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 father sold the slaves.

According to Judge Mansfield the tract of land was laid out in five-acre plots.  A cabin was built on each and a family placed in each cabin.  The families were the married sons and daughters of Nathaniel Beaufort who had been his master’s “nigger driver,” was the way one of his granddaughters put it.  The whole colony was under Nathaniel Beaufort’s control as long as he lived, during which time it prospered.  Two of the original colony, both women, are still living and own their little tracts, one residing on her property and the other in the infirmary.  The descendants of the first settlers owned most of the land but some of it has been lost.  Whether they had any teams and money to start with it is not known to Judge Mansfield, but he thought that they did not.  Both men and women had to “work out” much of the time for means to go upon, the girls toiling as servants in the community for twenty-five to fifty cents per week and their keep, the men receiving forty to fifty cents per day often paid in such provisions as meal and meat.

Judged by the management of their own plots they are not a success as farmers, most of their soil being now practically worthless.  “The land which was bought for the slaves was never recorded in their names,” says Judge Mansfield.  It was deeded to Benjamin Ladd