Biography

John Fuller was likely born into slavery in Granville County, North Carolina, four years before the Civil War began. After slavery was abolished, John worked on his father's farm from a young age and continued to do so well into adulthood, likely cultivating tobacco. He spent his entire life in Granville County, a prominent tobacco producing region on North Carolina’s norther border. He met and married Laura Thorpe there and the couple raised seven children together. Years of intensive farm labor eventually allowed John to provide upward economic mobility for his family. He became a landowner by the turn of the twentieth century and did so despite the social and legal hurdles that the Jim Crow era of segregation and racial discrimination had unleashed.[1] John and Laura converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints just two years before John’s death. He was only forty-three years old when he died, leaving Laura a widow to run the family farm and finish raising their children.[2]

John was born in 1857, in North Carolina, probably into slavery.[3] Granville County North Carolina was home to a relatively large percentage of free people of color by 1800, especially in comparison to other counties in the region.[4] Even still, by the 1860 census, when John was three years old, Granville County included 11,086 enslaved people compared to only 1,123 free people of color. In total, the free and enslaved Black population in the county outnumbered the white population by over one thousand people that year. John is not found among the free Black population in the 1860 Granville County census. However, there were six enslavers in the county with the last name of Fuller.[5]

John’s family could have taken its surname from one of these Fuller families, as sometimes enslaved people adopted or retained the name of the family who had enslaved them. Of the six Fuller families who enslaved people in 1860 in Granville County, only one, Martha Fuller, enslaved a three-year-old male. In fact, Martha Fuller counted three male enslaved children born in 1857 among the thirteen people she enslaved. The other enslavers in the county with the last name of Fuller do not document any enslaved children in 1860 who were approximately three years old.[6] John is thus possibly one of the three male children counted in the slave schedule that year, enslaved to Martha Fuller. The fact that John did not know a specific birthplace or birthdate (only birth year) to tell the missionaries when he was baptized a Latter-day Saint strengthens the assumption that John was born enslaved. Furthermore, whereas John does not appear by name in the 1860 census, he does appear in the 1870 census, which was the first census to include the names of people freed after passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.[7]

John spent half of his life laboring to help support his parents’ family and the rest of his life to support his own family. By 1870, just five years after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, when John was thirteen, John’s father, George Fuller, worked as a farmer, possibly sharecropping. At a young age, John worked the family farm with his father and his three older sisters, Nany, Annie, and Francis. His six younger brothers, Charles, George, Bobb (or Robert), James, William, and Squire, were still children and probably helped their mother, Harrietta, at home until they were old enough to work the farm.[8]

Ten years later, in 1880, John continued to work his father’s farm, now as a twenty-two-year-old man. Even as some of his siblings moved out of the house or possibly passed away, John remained on the farm and consistently helped his father.[9]

Although it is impossible to know for certain what type of crops John cultivated, contextual evidence suggests that it would have been tobacco. In the latter half of the 1800s, tobacco became a significant crop in the region. The introduction of yellow light leaf plants revitalized the economy in North Carolina’s coastal plain. Granville became part of what was called the Bright Belt, a reference to the bright yellow leaf of the new tobacco crop. Durham, a new town in the county just southwest of Granville, originated out of this post-war tobacco boom and witnessed its population grow to over six thousand residents by 1900, a significant spurt given that it had not even been listed in the 1870 census. Due to the historic ties of Granville County to tobacco and the growing economic importance of tobacco in the post-war period, it is probable that John and his family would have learned the labor-intensive process of tobacco cultivation, including how to sucker, top, and cure the plants.[10]

It is not clear how John met Laura Thorpe but she also grew up in Granville County and was likely born into slavery before the Civil War. Whatever the circumstances, the couple wed on 19 December 1882. John was 25 years old at the time and Laura was 22. Justice of the Peace William Davie performed the ceremony and John’s brother Robert served as a witness, alongside his father or possibly his other brother, George.[11] The young couple went on to have ten children together, seven of whom survived to adulthood: Conway, Mamy, Henrietta, Thomas, Gracy, Irene, and Iola.[12] John's early death left behind a young family for Laura to care for as well as the farm he had managed to purchase before he died.

