Walking through the doors of the Mountain Heritage Center is like walking through a time machine. You are surrounded by sounds of nature; birds chirping, crickets and running water, complemented by music that was popular in the late 1800s.
That all changes when you enter the Cowee 19 exhibit. Suddenly, you become surrounded by the oppressive silence and sadness of history.
Nineteen boys and men lost their lives at an incarceration labor camp tucked away in the mountains while working on laying the railway that would launch Western North Carolina into an era of economic development.
Each of them were convicted of petty crimes, mainly larceny, and were sentenced to multiple years of hard labor. Black Codes in North Carolina limited African Americans from being able to serve on juries which almost always guaranteed that any African American put before a jury was going to receive a guilty verdict.
The 19 didn’t stand a chance against an all-white jury, in rural, Jim Crow era North Carolina.
The story of the Cowee 19 details the strife and oppression of African Americans in the late 19th century. The Mountain Heritage Center opened the Shadows of Incarceration: The Cowee 19 Story, curated by graduate student Danielle Duffy, to the public Monday, May 6 and will be available through Friday, Dec. 13.
The Cowee 19 are (ages are estimated):
- Sampson Ward (1827-1882), Onslow County, 55
- David Dozier (1830-1882), Edgecombe County, 52
- George Rush (1838-1882), Montgomery County, 44
- Jerry Smith (1849-1882), Wilson County, 33
- Nelson Bowser (1850-1882), Hertford County, 32
- Moses Brown (1852-1882), Warren County, 30
- Thomas Miller (1852-1882), Chesterfield County, SC, 30
- Lewis Davis (1852-1882), Warren County, 30
- Robert Robinson (1855-1882), New Hanover County, 27
- Alex Adam (1857-1882), Washington County, 25
- Orren Brookes (1860-1882), Orange County, 22
- John Newsome (1862-1882), Hertford County, 20
- Albert Cowen (1862-1882), Rowan County, 20
- John Whitfield (1862-1882), Wayne County, 20
- George “James” Tice (1863-1882), Iredell County, 19
- James Fisher (1864-1882), Polk County, 18
- Jim McCallum (1864-1882), Gaston County, 18
- Allen Tillman (1864-1882), Anson County, 18
- Charles “Chas” Eason (1867-1882), Martin County, 15
“The Cowee 19 is a story that has been swirling around this area since it happened,” Duffy said. “It’s risen up and died back down kind of like the seasons. The story kept coming up and I kept on coming in contact with it. I got my chance [to tell this story] through a historic preservation project and just kept that ball rolling.”
Duffy has been interested in incarcerated people’s rights since she was young and took this opportunity to talk about the history and conditions that incarcerated people have experienced. To conduct her research, she used genealogical history and scoured the incarceration records in Raleigh.
There are no photos of the Cowee labor camp or of those who lived, worked and died there. There are photos of other labor camps, replica bunkbeds, prison outfits and various artifacts that were used in the exhibit to put into perspective the conditions of incarceration labor camps.
A map found pointed out the camp’s location which Duffy has displayed at the MHC. She talked with Cayla Colclasure, an anthropology doctoral candidate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about this labor campsite at a conference.
Colclasure, along with a WCU archeology department field school, is currently excavating the labor camp site and have been uncovering artifacts as of early May.
Many would assume that incarceration labor camps are a thing of the past. They are not.
In the U.S. the use of incarcerated individuals in the labor force is still a prevalent practice. As of 2022, nearly 800,000 people work while in prison for pennies on the dollar, varying by state according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Duffy sees this exhibit as a way to comment on the current system and view it as a mirror.
“I want people to recognize that incarcerated people aren’t just a number,” Duffy said. “I think that’s a really important thing to remember when we talk about deep things like structural racism. This is a structural issue, but this is also a people issue. I hope that when people go through the exhibit, they can see this long shadow of control and power systems in the incarceration system. You can see these links from the late 1800s to mass incarceration today and it’s just a path that has been walked down. With that path are there ways we can make a new direction?”
To view the exhibit, visit the Mountain Heritage Center connected to the Hunter Library.
