This is the second of a series about Buck Island, by Philip Cobbs for First Person Charlottesville. Read the first story here, and then join the author in a conversation on April 23.
My brother and I were born at home in the 1950s because my mother said she felt safer there than at the University of Virginia’s hospital. It was a tradition on the Garland Farm in Albemarle County that had been carried on for generations.
Family folklore was that Black women for generations often came to the farm — then the largest, Black-owned farm in the area, which my family now calls Buck Island — from Richmond to deliver their babies. Because Buck Island was perceived to be a safe space, it probably started early. Giving birth in safe spaces is a very old Black tradition that dates from slavery. Traveling to those places was common after Emancipation.
In the fall of 2017, a cousin gave me a clue as to why. She told me that an ancestor was part of a monument being built in Richmond. I attended the groundbreaking ceremony and discovered a new piece of my family’s history.
The women’s monument on the capitol grounds in Richmond is called “Voices from the Garden,” and it commemorates 12 remarkable Virginia women in life-size bronze statues. Among them is Sarah Garland Boyd Jones. The Encyclopedia Virginia says she was the first African American woman to pass the state’s medical boards examination in 1893. And while it says she was born in Albemarle County in 1866, it does not say that she was born on the Garland Plantation.
After her birth, the family moved to Henrico County and soon to Richmond. There, she trained as a teacher with a classmate named Maggie Lena Mitchell, who later became Maggie Lena Walker, also commemorated in the garden. Walker later became the first Black woman to own a bank in the United States and they remained lifelong friends. After graduating Sarah taught at Baker School, where she met another teacher named Miles Jones; they were married on July 4, 1888. She had to give up her job because married women were prohibited from the profession. Later, her husband lost his job too when Richmond passed an ordinance limiting the number of Black male teachers.
In 1890, she decided to go to Howard University in Washington D.C. where she received her medical degree in 1893.
Upon passing her medical examination, Sarah used her skills to bring better health care to the Richmond community. She had a home office and a office away from home where she saw both Black and white patients. She offered a free clinic for women and children. She was a champion of expanding and organizing the budding Black medical profession.
Sarah became a doctor when the medical profession was undergoing rapid discovery. The importance of hygiene and the need for sterilization were new concepts that needed to be taught. She instructed Black nurses by training these new techniques and their importance.
Her husband went to Howard and also became a doctor in 1901. Together they helped establish the Richmond Hospital Association in 1902. The association opened the first hospital for the Black people of Richmond, who were suffering from a lack of available medical service. This later became Richmond Community Hospital.
Unfortunately, her life was cut short when she died in 1905 at the age of 39 of a massive stroke. Her funeral was attended by hundreds and the eulogy was given by prominent white physician Dr. Ben Johnston.
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This is the second of a series about Buck Island, by Philip Cobbs for First Person Charlottesville. Subscribe to get free emails from Charlottesville Tomorrow with future stories.
To better understand this trailblazer, we need to take a look at where Sarah Garland Boyd Jones was born. The Garland Plantation was purchased by Thomas Garland from John Campbell in 1835. My great great grandfather Thomas was a complicated man. The 1830 census records his household as having 10 slaves and seven free persons of color.
But how he interacted with those 17 people can only be imagined.
Thomas was appointed a magistrate in Albemarle County in 1838 and was the director of the Rivanna Navigation Company in the early 1850s. He had a white wife who lived in Charlottesville, but they had no children. He did have 13 children with his enslaved housekeeper, Elizabeth Allen, the first being Sarah’s mother Ellen Garland who was born in 1838. When Thomas died in 1874, he left a well-written will that bequeathed his estate to Elizabeth Allen and their children.
I have often thought of what Sarah’s life must have been like. She was born a year after the Civil War ended. Her grandmother was once owned by her grandfather, a man she surely knew. Elizabeth Allen must have been an inspiration to her — a woman who went from enslavement to owning a large farm, a woman who managed to pass that estate on to her children. Elizabeth Allen died in 1909, outliving Sarah by four years.
Both Sarah and her mother, Ellen Garland Boyd, were the oldest of their siblings. They both married industrious men who were respected members of their community. Her father, George Boyd, was a well known builder in Richmond who constructed landmarks such as Maggie Walker’s home, now a National Historic site. Miles and Sarah were active in the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers, an African American fraternal organization dedicated to mutual aid. They founded the first Black bank in the United States and Sarah’s father built the hall which housed it. Everyone alive then remembered enslavement and many were part of the first generation of Black people to experience freedom. They diligently worked to uplift their people.
I believe the farm I remembered and experienced was in many ways like the plantation, and later farm, that Sarah knew and remained connected to. It was a safe space. I now understand why there was a medical presence on Buck Island, why my mother felt safer giving birth there. I remember an elderly Aunt Malie, who lived on the next hill. (I have a vivid childhood memory that once, when she opened her dresser drawer and there was a snake in it, she came to our house in a panic.) I knew Aunt Malie had been a nurse, but I didn’t know she was Sarah’s youngest sister until she was nominated to be in the women’s monument. I’d heard of her other sister, Marie, who was also a doctor and married Miles after Sarah’s death. When I saw a picture of Sarah, I was taken by her close resemblance to my mother. Elizabeth Garland Cobbs, who was named after her great grandmother Elizabeth Allen.
Stories passed down from generation to generation are precious, especially in the African American community. But like most precious materials, they must be gleaned. Often, I heard that Thomas Garland was closely related to Thomas Jefferson, in part because the Garland plantation was so close to Jefferson’s plantation. When referring to her birthplace, Sarah is known to have said she was born within sight of Monticello. The Garland Plantation was also next to Jefferson’s sister’s plantation, Monteagle, which was owned by Charles Lewis, but they had moved to Kentucky almost 30 years before Thomas Garland purchased his land.
In my search for my family’s history, I have found no direct family relationship between Thomas Garland and Thomas Jefferson. In a 1901 history of Albemarle County the white author Rev. Edgar Woods says this of Thomas Garland: “He was a man of amiable temper and unsavory reputation.” The choices Thomas Garland made were not appreciated by his white community.
Another origin story that has been passed down in my family is that Elizabeth Allen was of Native American descent. These stories are common among African American families and are hard to prove. It is true that Native Americans were enslaved along with African Americans in Virginia. I have heard a compelling story that Elizabeth Allen’s grandmother was an enslaved Native American who won her freedom, but her children remained in enslavement.
There are many documented cases of enslaved people trying to gain their freedom based on their Native American lineage. There were enslaved people of Native American descent in Virginia who did not gain their freedom until Emancipation. This is an often overlooked chapter of Virginia history and therefore so is the interaction between these enslaved people groups. If my ancestors were part of that intersection, I would be honored and humbled.
I have thought of how my family navigated the issue of race in the times in which they lived. My mother grew up knowing her grandfather, one of Thomas Garland’s children. James Garland born in 1852 and died in 1942. As I learn more about history, I ponder what he must have experienced in his long life. Was he able to put his experiences into words to share with my mother? I think much of what he lived through might have been too difficult to describe.
The legacy I believe James Garland, Sarah Garland Boyd Jones and the rest of my family left was a determination to live a life of equality, in an unreasonable world. And that determination was linked to my family’s land, Buck Island in Albemarle County.
