Jane Ferguson: Heroine of Reconstruction

MONUMENT DEDICATION SPRING HILL CEMETERY

SEPTEMBER 18, 2025

This is an important day in the history of Booker T. Washington. We are assembled here at Spring Hill Cemetery to dedicate a monument to Jane Ferguson, his courageous mother who is an unknown heroine of Reconstruction.

The marker is a memorial instead of a gravestone, because we do not know her exact location at Spring Hill. She was moved from a cemetery in Malden to Spring Hill during the Second World War when the Division of Highways constructed a four-lane highway on U. S. Route 60 from Charleston to Belle. A contractor was used to properly move the cemetery. A fire in the Spring Hill office in the 1960s destroyed the only records of the location of her grave. No markers from the Malden cemetery are known.

Jane Ferguson is a true heroine of Reconstruction. She was a leader in the African Zion Baptist Church after the Civil War, and she had her family integrate all-White Malden town, despite an order of the Ku Klux Klan that no Black people could live there. She had her family buy a  house there. She and her family were good neighbors to the White families and together they built a new social order in Malden based on equality of the races, unlike the social order for the rest of the South, which was a carryover from slave times, based on inequality.

To come to Malden after being freed in Hales Ford, Virginia, Jane Ferguson courageously walked her three small children, for about three weeks, 210 miles from their slave farm south of Salem, Virginia, in open air and all kinds of weather, for walking, cooking, and sleeping. Slave boys did not get trousers or shoes until they were ready for work around age 9. They wore shirts below their knees. The slavers on their small ramshackle farm could not have afforded to pay for shoes for growing children who did not work. The war disrupted work and sales of young boys. John and Booker, by two different White fathers, walked most of the way barefoot while Jane and her small daughter, Amanda, rode in a small wagon or cart with one or two horses or mules sent to the slave farm by her husband, Washington Ferguson. He likely sent the cart and money by a hired guide to help find her way over rugged mountain and river trails. There is no record of a guide, but Jane's travel without a guide seems impossible. The guide likely would have been well armed with so many displaced people at the end of the war. Her husband remained in Malden. He trusted his very capable and courageous wife to safely complete the family's journey of faith to the Promised Land, on her own.

Jane Ferguson and her children had never been away from the area of the slave farm and likely they could not swim. Slaves were not taught to swim, to discourage runaways. She was defenseless with a girl, Amanda, age 7, and her boys John, age 11, and Booker, age 9. Notably, when they left the slave farm they had only one name each, like pets.

She was the cook at the slave farm and later for the Ruffner family. She could not read or write but she was known by the Ruffners as intelligent and clever. Cooks were in executive positions at this time. They were relied on to run the household with the lady of the house. She was a good friend of Viola Ruffner, and both were personally dedicated to the care and education of charming little Booker. He was remembered by the Ruffners as the "bright little fellow," indicating he lived with the Ruffners, and his mother as their cook, until her surprise death in the summer of 1874 when Booker was 18 years old and ready for his last year at Hampton. Jane Ferguson carefully watched and directed his learning social graces and proper speech in the Ruffner household, where he lived and worked as a house and garden boy. He was a mischievous and adventuresome child who needed his mother's watchful eye.

Jane Ferguson was a remarkable leader in the nineteenth century, who as a woman changed Malden and gave her brilliant son the inspiration, optimism and courage to become a national leader and celebrity for African Americans. It is an honor for us to honor her.

© LarryL. Rowe2025