Josephine Williams
A Freed Woman Who Became a Community Founder
Josephine Williams was a woman who moved from enslavement at Clermont plantation in Clarke County, VA, to freedom at Emancipation, when she became a successful businesswoman in Berryville, married Phillip Williams, and led the founding of an independent community for freed people, Josephine City (today Josephine Street in Berryville), which was both a shelter from and a place of resistance to the re-emerging white supremacy in post-Civil War Virginia.
In 1870, the woman who had formerly enslaved Josephine, Ellen Jett McCormick, lost her husband, and the bank promptly foreclosed on her for pre-war debt. To save the ‘homeplace”, Clermont, she began selling all the land she and her husband Edward had acquired, but was unable at two public auctions to sell a 31-acre parcel between the farm and Berryville to whites. Josephine Williams went to the woman who had formerly enslaved her, told her that she had over 20 families who wanted to buy land, and convinced Ellen not only to sell to freed African Americans but to finance the deal as well. Ellen McCormick agreed and divided the parcel into 31 one-acre lots, selling each for $100 ($2,441 today) and charging 6% interest. These buyers helped save Clermont for the McCormick family, owners from 1819 to 2004.
Thus was created Josephine City, a thriving community that exists to this day, named by its citizens in honor of the woman who had the courage to make it possible. Forbidden to learn how to read or write, she made her mark, literally and figuratively, on the community in which she was now a citizen.
Josephine appears by name in only four currently known documents:
A family letter in February 1861, from her mistress to her master, about finishing some shirts. In late September 1864, effective Emancipation in Clarke County, Virginia.
A receipt from her in November 1867, for a shirt her former enslavers were now buying from her, with her “X”(see left) on the prepared receipt.
The September 1870 Plat of Josephine City, in which she bought Lots 1 and 2 in her own name.
The Court Clerk’s record in May 1871 of the sale of Lot 1, jointly with her husband, Phillip Williams.
She may also appear in the Slave Schedules for the U.S. Censuses of 1850 and 1860 for Clermont, which only identify enslaved individuals by age and sex, not by name. Because Clermont Farm’s slave records were deliberately destroyed in the 20th century by a member of the owner's family, we do not know how old Josephine Williams was. However, Edward McCormick’s Census Slave Schedule for 1860 shows a woman aged 36. Ten years earlier, in 1850, Edward’s Slave Schedule shows a woman aged 26.
Josephine does not appear in the U.S. Census of 1870, nor in that of 1880. It is not known when she died or where. Her name and legacy live on, however, not only in the Josephine community, but in the Josephine School Community Museum and African American Cultural Center, the only museum of African American history in the northern Shenandoah Valley.
