Stephen White (formerly Stephen Coffin) looking his sister Mary Ball

                 Stephen White Comes to Upson County

                   work in progress by David E. Paterson (last updated 2023)

1870 Census, GA, Upson County, Thomaston, p. 14, dwelling 98

Stephen White 50 MB Works in Shoe factory VA

Fannie White 30 FB Keeping House VA

Frank White 16 MB Farm hand GA

1880 census GA Upson County, Union Hill District 588 GMD, Enumeration District 140, p. 16, dwelling 128

Stephen White BM 62 farmer VA VA VA

Frances White BF 55 wife keeps house VA VA VA

Franklin White BM 26 son farm laborer GA VA VA

            In 1882, seventeen years after General Wilson’s cavalry galloped through Upson’s soil on their way to Macon, their hooves raising  clouds of red dust to color the sunset of the Confederacy, seventeen years after the Civil War emancipated those four millions for whose disputed enslavement the blood of so many hundreds of thousands had the soaked soil on hundreds of battlefields far from Upson, Stephen and Frances White sat down to write to their national church newspaper, The Christian Recorder.  They did not say what prompted them to write then and not sooner, but we can imagine that old age, he in his early sixties and she in her mid-fifties, increased the invisible tug of family ties long-severed, of parents not seen since childhood and probably dead, but sisters perhaps yet alive and perhaps tangible, if their letter was read from the right pulpit and heard by the right ears, somewhere in the United States.

Stephen White’s and Fanny White’s advertisements appeared together in the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s weekly paper, The Christian Recorder, on 19 October 1882.  Stephen’s advertisement read:

"INFORMATION WANTED OF MY SISTER, Mary Ball.[1] She used to belong to a man by the name of Joseph Ball, at the time I was sold in the year 1847. I belonged to a man by the name of S. G. Coffin [S. G. Coffin lived in Jamestown NC], and was sold to a speculator by name of Addison Weathers, and brought to Georgia. Any information of my sister will be gladly received by her brother, Stephen Coffin then, but now, Stephen White. I have also lived in North Carolina. The Rock, Upson Co., Ga."

            By the time Stephen Coffin, who would become Stephen White, trod the roads from Guilford County, North Carolina, to Upson County, Georgia, a path well-worn by the feet of enslaved hundreds who had preceded him in droves, driven by Isaac Weatherly (1791-1858) of Guilford County, his son, and their partners.  It was Isaac’s son, Joseph Addison Weatherly (1815-1878), called “Add” by his affectionate father, but called by business associates “Doctor Weatherly” or simply “the doctor,” his name somewhat fogged in Stephen’s memory by the intervening thirty-five years, but remembered nevertheless and identified with that traumatic wrenching from family, who carried and sold Stephen to Benjamin B. White, whose shoe factory on Tanyard Creek north of Thomaston, supplied footwear to much of Upson County. 

            Doctor Weatherly was a veritable doctor who, having read medicine in the house of Dr. Madison Lindsay in Jamestown, North Carolina, had found slave-trading a more rewarding calling than medicine.  Another of Dr. Lindsay’s students was Shubal G. Coffin, later a prominent physician and hotelier in Jamestown, the man who would sell Stephen to Dr. Weatherly in 1847. 

Likely records of Mary Ball, although anonymous:

1850 Census, North Carolina, Davidson County, North Division, Schedule 2, [unnumbered page, but image 15 of 39 at FamilySearch.org] left side, rows 36-39.

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-XCQ3-21S?i=14&cc=1420440&personaUrl=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AHRWQ-YMPZ

Joseph Ball age 58, died I forget, 1854?  Schedule 1, dwelling 1138, page 503(manuscript)/297(stamped)

1860 Census, North Carolina, Davidson County, North Division, Schedule 2, p. 20, left side, rows 16-20.   https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GBS8-HF5?i=19&cc=3161105&personaUrl=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AWKPY-LM6Z

Philip Ball, Joseph’s son b. 1816

END NOTES

[1] Mary Ball is almost certainly the 23-year-old black woman recorded in US Census, 1850, North Carolina, Davidson County, Schedule 2, page unnumbered, but image 15 of 39 at FamilySearch.org, left side, line 36, owner Joseph Ball.  With her and also owned by Ball were two children, probably hers, enumerated as a 6-year-old black girl and a 2-month-old black boy.  Joseph Ball died in 1854, but his surviving estate records do not include an inventory of his slaves; nevertheless the 1860 US Census, Schedule 2, Slave Inhabitants, p. 20, left side, rows 16-20, show people in possession of Philip Ball, son of Joseph Ball, whose ages and sex exactly correlate with the people listed in 1860.( https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GBS8-HF5?i=19&cc=3161105&personaUrl=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AWKPY-LM6Z )