It is important that I inlay the story of Clem Bolden and the community he is a part of into the most accurate setting I can. Unfortunately, there will often be hindrances to laying out the timeline of this history – the first one being that there is so little recorded history for the Native peoples here in Roanoke prior to their violent removal. Most histories seem to agree that multiple Native nations were here prior to European settlement. Tutelo, Saponi, and Monacan people are known to be part of the history here. There also are documented encounters with Cherokee, Sioux, and Iroquois people in the settler narratives. Indigenous history has intentionally and systemically been erased. It is not by accident that I am unable to write more about these nations here. As with many histories, this void is a ramification of who has been historically holding the pen. In a future post, I will write what I do know of the history of Indigenous people in the Roanoke area.
It is generally believed that Hollins University was founded in Botetourt County in 1842, with the founder being listed as Charles Lewis Cocke, though he did not oversee or have affiliation with the school until 1846. The county lines for Roanoke and Botetourt have moved over the years concerning this space. Cocke is credited with the founding due to his financial leadership – guiding the institution through multiple financial crises, health scares, and a civil war. However, it is impossible to honestly view this leadership outside of Cocke’s direct involvement with enslavement and white supremacist ideology. The monies he saved, received as tuition, and that he paid to his staff were connected with monies gained from enslaved labor. The letters and sermons he preached, in regard to Black people, are laced with white supremacist ideology. His methods and reasons are explicitly labeled in his own handwriting. These beliefs can be found in his papers located in the Hollins archives.
While Charles Lewis Cocke was a man of his time, so were the abolitionists and even the German Baptists living on neighboring farms that were opposed to enslavement. More than that, the people enslaved by Cocke and in the surrounding area were also people of their time, and they always knew that their mistreatment was wrong. I never want to lose sight of that perspective. Dismissing the practice of enslavement as being a cultural norm of another time dismisses the experience of those who endured it.
That being said, the accepted history of Hollins begins with William Carvin (known as an “Indian Hunter”) owning a large plot of land in Botetourt County, Virginia that included a natural sulfur spring. These 150 acres were allotted to him in 1746 by King George II in a royal grant. By 1762, he had acquired an additional 1,617 acres (about twice the area of Central Park in New York City). His homestead became the site of the current Carvin Residence house for students on the Hollins campus.
The land is purchased from the Carvin family by brothers, Christian and Martin Wingart who sell their collective plots to Charles Johnston in 1818 and 1826. Johnston (whose brother fought in the Revolutionary War under Robert E. Lee’s father) was a well-known tobacco broker and bookkeeper. In fact, in 1810, the year after Thomas Jefferson left office, he purchased Monticello’s entire tobacco crop for $2,000 – what would be today about $48,000. Several years later, Jefferson dined at Johnston’s home in Lynchburg, Virginia.
As president of The Farmer’s Bank of Virginia, Johnston was a prominent member of society. He and twelve other investors established the Prestonville Company with the idea of creating a canal between their collected properties in Botetourt with Lynchburg by
manipulating creeks and rivers in the area. This waterway would enable a monopolized means of transporting the tobacco, flax, and other cash crops of these investors for sale elsewhere. A town was designed, with lots laid out, and several of them were sold. However, the Panic of 1819 sent tobacco sales plummeting, and the business venture failed. The town and canal were never built. Johnston was hit particularly hard financially, and he never recovered from the setback. The accumulated land for Prestonville was split among its investors, and Johnston’s portion became his sole means of income, as he was also forced to sell his Lynchburg home. In 1821, he used this remaining property to build a resort, Botetourt Springs, around the natural sulfur spring there.
Due to his previous connections over the years, the resort was patronized with several well-known men such as Andrew Jackson and Parisian general, Lafayette. Upon the death of Charles Johnston, Hezekiah Daggs, who already ran the Virginia Hot Springs, purchased the land and continued to run the resort. Within the deed of this purchase are listed ten enslaved people. They are not named. They are simply listed as part of the sale of the land. In 1839, Charles Johnston’s nephew, Edward William Johnston, purchases the land, and this is where the Hollins history gets a bit hazy: instead of operating the resort, he moved a girl’s school called the Bedford Female Institute (of which he was the principal) to the location and changed its name to the Roanoke Female Seminary. Thirty-four years prior to this move, the Bedford Female Institute was begun by Elizabeth C. Leftwich. It was the first boarding school for girls in Liberty City (now Bedford County). Once moved to the Botetourt Springs location, the school only lasted about two years.
