Steve Wick
In August 2006, a black farm worker named James Wilson died on eastern Long Island. He was 87 years old and lived out his life in farm labor camps in New Jersey and on Long Island. I found him near the end of his life living in a camp in Cutchogue, Long Island.
As a journalist, I wrote a number of stories about Mr. Wilson and this camp, which burned to the ground a year before he died. There are many questions about his life that he could not answer for me. Those questions, including one in particular, are the reason I am writing today.
Mr. Wilson was born in Barwick in 1918. There are no records of his birth in the state archives. His mother was Ada Wilson, his father Berry Wilson. He had no memories of his father and almost none of his mother. While I found no death records for Berry Wilson, I did find one that shows that Ada Wilson died in Barwick in February 1925. At the time of her death, at the age of 37, I believe she was a housekeeper for a white family in Barwick.
Mr. Wilson never knew where his mother was buried in Barwick. Her death certificate includes two militia district numbers that are strong clues and one shows that she lived on the Brooks County side of Barwick at the time of her death. The second shows that she is buried on the Thomas County side of Barwick.
Her death certificate also says that Berry Wilson was dead by 1925. I have no idea where he is buried, or how or when he died. His life, which must have ended when he was also in his thirties, is a mystery.
I do know that Mr. Wilson, then six or perhaps seven years old, left Barwick after his mother’s death and went to Ormond Town, Fla., to live with his grandmother, Julia Wilson. The 1920 federal census shows that Julia Wilson, and her husband, Shadrick Wilson, then lived in Barwick on the Thomas County side. The militia district number on the census for Julia Wilson’s location in 1920 is the same as the number on Ada Wilson’s death certificate. Julia Wilson was born in 1866 or 1877 in Boston, no doubt on the same ground where her family was enslaved. Shadrick was born in that area, too, in 1861.
I know that Julia Wilson died in 1931 in Ormond Town. Perhaps 12 or 13 years of age at the time of his grandmother’s death, the young Jimmy Wilson climbed aboard a truck that left that town and took him to a farm in New Jersey. He never returned to Barwick. He told me repeatedly he would never go back to Georgia, under any circumstances.
I would like to find out more about this Wilson family, including what happened to Berry Wilson and where in Barwick Ada Wilson is buried. Before he died, Mr. Wilson said, if her burial location could be found, he would like someone to put flowers there for him.
There is one more area I am interested in. Local newspapers say that, in Nov. 1920, when Jimmy Wilson would have been one or two, a man named Ralph Wilson was lynched in Thomas County. Subsequent stories say the lynch mob did not get him, as the Thomas County sheriff got this Wilson out of the county in time. Additional newspaper accounts show that Ralph Wilson was put on trial in Thomasville in Feb. 1921 and found not guilty of raping a white Thomas County teenage girl, the daughter of a prominent family.
If more can be learned, I would like to find out what happened to this Wilson. Was he related to Jimmy Wilson? Was he, perhaps, Berry Wilson’s brother?
If anyone can help answer these questions, if there are black Wilsons still in the area, I would like to hear from them.
I can be reached at 631-843-4173, or at my e-mail address wick@newsday.com. My regular mail address is: Steve Wick, Newsday, 235 Pine Lawn Rd., Melville, NY, 11747
