In Franklin black residents lived clustered in towns and segregated from whites, their position in the county secure only in their tightly defined communities.

In Franklin County most black families lived in the southern and easternmost portions of the county, clustered in a band running south of Chambersburg and just north and east of the county seat into Southampton Township. Few blacks lived across much of the northern and western sections of the county. In Chambersburg this pattern persisted, as black families overwhelmingly congregated in the South Ward--439 blacks lived in the South Ward while just 84 lived elsewhere in Chambersburg. The largest concentration of black citizens lived in Montgomery Township and Mercersburg, just a few miles from the Maryland line. Taken together, blacks in the South Ward of Chambersburg and Montgomery Township constituted over half of all black residents in Franklin. Two townships in Franklin--St. Thomas and Mont Alto--had no black residents, while seven had at most one or two black families.

Most Augusta free blacks (67 percent) lived in the North Subdivision of the county, while 18 percent lived in the Staunton District No. 1 and 13 percent in the 1st District. Newspapers in Augusta did not refer to a black area of town or the county. While the majority of free blacks lived in Staunton, at least one-third lived in the rural areas of the county outside Staunton and alongside white residents.

African American Residence by Town, Franklin County, 1860 (table)

Blacks in Franklin County, 1860 (table)

Free Blacks in Augusta County, 1860 (table)

Free Blacks as a Percentage of Total Population, 1860 (graph)

Related Historiography

John D. Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).