Up until late 2024, genealogist Tessa Wahlquist worked as a tour guide at the Old State House Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her supervisors encouraged her to do her own research to enrich her work.
So she did, quickly uncovering evidence that hadn’t factored into the site’s history until then: enslavement.
While diving into the building’s construction history, Wahlquist found evidence that the former de facto county courthouse was once a pivotal site for the enslavement and sale of humans. But she said she was quickly discouraged from publicizing her findings at the risk of backlash from Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ administration.
The Emancipator has reached out to the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism for comment but has not received a response.
Wahlquist, who has since left her role at the Old State House Museum, spoke with The Emancipator not just about her findings, but also the troubling political atmosphere around historical stewardship today.
Tell us how you learned that evidence shows that auctions of enslaved people happened at the Old State House site.
I was a tour guide for The Old State House Museum. If I wasn’t talking to a visitor or giving a tour, I was told that I was supposed to be researching the history of the building. I ended up on newspapers.com just searching for “State House” and “courthouse.” I was trying to find more descriptions of the building being constructed when “courthouse” led me to a probate auction for Robert Crittenden. And they were going to auction off his enslaved people “at the courthouse door.” That was wild because the probate was through Pulaski County, and it was 1836. The only “courthouse door” that existed in the city of Little Rock was our building. Then it was a free-for-all. Each of my coworkers was trying to figure out this mystery. It was exciting. We discovered that the state had used the funds for the Pulaski County courthouse to help build the State House, so the agreement was that the state would let Pulaski County use the Supreme Court building for their county business.
What happened after you started doing and sharing this research? What is going on at the site now?
When I reported my findings to my higher-ups, they were extremely nervous. They told me that if word got out about my findings, I would be putting their jobs and potentially mine at risk. I was instructed not to mention anything in our work emails since everything is monitored. I became afraid that my digital research would disappear, so I began keeping a printed copy of all of my work, including the printed newspaper advertisements, in an unlabeled binder at the front desk where all of the tour guides worked.
I’m sure part of the problem was that the courthouse door is most likely the one that is surrounded by Confederate monuments, including two commemorating Arkansas’s secession from the Union and a huge one to David O. Dodd, a Confederate spy who was hanged for treason during the Little Rock Occupation by the Union. They are hiding the monuments on the east side of the building and the door has to be either of the doors on that side. I found evidence of the eastern side being used as a meeting place. So if word got out about the auctions, it might ignite a controversy over those monuments that they have managed to avoid.
I worked there for, I think, a year after the discovery. I started including the information about the auctions [of enslaved people] in my tours probably a month afterwards. It felt wrong to keep that information hidden; and you know what, not a single person was surprised. I felt more emboldened the more people I told. I even contacted a former professor of mine who was able to give me needed context for the auctions. She told me that auctions [of enslaved people] at courthouses were not unheard of, but it’s not really something that is discussed. The unique thing here was that this courthouse also happened to be the state capitol building. I’ve wanted to write a paper on the slave auctions with my professor, but life keeps getting in the way. I’m a stay-at-home mom who’s trying to get a genealogy business off the ground. I was never much of an academic writer to begin with; research is much more in my wheelhouse. So when a reporter with the Arkansas Times reached out saying he wanted to do a story on my research, I said yes. I want this information out there so other people are able to utilize it.
Since the article was published this summer, it seems like things haven’t been going well at the museum. Another article came out in early October that a Black employee put in her resignation letter, which referenced some unsavory comments in a staff meeting at the museum where someone said that they were tired of talking about [enslavement]
and that Arkansas was a “White state.”
From my understanding, the department has given someone the job of double-checking my research and getting a marker put up at the courthouse door. I’ve tried reaching out, but I’ve been unable to contact him. Hopefully we will see a marker soon, but I doubt the Confederate monuments will be removed as well.
Please tell us more about your research findings. What are the most important things you’ve learned? What does your work tell us about enslavement in Arkansas and across the country?
