History in Black and White by James Dawson Talbot County is still full of surprises, and often in unexpected places. My ancestors, the Caulk family, had been in Talbot since 1705 and, being farmers, had owned slaves. In fact, some of the papers still in the old Caulk family desk are actual bills of sales for slaves. This is what you might expect, but the surprise was that just recently, I discovered that in among those slave documents were two remarkable letters written by a 20-year-old Black woman, Maidie Thomas, while she was attending Hampton Institute, a private school
for Blacks in Virginia, in 1912. What is so remarkable is not just that they were written by a young Black woman who was attending college (something few Whites did then) but also the genuine affection shown in these letters to her White friends, the Caulks. Maid ie Virg inia Thomas, t he daughter of James and Etta Thomas of Trappe, was born on Dec. 7, 1892. These letters were written to my great-grandmother, Mar y Susan Elizabeth Caulk, or Mollie, as she wa s k now n to her f r iend s. The
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