and the death of a young daughter in a fire in 1850.
Two of Pointer’s great-grandsons fought in the Civil War, and their family farm was invaded by Confederate soldiers in 1864. After the war three sons moved to Georgetown where they raised the fifth generation of Pointers. The two youngest children went to the first Reconstruction school near their home, and eventually two literate sons joined the early Black migration to New York State to become a Pullman porter and a cathedral sexton. The end of Reconstruction, however, and the beginning of Jim Crow threatened the families’ way of life in Washington, DC.
At the beginning of the 20th century some of Pointer’s descendants had become federal civil servants in the Post Office and Park Service and a distinguished Black undertaker. The expansion of the white population of DC into its rural suburbs, however, increased the need for white schools. And the use of the constitutional principle of eminent domain forced four Pointer households to lose their homes; they were forced to sell the 2-acre family farm in Chevy Chase, DC where they had lived for generations.
At the beginning of the 21st century the eighth generation of George Pointer’s descendants gathered at Lafayette Elementary School in the District on the grounds where their family farm had been. They gathered again when the school park was renamed for their ancestor and will gather once more at Great Falls National Park in 2023 for the 250th anniversary of their distinguished patriarch.
The history of George Pointer’s descendants begins with an eleven-page letter he wrote to the Board of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in 1829.
Read George Pointer’s full letter to the Board of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal >>
