I’ve always had a penchant for misfits.
You know, those folks who, due to eccentricities, fashion habits, gender performance or whatever, have been pushed to the edges of society.
Such marginalization was, of course, prominently on display during the formation of Allen County as well, as evidenced by one of its least-known settlements.
West of Iola, just west of the Neosho River once sat Charleston, a haven for people of color and anybody else who didn’t quite belong.
No one alive seems to know exactly where it was, but every time I stand on the riverbank west of town, I close my eyes and listen carefully for the whisper of brown, Black and red ghosts, moving about their little cabin town.
The best window I’ve found into the forgotten world of Charleston is from letters written or dictated by former Black slaves.
One of them was Albert “Deacon” Woodard, described as a “pioneer colored man of Iola,” who was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1852.
The avowed Baptist enjoyed smoking his corn cob pipe, and was known for having giant feet.
Woodard was actually the name of Deacon’s former owner, and after the Emancipation, he rented his old master’s farm and worked it himself.
He then traveled to Kansas in 1871, along with a “‘herd’ of colored folks, about 40 in all.” It took them 65 days to cross the distance from Tennessee.
Although the party arrived in Iola, they were all soon settled in, you guessed it, Charleston. The place where, as Woodard put it, “nobody but colored folks lived.”
According to Woodard, in Charleston “there were no stores or public buildings, just a cluster of cabins,” none of which were likely standing by the dawn of the twentieth century.
And he describes how most made a living, saying “the colored folks over there lived by their labor, of course. Everybody around here burned wood in those days and most of the labor was cutting firewood.”
He even remembered that his first job was cutting cords of stove wood for Mrs. Harmon Scott, for which she paid him $2.
When Woodard corresponded with the Iola Register, the conversation concluded with the following attempt to transcribe his dialect: “He is 77 now. Weary totin’ such a load. Tredgin’ down dis lonesome road. … He don’ his sheer o’ ha’d wo’l an’ he goin’ tek it easy f’om now on.”
An even more colorful and detailed account of Charleston comes to us from former slave and Iola housekeeper Nancy Grubbs.
Grubbs did not belong to a white person, however, but to a Native American chief’s brother. Hence she came to Iola by way of Indian Territory in Oklahoma, and her parents/their owners likely walked the Trail of Tears.
