Around the year 1800 on a slave plantation in Vance County, North Carolina Harry Blacknall Crews was born. It was his lot to become a house boy in the plantation house where the children of his master secretly taught Harry to read, write and manage numbers. A daughter of his master was to marry to a Granville County man whose surname was Crews. Harry was given to this daughter as a dowery. Thus, in his mid-teens Harry left the plantation he was born and followed his young mistress to Oxford, North Carolina where he became manservant in the new household. Sometime in the early 1840’s he met and married in slave fashion a buxom slave woman by the name of Zenia Philpott.
Ten children were born to this couple. Jane Crews~1845, Charles Crews~1846, Thomas Crews~1847, Samuel Crews~1855, Calvin Crews~1859, Luther Crews~1862, Cecelia Crews~1867, Julia Crew~1870, Zachary Crews~1871 and Cora Crews~1872. Our family tree stems from the offspring of these children. Nine of whom married and begat descendants. Zachary Crews died in his early twenties and left no known offspring. The other nine children of Harry had more than 1300 hundred descendants in 1977.
Following the Civil War, Harry and Zenia bought a five-acre homestead in Belltown, a community about two miles west of Oxford where they reared this large family. The geographical location of this homesite is now in the southeast quadrant at the intersection of NC Highway 50 and Highway 85. This original land remained in the family until after Calvin Crews’ death in 1939, he spent all his life on this land.
After the Civil War, Harry became an itinerant preacher with the Missionary Baptist Churches and served congregations in Granville, Vance, and Franklin counties. He was the third pastor of Pine Grove Baptist Church (1875-1885). Legend records him as an eloquent speaker and cultured reader due to the early training received from the children of his master.
Harry claimed kinship with the descendants of his brothers and sister who remained with the Crews master until freedom of the slaves in 1865. We know there was visitation between them while Harry lived and by some of his children and grandchildren in subsequent years around the turn of the century. Due to distance, lack of transportation and the migration of many free Negros after the Civil War, the documentation of this side of Harry Blacknall Crews family tree has been all but obliterated by the passage of time. The relationship is recognized by the Harry’s descendants who still live in the Vance and Franklin counties. Although they do not know how the kinship came about.
