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Freedom Project series, which kicked off Saturday, focuses on the lives and history of blacks in the region since the Civil War. Date published: 1/16/2006 By CATHY JETT By CATHY JETT Moncure Daniel Conway was the "black sheep" of his family, but his abolitionist ways helped save their Falmouth home. The Conways fled their brick mansion on the Rappahannock River before the Battle of Fredericksburg, locking all the doors and leaving their slaves behind, Lenetta Schools told visitors Saturday at the first Stafford Freedom Project event in the Rowser Building. But someone fired a single shot when Union soldiers approached the house, wounding one and prompting the rest to go on a looting spree in retaliation, said Schools, who now owns the house with her husband, Norman Schools. The soldiers stopped only because they spotted Conway's portrait, which some of them recognized. "It's mars' Monc the preacher, as good an abolitionist as any of you," house servant Eliza Gwinn reportedly told them. Gwinn and her husband, Dunmore Gwinn, were among the more than 3,000 slaves living in Stafford before the Civil War. Afterward, Conway led them and the rest of his family's slaves to freedom in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Dunmore Gwinn helped found the First Anti-Slavery Baptist Church. The Gwinns' story--and those of other African-Americans living in the county before and after the war and during the civil rights era--is the focus of the six-month Stafford Freedom Project series. It's sponsored by the National Park Service, the Stafford County Historical Society, Stafford County Parks & Recreation and Stafford County Tourism. The project is designed, in part, to broaden understanding of Stafford's history by telling the little-known stories of its African-American community, said John Hennessey, chief historian of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. He said former slaves used to sponsor and run Memorial Day ceremonies to honor the Union soldiers who'd help set them free. Then, in 1882, the soldiers asked that their former Confederate foes be included in an act of reconciliation. The ex-Confederates agreed, with the condition that African-Americans be excluded. "From that point on, stories about the black community diminished," Hennessey said. "Yet it's very much a shared history. One of our hopes is to reconnect these disparate stories."
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