Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Probable
- Was there an ordinance?
- Sign?
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
Census Information
Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
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1860 | ||||||||
1870 | ||||||||
1880 | ||||||||
1890 | ||||||||
1900 | ||||||||
1910 | ||||||||
1920 | ||||||||
1930 | ||||||||
1940 | ||||||||
1950 | ||||||||
1960 | ||||||||
1970 | ||||||||
1980 | ||||||||
1990 | ||||||||
2000 | ||||||||
2010 | ||||||||
2020 |
Method of Exclusion
Main Ethnic Group(s)
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
Chippewa Township / Doylestown
email 2/2008
There have also been some interesting leads in Doylestown with African American strike workers brought from VA and kept in a stockade. They disappeared from Doylestown after the 1900 census. Many moved to the next town over, while others returned home to VA. None stayed in Doylestown. It may have just been that they were not welcomed because of the strike situation. Or, as the woman from the historical society suggested, there was no industry here and there were no jobs (besides the mines).
***
email 3/2008 — student researcher and resident
Doylestown is a small village within Chippewa Twp. The manuscript census figures for Chippewa Twp. and the Silver Creek mine, where the strike was, was also in the twp.
The first record of a black family living in the township was a barber named Lewis Holmes and his wife Flora in 1870.
In 1880 in Chippewa, during the Nadir of race relations, 122 black and
biracial men suddenly appeared on the town’s census. By the 1900 census the township was again 100% white.
In Chippewa in 1880 there was a coal
mine strike where the miners wanted more money form their employer Erastus Loomis. So Loomis decided to bring black strike breakers from Virginia to his Silver Creek Mines in Chippewa and Wadsworth. A local map from the 1950’s
shows it as the “Niger Mine.”
Loomis hired carpenters to make a
stockade to keep the blacks safe. The white miners were upset and they
talked about driving the blacks out of the mine. 500 men stoned the
barricade around the mines and injured one of the constables.
Eighty soldiers were stationed at the mine for six weeks to protect the
miners.
There is no record that any further violence occurred. Local historians
say simply that they eventually drifted back to the South and a few
moved to nearby Wadsworth.
Doylestown/Chippewa Township:
Chippewa Township 1870 blacks 4
Chippewa Township 1880 blacks 122
Chippewa Township 1900 blacks 0
Chippewa Township 2000 blacks 4