John and his wife Laura became landowners by 1900, a considerable feat given that John’s father had not owned land of his own and the sharecropping regime that dominated the post-Civil War South made it difficult for Black farmers to purchase land.[13] This offers some insight into John’s initiative and industry and might indicate his success in operating his farm and in his ability to take advantage of the post-war boom in tobacco production in the region. There is even a record of a John Fuller selling tobacco to a Farmers Warehouse at Durham, just southwest of Granville County, in 1876. He received twenty dollars for his haul. John would have been around eighteen or nineteen at the time, so it is unclear if it is the same John Fuller.[14]

Even if it is not, the fact that John was able to weather the various racial and economic storms that brewed in the reconstruction and Jim Crow periods indicates a strong level of resourcefulness. While most Black farmers of the period were tenant farmers, the number of land-owning Black farmers was on the rise during the latter half of John's life. John and Laura held nineteen acres, which was less than the average for Black land owners, but still an accomplishment at a time when white terror was used to deter Black people from buying land and intimidate white people from selling land to them.[15]

Not much is known of other aspects of John’s adult life, including what drove him to convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1898, at age 41, alongside his wife Laura. Given that he died just two years later, it is possible that he was in poor health for a while and that he sought comfort in otherworldly answers to life’s challenges. Perhaps his large young family and the ever-changing dynamics within it drove him to seek a new spiritual life. A variety of other factors could have come to bear on the couple’s decision; we just don’t know. Whatever the circumstances, surviving evidence suggests that John and Laura were committed converts to their new faith. The fact that John’s death is recorded on his membership record two years after his baptism suggests that he remained active in the LDS faith and was in contact with local leaders at the time of his death.[16]

Laura did not remarry following John’s death but raised their young family on her own. Local leaders of the Church established a small congregation or branch in Durham in the early 1900s and Laura remained close to the church there at least up through the 1930s when she is listed on Church census records.[17]

The only known documentation of John’s death appears on his Latter-day Saint membership record when a clerk or missionary scrawled the words “died May 1, 1900” under the words “colored and wife,” a reminder of the couple’s racial identity written onto their membership record at the time of John’s passing.[18]

By Drew Holley

[1] North Carolina, Granville County, Wills and Probate Records, Wills Vol. 30-31, 1942-1954, Laura Fuller, 10 May 1947.

[2] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, North Carolina (State) Part 2, CR 375 8, box 4727, folder 1, images 58-59, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[3] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, North Carolina (State) Part 2, CR 375 8, box 4727, folder 1, images 58-59, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah; United States, 1870 Census, North Carolina, Granville County.

[4] Paul Heinegg, Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to about 1820 (Baltimore: Geneological Publishing Company, 2001).

[5] Barnetta McGhee White, “1860 U.S. Federal Census-Slave Schedule Granville County, NC.”

[6] United States, 1860 Census, Slave Schedules, North Carolina, Granville County, Entry for Martha Fuller.

[7] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, North Carolina (State) Part 2, CR 375 8, box 4727, folder 1, images 58-59, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah; United States, 1870 Census, North Carolina, Granville County.

[8] United States, 1870 Census, North Carolina, Granville County.

[9] United States, 1880 Census, North Carolina, Granville County. It is hard to verify what happened to John’s siblings between 1870 and 1880. John's older sisters do not appear as household members in the 1880 census, nor do his younger brothers Charles, William, and Squire. By 1880, new siblings to John do appear in the record—two young brothers, Lucius and Isham, and a younger sister, Lucy. Older siblings no longer in the house could have married or found work outside of the home. However, William and Squire would have been around ten years old at the time, and it is uncertain what happened them.

[10] Roger Biles, “Tobacco Towns: Urban Growth and Economic Development in Eastern North Carolina,” The North Carolina Historical Review, vol. 84, no. 2 (2007).

[11] North Carolina, Granville County, Marriages, 1762-2011, John Fuller and Laura Thorpe, 19 December 1882.

[12] United States, 1900 Census, North Carolina, Granville County; North Carolina, Granville County, Wills and Probate Records, Wills Vol. 30-31, 1942-1954, Laura Fuller, 10 May 1947.

[13] United States, 1870 Census, North Carolina, Granville County; United States, 1880 Census, North Carolina, Granville County; United States, 1900 Census, North Carolina, Granville County. In 1870, George Fuller is not assigned value to his home or farm in the census record, an indication that he likely did not own the farm he worked. In 1880, land is not included as a census category, whereas the 1900 census shows Laura owned the farm that she and John had lived on.

[14] “Sales of Tobacco made last week at Parrish’s Farmer Warehouse Durham, N.C. Tobacco under $10 not included,” The Torch-Light (Oxford, North Carolina), 22 August 1876, 2.

[15] North Carolina, Granville County, Wills and Probate Records, Wills Vol. 30-31, 1942-1954, Laura Fuller, 10 May 1947; Waymon R. Hinson, “Land Gains, Land Losses: The Odyssey of African Americans Since Reconstruction,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 77, no. 3 (2018), 917-919.

[16] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, North Carolina (State) Part 2, CR 375 8, box 4727, folder 1, images 58-59, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[17] “Fuller, George,” Presiding Bishopric stake and mission census, 1925 Census, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah; “Fuller, Laura,” Presiding Bishopric stake and mission census, 1930 Census, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[18] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, North Carolina (State) Part 2, CR 375 8, box 4727, folder 1, images 58-59, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Documents

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