– more than two years before the 13 th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery throughout the United States .
According to Historic Mitchelville staff and other sources , the town had between 1,500 and 3,000 Black people at its peak , including those who had lived in the area and refugees who found their way there during the Civil War . The area is named for U . S . Army Major General Ormsby Mitchel , who ordered construction of a new village by and for the “ freedmen ” and refugees .
Mitchel shared his vision when visiting the First African Baptist Church shortly after his arrival in 1862 : “ What will you do with the Black man after liberating him ? We will make him a useful , industrious citizen ,” Mitchel is quoted as saying during the height of the Civil War . “ We will give him his family , his wife , his children – give him the earnings of the sweat of his brow , and as a man , we will give him what the Lord ordained him to have . This experiment is to give you freedom , position , homes , your families , property , your own soil . It seems to me a better time is coming … a better day is dawning .”
Newly liberated men and women were paid for their work , some started businesses and many became landowners when properties confiscated by soldiers were sold
( Photo by : Norris P . West ) to them for $ 1.25 an acre . Many residents belong to the Gullah Geechee community , who were brought here in slavery from West Africa and maintained many of the traditions , such as covering homes with blue , the color of heaven that serves as protection .
The Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park is essentially an outdoor museum , with metal frames shaped in the outline of small houses and a church , scaled to the approximate size of structures the freedman built in the 1860s . Each has descriptions of daily life at the time . There is also a tribute to Robert Smalls , an enslaved man who escaped to freedom in 1862 by boldly commandeering a Confederate supply ship from the Charleston Harbor and delivering it to Union forces . Smalls would later serve in the South Carolina legislature and the U . S . House of Representatives .
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( Photo by : Norris P . West )
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