By Josh Shaffer/ N&O
February 05, 2020 08:54 am, Updated February 06, 2020 07:19 am

Collage Image Description: Left Top-Portrait of John Hunter-Credit: City of Raleigh Museum* / Right Top-An 1870s article from The Raleigh Sentinel features former slave John Hunter. Image credit: Josh Shaffer/ Bottom Image-An 1870 census report showing John Hunter, age 101, as a blacksmith. Image credit: Josh Shaffer

RALEIGH, NC
In 1876, a writer for the Raleigh Sentinel sat down to interview an old, old man — a Raleigh native so aged he recalled clearing the forest to build Fayetteville Street, frightening deer and dodging bears.

He said he’d seen British troops in Raleigh before the city had a name. He’d seen burning buildings in the War of 1812. And after a century, he’d seen a lifetime of slavery abruptly end, offering him a short taste of freedom.

John Hunter lived to be 112 by history’s best guess, and until a few months ago, his name had almost totally vanished from Raleigh’s memory.

With luck and the internet, City of Raleigh Museum Director Ernest Dollar rescued him from wills buried in the state archive, articles printed in newspapers that no longer exist and a single line from the 1870 census.

Dollar has provided Raleigh with a rare narrative of an enslaved person, a life he will discuss in detail in a Black History Month symposium at the museum Saturday.

But for him, the greater accomplishment came in connecting John Hunter with his distant descendants, all of them in New York and Washington, D.C.

In Harlem, he found Raymond Figueroa and his wife, Wannetta Worthy, who collected more than 30 relatives and came to Raleigh to tour family sites they never knew existed, hearing about kin they never knew they had.

They hope that Dollar’s research and the new surge of family interest may help unearth family Bibles, journals and letters hidden in attics and old drawers.

“We need to (learn) more about the other slaves on the plantation because there are a lot of black families down there with the name Hunter and we could be related to them,” Worthy said. “John Hunter is opening the door. I think there’s a more amazing, more fantastic story that is not even being told.”

BORN BEFORE WAKE COUNTY FOUNDED
By Dollar’s best estimate, Hunter was born in 1764 — seven years before Wake County’s founding and 28 years before Raleigh’s.

He worked most of his life on Spring Hill Plantation, owned by Theophilus Hunter, an early settler and founder of Raleigh.

Nearly a century later, much of that land would go to Dorothea Dix Hospital, the first to treat mental illness in North Carolina, and that sparked Dollar’s interest because that campus now belongs to Raleigh.

What came before? he asked.
Bored in a meeting last year, Dollar flipped through the 1870 census, the first to include black people by last name, hoping to find anyone with the last name Hunter. And on page 36, four lines down, he found John Hunter, black male.

Age 101.

“I was like ‘Holy crap,’ ” Dollar said. “There’s a story here.”

Hunter also turned up in his slave master’s will, near the top of a long list on file at the state archives. Dollar suspects he appeared so high because he was highly favored.

A RALEIGH CENTENARIAN
But much later, in the 1870s after emancipation, Hunter appears in a long story under its own misspelled headline, “A Raleigh Centennarian.”

That he should be so notable in 19th-century Raleigh astonishes both Dollar and his distant relatives.

“How did he negotiate the challenges within that society?” Figueroa asked. “To be someone of a centenarian, he must have done a few things right.”

Though it describes Hunter with a string of racist and condescending terms — “darkey,” “ancient African” and “venerable Ethiop” — it makes much of Hunter’s life.

“His earliest recollections of Raleigh are of a rough backwoods farm, with but little cleared land, encompassed on all sides by a howling wilderness,” the article read. “John says that it was impossible in his young days to drive a cow along what is now Fayetteville Street without rousing a bear or jumping a deer.”

For most of a front-page column, the story recounts Hunter seeing “the blood-thirsty dragoons of Col. Tarleton” during the Revolution, the “smoldering and smoking” city of Norfolk in 1812, and of driving his master’s hogs to market in Virginia.

As an old man, Hunter lived with his granddaughter and her husband, Stewart Ellison, who would find his own way into history books.

Born a slave, Ellison started life as a carpenter, moving to Raleigh to help build up Fayetteville Street, St. Paul’s AME Church and the first buildings on the Dix hospital campus. Later, he would serve in the General Assembly during Reconstruction.

When the family toured Raleigh, Dollar took them on a trolley tour through the Dix land, St. Paul’s, and Mt. Hope Cemetery, where Hunter is likely buried.

“One of the things that we talked to Ernest about is there needs to be more research,” Worthy said. “We cannot rely on a straight genealogical approach to this because the documentation is so thin. John Hunter was one of 50-something slaves on that plantation. He didn’t have just the one kid, Emmeline, when he was 60. So what happened?”

In 1876, the N&O ran an obituary for Hunter, putting his age at 112, calling him “old uncle John ... a much respected colored man.”

A century and a half later, his family hopes to fill in more gaps, providing a more proper epitaph.