Samuel Anderson: Flatbush's Famous Black Pioneer

Lifelong Flatbush resident Samuel Anderson was a preacher, a farmer, and a father of 12. As the second black man to ever own property in Kings County, he was therefore also the second black person to legally be able to vote here.

Anderson was born into slavery on a farm located at Flatbush Ave near Cortelyou Rd in 1810. At this time, New York was still VERY much in love with slavery, but was trying go along with other Yankee states and pretend like it wasn’t. NYC’s economy was deeply tied to the labor of enslaved people, through trade, banking, and transportation. And even though lots of free black folks lived in Manhattan, out in rural Flatbush, most of them worked in servitude to white landowners.

Starting in 1799, The New York legislature had passed a series of bullshit, chicken-shit laws that outlawed slavery for some, but not others. When Anderson was born, the laws kept infants like him enslaved until their 20s (28 for men, 25 for women). Further, the slave-holding families of Flatbush actively participated in family separation, both as a means of control and financial necessity — most households could only afford to enslave more than a couple of workers at a time. So while Anderson lived his mother at the Lotts’ farm, his father was enslaved by the Remsens, who lived out near the present location of King’s Hwy. Unlike the plantations of the South, black people didn’t have their own space. Historian Craig Steven Wilder notes*:

Slavery in Kings County was intimate, but intimacy did not negate brutality. Small holdings mean that local masters were more dependent upon each individual chattel. Owners and servants usually slept in the same houses, although neither in the same nor comparable quarters; ate the same food, although not at the same table; and worked side by side, although not for the same reasons. The familiarity of masters and slaves in Kings County allowed Africans more opportunities to note the equality of human beings and therefore more solid evidence of the injustice of slavery than servants on large plantations, and that same closeness allowed their owners to react to rumors and reports of conspiracies and rebellions with a more sincere sense of personal fear and betrayal than the masters of large plantations.

So, the black families of Flatbush lived beside their oppressors, in flux somewhere between sertitude and enslavement, right across the river from their freer brothers and sisters in Manhattan. Legally, Sam Anderson was most likely emancipated in 1827 (at the age of 14), when a new, less shitty emancipation law took effect across New York. But for all practical purposes, he had little freedom even then.

Like many people before and since, Anderson found God when he switched from a shitty church to an awesome church. The church he HAD been going to was the Dutch Reformed Church on Flatbush & Church Aves, where he was forced to listen to sermons in Dutch from the segregated section in the balcony—and shovel hickory coal into the iron stoves with the rest of the servants during winter. But when he was 19, Anderson started walking 4 miles to Brooklyn Heights (then, the separate city of Brooklyn) to attend what was the first-ever AWME (African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal) Church in the county, then known as High Street Church and later, Bridge Street Church. Anderson couldn’t afford to take the trolley, which was so serious about segregations it didn’t make black people ride in the back — they had to ride on the m-therf-cking roof (and this is when the trolleys were pulled by horses!). So he walked there each way, up and down Flatbush Ave, which back then meandered through present-day Prospect Park. On Sundays he did it three times both ways, because the Lotts wouldn’t even give him Sunday off — he had to go back to Flatbush between services to work. But from then on, religion played an important role in his life.

Soon after he started attending the AWME church, in 1833, Anderson purchased 7 acres of land at the approximate location of what’s now Church Ave & Kings Hwy. Back then, Kings Hwy was an old (possibly native) trail called Hunterfly or Flatlands Neck Road. He built a small cottage, moved in with his wife and children, and planted some ivy on the side. In 1835, he helped build a Methodist church next door, where he often preached at spirited Sunday revivals. The money to build what was known as “The Church in the Woods” came from collections taken at the other Black Methodist church as well as from residents of Flatbush and Flatlands. (It eventually burned down, and so many wood-framed structures did in that time period.)

Anderson’s purchase along Hunterfly Rd paved the way for James Weeks, a black man, to purchase land a few miles farther up Hunterfly five years later. There, he created an early, independent black community known as Weeksville (now home to the Weeksville Heritage Center). Weeksville had immense importance to Black New York and was key to drawing more black people to Brooklyn, especially after the draft riots — they were safer in Weeksville than in New York at large, and had a chance in hell of owning property.

Anderson lived in his cottage, raising hens whose eggs he sold throughout town, until he moved into the Brooklyn Home for the Aged shortly before his death on September 17, 1903. At the time of his death, he had been the last remaining person born enslaved in Flatbush. Five years before he died, the Brooklyn Eagle sent a reporter to his ivy-covered cottage near Hunterfly and Church and ran an article on him headlined BORN A SLAVE IN FLATBUSH. It was filled with racism characteristic of the time — the reporter refers to him as “Uncle Sammy” and seems surprised that he knows how to keep his house and yard clean. But he devoted several inches of column space to quoting Anderson directly, who had this to say about his experiences in Flatbush as a young man:

In those days the farmers raised their own grain and had it ground in the wind mill back of Judge Hegeman’s on the Big lane, Gerretsen’s in Gravesend Neck, Vanderveer’s in Canarsie and Baldwin’s. The toll for grinding was one peck for every bushel.

In those days when a house was to be built the timber was cut in the spring and allowed to season for a year, when it was hewn into shape. The neighbors for miles around were always invited to a house raising and it was made the occasion for jollification, with feasting and drinking, Holland gin, Jamaica rum and cider being plentiful. The cider was usually drawn from a cistern made for the purpose of holding a winter’s supply of apple juice, because barrels were scarce….

I married young and was blessed with twelve children, three of whom are still living, My wife and the others are buried near the old brick church yonder. I was for a time an exhorter, a local preacher and active in the High Street Church. Then I became interested in our little church in Flatbush. We had great revivals in those days and the building was packed Sunday after Sunday. But it is all now past and I am just waiting, waiting to be called to glory.

*This quote is from Steven Craig Wilder’s brilliant book A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (Columbia University Press, 2000). I used several other sources for this post including:
• the Brooklyn Eagle article referenced above and reprinted below
• this article by Anderson’s great-great-grandson, Augustus W. Harris, in the fall 1995 newsletter of the AAHGS Jean Sampon Scott Greater New York Chapter Newsletter
• the book Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville, New York by Judith Wellman (NYU Press, 2014)
• and this enormous 1884 book on Kings County history

Illustration of Samuel Anderson (most likely based on the image below), who was known to white people as Uncle Sammy. (From the book Tales of Old Flatbush by John Snyder, 1945.)

Detail of the illustration of Samuel Anderson in front of his cottage that accompanied the Brooklyn Daily Eagle article on him in 1898.

Interview with Samuel Anderson in the Sept 18, 1898 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. LMAO that he mentions the Dutch intermarrying.

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