Pocahontas Island: The South's Largest Free Black Community

In the antebellum South, freedom was not supposed to look like this.

Pocahontas Island sits in the Appomattox River on the edge of Petersburg, connected by bridges to one of the largest cities in Virginia. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was home to the largest free Black community in the entire South. More free Black residents of Petersburg lived on this island than in any other part of the city, and Petersburg itself had more free Black residents than any other city in antebellum Virginia.

The island's story began in seventeen thirty-two, when enslaved Black workers were brought here to labor in John Bolling's tobacco warehouses. The land was subdivided in seventeen forty-nine, became a town called Wittontown, and was renamed Pocahontas Island when it was formally incorporated in seventeen fifty-two. By the time Petersburg absorbed it in seventeen eighty-four, a community had taken root.

Through the early decades of the eighteen hundreds, free Black men and women acquired property here, built homes, and found work as boatmen, fishermen, watermen, and tobacco factory hands on the Appomattox wharves. They established churches, the Sandy River Baptist congregation organizing here as early as seventeen ninety-seven. They created a community infrastructure at a time when Virginia law made free Black life deliberately precarious.

By eighteen sixty, Petersburg's free Black population numbered three thousand two hundred twenty-four, roughly one-third of the city's Black residents. Most of them could trace a connection to Pocahontas Island.

The island's last surviving antebellum structure, the Jarratt House, a Federal-style double brick house built around eighteen twenty, still stands. The Pocahontas Island Black History Museum now tells this story, one of the most important and least-known chapters in the American struggle for freedom.