The lives of Margaret Hyson and her children George and Charlotte — three people enslaved in the Yorktown neighborhood in the 1800s — had previously been unknown to all but their descendants.
But now, this family will have their stories told to a broader community.
County leaders joined with the Arlington Historical Society and Black Heritage Museum of Arlington on Saturday to unveil “stumbling stones” honoring the three. The brass markers, embedded in the sidewalk at Little Falls Road and N. Harrison Street, are the first of many planned for installation countywide in coming months.
The three markers — plus those that came before and those to be installed in the future — commemorate “the humanity and the humility of the enslaved in Arlington,” said Scott Taylor, director of the Black Heritage Museum.
There had been “so many years of us neglecting slavery in Arlington. We have to make that wrong right,” he said at the event, which drew more than 100 attendees.
The markers are distinct from the three original memorial plaques, which were in 2023 were placed in front of the historical society’s Ball-Sellers House in Glencarlyn.
Those had been installed to honor a woman named Nancy and two men whose names are unknown. All were enslaved by the Carlin family, prominent landowners of the era.
The new, more compact design was chosen to be easily embedded into public right-of-way areas, like sidewalks. Funding to support the effort was approved by County Board members last June.
As additional markers become installed, “more stories will become better known,” said Zachary Newkirk, president of the Yorktown Civic Association.
Descendants on hand
Among those on hand March 15 were numerous descendants of Margaret Hyson, including great-great-granddaughter and Arlington civic leader Saundra Green.
Green said the family was pleased that the memorial markers for her family members, and those installed in the future, would help Arlington “confront the untold truths that were not taught and not even talked about.”
Green’s daughter, Nadia Conyers, said the event was another step to ensuring “a future where all people are seen, valued and honored.”
“Our ancestors built Arlington, brick by brick, field by field, without reward, without recognition,” said Conyers, who in the late 1990s was a valedictorian at Yorktown High School, just a few blocks from where the markers have been installed.
The stumbling stones were constructed by students in the Arlington Tech program at Arlington Career Center. Jordan Kivitz, an engineering teacher there, said his students took the project to heart.
“Over time, we got better and better at it,” he said of the design/build process. “That was kind of a metaphor for us. It’s projects like these that allow us to make the world better.”
Family history
Margaret Lewis was born to enslaved parents around 1825. By the 1840s, she appeared in the census records as being enslaved by William and Catherine Minor, who owned a large tract of land in what today is Arlington’s Yorktown community.
Around 1850, she married a free Black man, Thornton Hyson. But the marriage did not free her from bondage, and under Virginia law, any children of enslaved women were themselves considered enslaved. That included the first of what would be her eight children, George (born 1851) and Charlotte (1853).
William Minor died in mid-1859. In his will, according to documentation presented at the event, Margaret, George and Charlotte were listed as property and valued at $650, $500 and $250, respectively.
As the local area had been under Union occupation from the start of the Civil War, family members were freed in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In the 1870 census, they were listed as living in the area today known as Halls Hill.
George Hyson, who worked as a farmhand, became active in neighborhood civic life. In 1881, Charlotte’s father and her husband, Charles Chinn, purchased a one-acre tract of land from Bazil Hall for the sum of $108.
The family was instrumental in creation of what is now Calloway United Methodist Church. Margaret, who died in 1891, and Charlotte, who died in 1921, are buried there.
Thornton Hyson died in 1882, while George succumbed to injuries sustained in a lightning strike in 1900.
Plans for more
The stumbling-stone initiative is one part of the “Memorializing the Enslaved in Arlington 1669-1865” initiative of the Arlington Historical Society and Black Heritage Museum.
Many of the several thousand people enslaved in present-day Arlington during that nearly two-century period remain unknown. Their stories are being uncovered through research, however, and a database is constantly being updated.
The list begins with the 10 people who arrived with settler Robert Howson when he received a land patent in the 17th century that covered most of present-day Arlington.
A century later, the number of people enslaved in the area had grown significantly, as they provided the backbone of an agricultural economy.
“Picture what it was like here 150, 200 years ago,” said Newkirk. “These were hard farms, requiring hard labor [including] enslaved men, women and children.”
The stumbling-stone effort borrows from an initiative in Europe to memorialize Jews and others killed during the Nazi era from 1933-45. The goal is to remind passersby that previously untold history had unfolded in the environs.
“Places that don’t have a memory are no place at all,” County Board Chairman Takis Karantonis said at the ceremony.
Tim Aiken, who brought the stumbling-stone idea to the Arlington Historical Society, said he was heartened by the “wonderful crowd and great turnout” for the event, which closed off a stretch of Little Falls Road to accommodate the ceremony.
“We need to learn to remember together,” Aiken said. “When [truth] is told, we — humanity — can chart a better path forward.”
Taylor said the markers are a reminder that everyone in a civil society needs to move forward together.
“It’s time for all of us to come together — at last,” he said.
