Victims or fugitives?
The Parker Sisters' story
December, 1851, Chester County, Pennsylvania: Elizabeth Parker, a ten-year-old free born Black girl lives and works for the Donnelly family on their farmstead. It’s late, but she’s sent outside to collect a bucket. As she does as she’s told, she’s grabbed by two men. A stick is forced in her mouth and tied in place so she can’t scream. Her hands and feet are bound. She’s bundled into a carriage. She has been kidnapped.
Maybe ten days later, around midday on December 30th 1851, Elizabeth’s seventeen-year-old sister, Rachel Parker, answered a knock at the door to the farmhouse near Oxford, PA, where she lived and worked for the Miller family. The visitor asked to speak to Rachel’s master, but when she turned away, he snatched her. As her sister had been, Rachel was tied up, thrown in a carriage, and driven away - this time in broad daylight.
Although Elizabeth was the first Parker sister kidnapped, word hadn’t spread. No one had raised the alarm or told her mother she had been taken. The men involved were led by Thomas McCreary a well-known kidnapper/slave catcher (a view largely dependent on which side of the nearby Mason-Dixon line you lived). He was able to drive her into Maryland and deliver her into the hands of a slave trader in Baltimore. At gun point, Elizabeth was told she had a new name. She was Henrietta Crocus, an enslaved girl who, along with her parents and sister Eliza, had escaped north four years earlier. By the time Thomas McCreary returned to kidnap Rachel Parker from the Millers’ farm, Elizabeth Parker was on a schooner, bound for New Orleans where she would be sold as a slave.
Rachel’s kidnapping didn’t go so smoothly. Her master, Joseph Miller, gave chase. Other local men joined him, riding after the kidnappers but failing to stop them boarding a train to Baltimore at Perryville MD. Undeterred, Miller & co. took the next train to Baltimore and filed kidnapping charges against McCreary. Rachel, declaring herself a free woman to anyone who would listen, was incarcerated in the Baltimore city jail while matters were investigated. The Pennsylvania contingent declared positively that Rachel was who she said she was - a free born girl from Oxford - but a man named Luther Schoolfield was on hand, ready to swear she was Eliza Crocus, a fugitive slave who, along with her parents and sister Henrietta, had absconded from Hannah Dickehut, his mother-in-law. If Schoolfield was right, McCreary had lawfully captured and returned the girl in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In an irony surely lost on no one today, McCreary was freed on bail, while Rachel was kept in ‘safekeeping’ in the jail. Content she was in no immediate danger, the Pennsylvanian men took the train back home… but before they left the station, Joseph Miller stepped off the train for a moment, perhaps for a smoke. He was never seen alive again.
What happened to Joseph Miller is a story all of its own,1 but I’m here for the sisters. Why did no one know Elizabeth had been kidnapped until after Rachel was also taken? And what happened to them next?
Rachel was born in 1834 and Elizabeth sometime around 1841. Their mother, Rebecca (sometimes known as Beck, or Becky), who split from their father Edward when Elizabeth was very young, was a free woman and a domestic servant, and her daughters followed in her footsteps. Rachel began working at the age of ten and spent most of the next seven years with the Millers. She was known as a ‘tractable child’, but the same could not be said of Elizabeth. The younger girl began work “possibly as young as four and certainly no more than six.” She’s described in contemporaneous newspaper reports as not having such a good character as her sister and as ‘never a favorite of her mother’s.’2
In November 1951, Elizabeth and her mother had a major falling out. According to her employer, Rebecca gave Elizabeth a whipping and sent her off, telling her not to come back. The girl left, and crossed paths with one William McCreary, the nephew of the man who would kidnap her one month later. This McCreary was known to Elizabeth, and it was on his suggestion that she found work with the Donnelly family. No wonder no alarm was raised when Elizabeth was kidnapped. Her mother had sent her packing. She was ripe for the picking for a man like Thomas McCreary.
In early January, as Elizabeth, along with as many as twenty others, was shipped off through icy waters to be ‘traded’ in New Orleans, McCreary faced trial in Baltimore for his kidnap of Rachel. Fifteen witnesses, eleven from Chester County PA, testified that she was who she said she was – Rachel Parker – and not Eliza Crocus. Even some members of the family from whom the Crocus sisters and their parents had run agreed that Rachel was not Eliza. But others claimed Rachel looked just like the missing mother, Juno Crocus. Here’s one example from the testimony of Hannah Dickehut who:
…took to the stand and swore that Rachel Parker and Eliza Crocus were the same person. She did acknowledge, however, that she remembered Juno much better than she remembered Eliza. In fact, she admitted… she ‘took no particular notice of the girl’ because in general, she ‘did not notice colored people much.3
Ugh.
Rachel’s identity was still in doubt when a man named John Merritt was called to the stand. Merritt, the brother-in-law of Elizabeth Parker’s employer, Donnelly, testified that Rachel’s now dead employer Joseph Miller, had known all along that Rachel was Eliza Crocus and been complicit in McCreary’s legal effort to capture this fugitive slave. Of course, Miller was dead and there was no one to contradict Merritt’s claims. While it seems clear that Donnelly, Merritt, and McCreary were in on the plan to kidnap the sisters from the outset, they projected their own guilt onto Miller and the trial was halted. The charges against McCreary were dropped. He was free. Rachel was not.
By now, Rebecca had learned that her younger daughter was also missing. And while it would be false to claim the white citizens of Chester County were all enlightened, pro-abolitionists, there were many, especially in the Quaker community, who wanted Elizabeth found and Rachel released.
