r making unlawful use of
another man's horse, and so it happened that a white man named Demitt
accompanied him for a like offense. Upon being interrogated as to his
occupation, Sam answered, 'Preacher ob de Gospel!' Turning to Demitt,
the officer asked, 'What's your occupation?' 'I clerk for Sam,' was
the shrewd reply.

"Richmond Cumberland ('Blind Dick'), Meredith Cumberland, Taylor
Davis, Moses Cumberland, Ephraim Johnson, and Winston Cumberland were
also born in Virginia."--History of Brown County, Ohio (edition
1883), p. 592.

During these years according to the letter below another group of Negroes
found their way into Jefferson County, Ohio.

_Dear Sir:_

Every body with whom I have talked about this colony of Negroes,
referred me to Judge Mansfield as one knowing more about it than
anybody else. He, therefore, is my chief informer. In 1825 a colony
of slaves was sent up from Charles City County, Virginia, to
Smithfield, in Jefferson County, Ohio, about twenty miles southwest
of Steubenville. They were the slaves of Thomas Beaufort of the
Virginia County above named. So far as I could learn not all of
Beaufort's slaves were sent to Smithfield. Another colony I was told
was located at Stillwater in Harrison County, Ohio, but I have not
yet been in that community. How the slaves traveled from Virginia to
Smithfield could not be told. The number sent up is not known--about
thirty or forty families, they said. They were a tribe, as it were,
Nattie Beaufort being the patriarch. They were sent in charge of a
man named McIntyre, an overseer, who supposedly had been sent to see
to the locating of the slaves on a tract of land which the master had
bought for them through Benjamin Ladd, a Quaker of the Smithfield
community. McIntyre returned to Virginia after a few days stay. He
was never in the community again, nor was any other representative of
the Beaufort's so far as anybody knows. The land was bought in Wayne
Township--about 200 acres, about five miles out from Smithfield. It
is quite rolling, of stiff clay character. There are fine farms all
about it and coal fields not far away. It was bought of Thomas
Mansfield whose son, a prominent lawyer in Steubenville, still owns
land contiguous to the Beaufort tract, and owns now a part of what
his f