Well, I just discovered that the auctions from the advertisements all fell into one of five categories: settling probate, person vs person, court judgments, bank vs person court judgments, selling “runaway slaves,” and regular auctions. The court door acted not just as the gathering place for court business but as a central point for out-of-towners to hold their own auctions. I found one instance of a Black man, almost ironically named Thomas Jefferson, who was being held in the Pulaski County jail who the sheriff said was a “runaway slave.” Of course, we don’t know for sure if he was enslaved or freed. I’ve tried finding him post-Civil War, but I’ve had no luck. I suspect that the auctions at other courthouses would fall into the same categories.
It shouldn’t have been surprising. It’s not like I’m new to pre-Civil War Arkansas. But the idea that they were mortgaging the people they enslaved- that concept just, I don’t know, it kind of blew my mind. I think it’s because we think about [enslavement] on a much larger scale. You know, you might talk about the cotton gin, then the Fugitive Slave Act, Bloody Kansas, the Missouri Compromise, and then it’s time for the Lincoln-Douglas debates. That leads into Lincoln’s election; maybe we’ll read an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and call it good. When we do talk about the day-to-day of [enslavement] we’re going to talk about it from the enslaved person’s point of view, which is incredibly important and insightful, but I think seeing how ordinary [enslavement]
was, how it fit right into the society and economy, is important as well. I mean, they took out loans with banks putting people up as collateral! I tried to talk to people about this with my higher-ups, who were like, ‘Yeah, Tessa, duh, they were treated as property. That’s how property works.’ I guess it feels like [enslavement] should be a bigger deal, but when I look closely and see mundane things like mortgages, it really brings home how normal [enslavement] was, how part of everyday life it was. And that’s hard to wrap my head around. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Tell us about some of the individuals and families you’ve researched. (1-2 of the most interesting or important stories)
In December 1853, Charlotte and her four children, Betsy, Maria, John, and Fanny, were advertised for sale. Charlotte would show up in the advertisements again in 1858 with two more children, Adaline and Abner. Her family was sold twice at the Old State House. Because she was listed with so many children, I was able to find her in 1870, living in Little Rock, with, I assume, her husband and father of at least some of her children, Abner Hamilton. Betsy Hamilton married Allen Akridge, who I believe was a Reverend with Wesley Chapel in Little Rock. I know where the majority of the family is buried in Oakland Cemetery. It’s unmarked, and I hope to someday have a marker for their families. I’ve tried to find living descendants, and the closest I’ve gotten was tracking one great-grandson as far as St. Louis in the 1960s, but that’s where the trail goes cold.
Tell us about your research methodology. What kinds of sources do you rely on to do this work? What can they tell us, and what are some limitations?
I’m only as good as my search engine. Newspapers.com doesn’t catch every word on the page, so I couldn’t just search for “auction”; I had to search for “sheriff sale, courthouse door, probate,” etc. The site gets better every day. Every so often I’ll go on and search for a term to check, and I’ll find an advertisement I hadn’t found before. In total, I have a little under 400 names of enslaved people who were advertised as intended to be sold at the Old State House.
What does uncovering this knowledge mean for the community in Little Rock and for descendants of these enslaved people?
I’m a genealogist. I think of everything from a genealogist’s perspective, and Black genealogy is so difficult. I’ve kind of accidentally specialized in it. I didn’t set out to do so, but it requires so much work; I’ll get stuck in cases for months. Anything that adds to the pre-Civil War documentation is a win.
I think there’s something about focusing on the individual that you aren’t able to get in history class when you have so much material to cover. When you zoom out, you see the general trends of [enslavement] how it led to the Civil War, etc. Those things are important, but when you focus back on the individual, on Charlotte and her six children, the things that divide us as race, politics, and class fall away. Was she sold away from Abner Sr.? He was never listed in any of the auction advertisements. Was she still able to see him after she was sold? How did they find each other again before the 1870 census? And then only to lose him again nine short years later with his death. How long did they actually get to be together? Focusing on the individual triggers empathy in the audience. Everything else is just statistics. Historians can get bogged down in the sheer amount of facts that they have. The general public just cannot consume it.
Kaila Philo is a research assistant with the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study.