Elizabeth, surprisingly, was not having too bad a time of it. After a few weeks in the ‘trader’s house” in New Orleans she was sold to a Mrs. Churo. Here’s how Elizabeth describes Mrs Churo and her time there:
…she was a Creowl, sir, a creowl, she kept a flower garden and kept some sows and made molasses candy… she told me she liked my looks and all she wanted of me was to sell milk and candy and flowers, and that if I was honest an done the best I could, she would treat me well, so I set into work in the morning. I took out milk to the market and sold it by the pint and quart, at 10 o’clock I came home and took out molasses candy – this Mrs Churo made herself, it was done up in long platted sticks, and it was fust-rate… at 4 o’clock I went home again and got flowers and took them out. I would go to the theatres and stand with them, I stood inside and could get to see the performances, I like to see ‘em play fust-rate.4
It's not hard to imagine that this experience of slavery might have some appeal for a young girl whose life before this point had basically been hard drudgery on isolated rural farm holdings. But one night, after a few months at Mrs. Churo’s home, Elizabeth was stopped by a watchman for being out too late. According to her, she “just thought I would just tell the truth.” Elizabeth declared that she was really a free girl who had been stolen from Pennsylvania and sold. When the trader who had sold her to Mrs. Churo couldn’t provide papers for her sale, word was sent to Baltimore and Elizabeth was sent back to the New Orleans slave pen. She was whipped and forced to cook barefoot, but in July 1852, she was reunited with her sister in Baltimore. While there’s no record of how the sisters’ meeting went, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society had no doubt that it was emotional, declaring:
These two sisters, thus parted, met in circumstances so highly tragic, so deeply pathetic, that, were they the theme of a romance, they would thrill the soul of every reader.5
Be that as it may, what we can know for certain is that now both of them were firmly stuck in jail.
It took another six months for the trial to determine Rachel Parker’s identity to begin. On January 4th, 1853, Rachel, Elizabeth, their mother Rebecca and their father Edward were in court, not to testify, as that would be illegal, but to be identified. Here’s how Rebecca’s reunion with Elizabeth was reported in the local press:
Her first words were those of upbraiding, as if the abused, sorrowing child had not already born(sic) enough, and accused her of being the author of all this trouble. Her greeting with Rachel was more cordial, but Becky never gets enthusiastic… Elizabeth appears to be her ‘father’s child,’ while Rachel was ‘mother’s.’ When Edward Parker, the father, entered the Court, Elizabeth seeing him as she chanced to look up, uttered a stifled scream of joy, and flying to him, wound her arms around his neck and kissed him again and again and he greeted her no less fondly.6
This time, 49 witnesses were called to testify that Rachel was Rachel, with reportedly another 30 more standing by but not called. Testimony was given over seven days and included Rachel twice being called before the jury to show two scars – an axe wound to her foot, and a vaccination scar. On the eighth day, January 12th, Luther Schoolfield withdrew his claim that the girls were the Crocus sisters. Rachel Parker was declared free, the jury was reconvened and immediately also freed Elizabeth. The sisters were free to return to Chester County.
Despite the tepid reunion between Rebecca and Elizabeth, they did return home and stayed together at least initially. And although their case was well publicized – enough for example, for their story to feature in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, along with the story of Solomon Northrop (of 12 Years a Slave fame), the Parker sisters’ lives pretty much returned to what they had been before. Rachel spent most of her adult life as a domestic for white families. She married, had children and grandchildren, and died among her family. She died in Lower Oxford in 1918, survived by 3 of her children. Elizabeth moved around more and information is sketchier. In 1880 she was 38, a widow, working as a housekeeper in West Chester. In the early 1890’s her story was retold in the papers with an interview where she gave a more graphic account of the suffering she experienced than she had aged 11. The last known record finds her in York, PA in 1920.
This is a story that I was drawn to because it’s local to me, but the parallels to current events in the US, particularly the activities of ICE agents, can’t be missed. In Stealing Freedom Along the Mason-Dixon Line, Milt Diggins’ comparisons of wildly different newspaper reporting on the same events, have the same whiplash polarity that defines much of our media today. I’d like, though, to have a last thought for the other sisters in this story, the Crocus sisters. Like the Parker sisters, Eliza and Henrietta Crocus had been separated from their mother when they were quite young. Their father, Allen, was a free man who worked at the North Point Lighthouse in Baltimore. One Sunday night in 1847, Juno went to the house where her daughter Eliza worked and said Allen, was dying of a broken blood vessel. She was allowed to take Eliza to say goodbye to him. Allen, Juno, Eliza, and her sister Henrietta all disappeared from Baltimore that night and were never seen again. Let’s hope they had a safe and happy life.
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In short - he had been poisoned and then hanged in a staged suicide. His body was found the next day near a station down the line from Baltimore on the way back to PA. A Maryland justice of the peace declared the death a suicide and he was buried. Miller’s body was exhumed and examined four times before the true manner of his death became clear.
Elizabeth Parker, The Kidnapped Girl of Nottingham, Village Record, 1853 (appendix to The Parker Sisters, Lucy Maddox)
The Parker Sisters, A Border Kidnapping, Lucy Maddox, Temple University Press, 2016
Elizabeth Parker, The Kidnapped Girl of Nottingham, Village Record, 1853
The Parker Sisters, A Border Kidnapping, Lucy Maddox, Temple University Press, 2016
Elizabeth Parker, The Kidnapped Girl of Nottingham, Village Record, 1853
Agree with Joan’s comment. Fascinating. Thanks for writing about it.
Fascinating story. Thank you.