Years later, while Charles Lewis Cocke’s grandson, Joseph Turner, was the general manager of Hollins acknowledged this tradition in a letter to a Leftwich family descendant, citing a long history of Hollins with the Leftwich family. Indeed, census records show Leftwich family members living on or near the campus for generations. Leftwich women graduate from Hollins for decades. However, fifty years after Turner’s acknowledgement of this connection, the institution resisted this narrative stating that the Leftwich women simply had a long history of graduating from the institution, recentering Charles Lewis Cocke as the sole founder of Hollins.
In 1841, a minister from New York, Joshua Bradley, purchased the 600 acres used for the Roanoke Female Seminary and organized the Valley Union Education Society for Boys and Girls in 1842. (This becomes the founding date of Hollins.) Joshua Bradley and the school face financial hardships, and in 1845, he left Valley Union Seminary, citing that he would prefer to not be in education any longer. However, he moved to Missouri to run a school there, while the Valley Union Seminary continued without him.
In 1846, the Valley Union organizers (of which George P. Tayloe is one) called mathematics professor and assistant manager of Richmond College, Charles Lewis Cocke, to take the helm of running the school. He agreed and classes continue under his leadership in the fall of 1846. Cocke was twenty-six-years-old at the time.
It is said that Cocke brought with him from Richmond sixteen enslaved people. Being married to Sussanah Pleasants six years prior, these enslaved people could have come from either of their families’ plantations as a gift or from those they purchased together to run their home. Currently, we are unsure of their names. When I began researching this history in 2015, the narrative on campus was that Cocke did not himself enslave others but “only rented” them. The record in Deedie Dent Kagey’s book, When Past is Prologue, of Cocke bringing enslaved people with him was disputed and considered a mistake. However, I was able to find Cocke on both slave schedules available in Virginia – one for 1850 and the other for 1860.
During the time before emancipation, students and staff would have brought enslaved people with them. This would have been an ordinary and expected occurrence. The daughters of political leaders and the financially well-to-do would have had every cultural comfort afforded to them. In fact, it was common that wealthy white families (the ones with the means to send their daughters to such an institution) would gift an enslaved girl to their daughter around the age of twelve. The enslaved girl would normally be close in age to their daughter and would grow up with her. The enslaved girl would perform everyday duties for her like helping her dress. As she got older, the enslaved young woman would usually go with the enslaver’s daughter when she married and, unless sold away, would remain with her for life.
In many cases, enslaved people who were chosen for such duties would be fairer complected because it was believed that fairer complexions lent themselves to higher intelligence. It was not uncommon for these fairer complected people to be the offspring of the enslaver. It is possible that there were women on this campus who were enslaved attendants to their own half-siblings.
The 1911 Spinster (Hollins yearbook) states that during the time of the Civil War, “All buildings existing at the time [on campus] were occupied to their full capacity... This was due to the fact that so many similar institutions were closed and... that large numbers of refugees from Maryland, the District of Columbia, and from the Northern counties of Virginia found in Hollins for their daughters, not only a place of education, but a refuge from insult and outrage.” In 1911, the Hollins campus culture considered Confederate sympathizers as refugees that the Hollins campus was a haven for. For generations, the act of enslavement was considered part and parcel with the prestige of having attended Hollins.
In 1852 the male department of the Valley Union Seminary was discontinued, and the school became a single-sex institution, a decision that would make Hollins Virginia’s first chartered women’s college. In 1855, John and Ann Hollins donate $5,000 to the school during one of its many financial hardships in order to begin building East dormitory. In today’s money, that would be a little over $170,000. This money saves the school from ruin and the institution is renamed in their honor as Hollins Institute. Mrs. Hollins went on to donate an additional $12,500 after her husband’s death, what would be around $445,000 today. As time goes on, the school is renamed Hollins College and, eventually in 1998, Hollins University.
It is important to note that any money from the Hollins family would have also come from enslaved labor as their wealth was directly tied to it. Institutional and individual wealth, in regard to Hollins, would have almost (if not) always been intertwined with the enslavement of human beings.
It was to this institution that Clem Bolden and his known family were rented out by the neighboring Read family. And it is Clem Bolden’s account that offers us an uncontested space to acknowledge enslavement on the Hollins campus. Without his words, stories like his would have remained speculation, considered rumor by some. We have this record and the testimony of Cocke descendants to support it because (according to his obituary, written by Joseph Turner) Clem Bolden, in January of 1925, walked into his office with a clipping from the Roanoke Times with an article that told of a Black man in Salem getting his Confederate pension for being a body servant and asked, “Mr. Turner, can’t you get me one of them things?”
