Feb 27, 2017 3 min read

Someone in 1893 did a valuable service for all of us here in 2017.

A scribe for The Daily Republican, the Monongahela newspaper that was launched in 1881 and published its final edition in 1970, had the foresight to talk to residents of the community who had been born into slavery or escaped from it.

By 1893, the Emancipation Proclamation was 30 years old, and former slaves who were young adults at the conclusion of the Civil War were well into middle age. Considering that life expectancy in those days was in the mid to late 40s and the onetime slaves had led lives of extreme stress and deprivation, there would have been no guarantee in 1893 that former slaves would be around too much longer to tell their stories.

As we detailed in a story in the Monday edition, the tales of former slaves that were recounted to The Daily Republican were recently uncovered thanks to the sleuthing of Terry Necciai, an architect and historian in Monongahela who has taken a keen interest in the history of the black community in the Mon Valley.

“It really interests me that this was in the newspaper at that particular time,” Necciai told the Observer-Reporter’s Scott Beveridge. “There is something about this community that allowed for this diversity.”

In our time, slavery can seem distant and remote, like ancient Rome or the Spanish Inquisition. But it was finally eradicated in the United States just 150 years ago – in the grand sweep of history, that’s pretty recent, and the brutality that was meted out to slaves should still shock the conscience.

For instance, Esther Cochran told The Daily Republican about carrying her infant son through the night and through knee-deep mud and rain in order to reach the safe harbor of a stop on the Underground Railroad, located on the other side of the “borderland of freedom.”

Cochran also told the newspaper about brutal scenes she witnessed while she was enslaved. She recounted seeing men being tied up, forced to kneel in the snow and whipped “until the blood-stained snow was like a lake of fire.”

Another former slave told The Daily Republican about seeing a man whipped and the wounds being so severe that “for weeks he would have to wear a greased shirt to keep the garment from sticking to his flesh.”

Yet another recalled a blow to the head “which nearly cost me my life and which today shows its effect in many a severe headache.”

Anyone who has ever gone hunting through back issues of old newspapers knows how engrossing the process can be. Set aside one hour to find an article on microfilm or in a musty, bound volume of back issues and you risk happily frittering away three hours as your attention is diverted to ads promising miracle cures, notices about births and deaths and, let’s be honest, stories about mayhem and scandal from long ago. That Necciai was able to share these important narratives in the 21st century is a testament to the wisdom of a long-ago newspaper writer who realized the stories coaxed from former slaves would resonate far beyond their time and place.