Being enslaved in Wheeling seems unimaginable now, but it was a grave reality in pre-Civil War years. While the number of slaves in Wheeling was relatively small and conditions were better than in the Deep South, sorrows of slavery persisted.

Wheeling historian Margaret Brennan appeared at the Ohio County Public Library Tuesday to share slaves’ stories. Her presentation for Lunch With Books drew an audience of 101 people.

“I don’t think we can know what it meant to be enslaved,” Brennan said. She quoted an account from the period: “You couldn’t guess at the awfulness of it all.”

In 1860, Virginia’s population of 1.5 million included 400,000 slaves. The 1860 census listed 100 slaves in Wheeling.

“But each of these people was a human being, like you and me. I believe, in many ways, they lived a heroic life,” the historian commented. “These people who, through no fault of their own, had no right to liberty and life.”

She said, “Virginia was the biggest exporter of slaves for sale. It was the state’s cash crop, so to speak. Raising slaves for sale was serious business.”

From 1830 to 1860, thousands of slaves traveled through Richmond, Va. Some of those slaves were sold in Wheeling on an auction block at 10th and Market streets, at the north end of what is now the Market Plaza.

“After witnessing a slave auction, you were never the same,” Brennan said, adding that abolitionist Benjamin Lundy was “radicalized” by seeing a slave auction in Wheeling as a young boy.

In a 1907 novel, “Bonnie Belmont,” Judge John Salisbury Cochran wrote of a slave named Aunt Tilda being sold for $120 to Joshua Cope, a Quaker who freed her immediately. Tilda’s daughter, Lucinda, was sold to a scoundrel from New Orleans and her son was bought by a man from Mississippi. However, Lucinda was freed forcibly by Underground Railroad workers from Ohio, and the son jumped off a boat in the Ohio River and swam to shore, Brennan said.

The city was an important auction site because of its proximity to the National Road and the river. Groups of slaves, shackled and bound together, were marched through town, she said.

“The roots of Wheeling trace back to slave culture,” Brennan said. “But we were an industrial power … The Germans and Irish (immigrants) did not support slavery. It was a divided city.”

The Zanes, who settled Wheeling, brought a slave family with them. “They were as much as anyone a pioneer family of Wheeling,” she said. One of the slaves, known as Daddy Sam, fought with the Zanes at the Battle of Fort Henry.

Brennan said a newspaper article reported that “Ebenezer Zane was warning people to leave his slaves alone, not to try to free them or mess with them.” An ad in the Washington (Pa.) Reporter in September 1813 stated that Zane’s son, Daniel, was offering a $50 reward for the return of a runaway slave.

Noting how slaves were listed in owners’ wills, she said, “It was chilling. They were named as property.” Ebenezer Zane left two slaves to his wife, Elizabeth; she emancipated a female and gave a boy to her son, Daniel, on the condition that he be freed seven years after her death.

Aunt Rachel, another slave of the Zane family, was given her freedom and moved to Ohio. She was over 100 years old when she died in 1836, Brennan said.

Moses and Lydia Shepherd had one of the largest groups of enslaved in Wheeling, the speaker said. The 1850 census listed Lydia Shepherd Cruger as owning 13 slaves. An 1865 account stated that Cruger owned 15 slaves who “lived easy and comfortable lives – they were deeply attached to her” and later Cruger “saw the liberation of her slaves without regret.”

The historian recounted a story of Aunt Mary, a slave of the Chapline family who lived to be 102. She buried the family’s valuable items during the Civil War. When the war ended, Aunt Mary dug up the valuables from the roots of an apple tree in the orchard. “The family still has those treasures,” Brennan said.

Wheeling’s most famous enslaved person, Sara Lucy Bagby, was the last known slave returned to an owner under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Brennan said Bagby was purchased in Richmond for $600 by John Goshorn of Wheeling in 1852 and was given to his son, William, in 1857. She escaped to Cleveland in 1860, but was found and returned to William Goshorn. Years later, after being freed, Bagby married George Johnson and moved back to Cleveland, where she died in 1906.