This same bend of the James River is where the first English colonists came ashore — eight days before they founded Jamestown.

A paradox the ground itself would carry forward.

That paradox deepened here: on June 12, 1621, this ground saw the first recorded sale of a person of African descent in English North America — and by 1624, the second ship ever to dock with enslaved people of African descent had come ashore as well.

And yes — this all took place in the town of Claremont, located in Historic Surry, Virginia.

On that same paradoxical ground, two and a half centuries later, a formerly enslaved man bought the land and built a school.

John Jefferson Smallwood was five months old when he was sold away from his parents in Southampton, Virginia — to the Smallwood 600-acre plantation in Rich Square, North Carolina.

He never saw his father again, and did not find his mother until decades later, in El Paso, Texas.

Family history holds that his mother was the daughter of Nat Turner, who led the 1831 rebellion in Southampton County — making Smallwood his grandson.

Not independently confirmed in the historical record, but carried down through generations of the family.

He spent one year at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute — now Hampton University — where he was given a single Webster's spelling book.

He often stated he studied it word for word, six times over — and, at nearly 21, walked 125 miles to freedom.

By his twenties, Smallwood was lecturing across New England, and all over Europe, on temperance, labor, and the treatment of Black Americans — his style compared by the press to Frederick Douglass.

The two were acquainted — and an official letter survives inviting Frederick Douglass to speak at one of the institutions' graduations.

No proof exists that he ever accepted.

In 1892, with fewer than ten pupils, he opened the Temperance Industrial and Collegiate Institute — classes held in a dining hall.

In 1900 he married Rosa E. Banks, who became the institutions' Lady President — and in 1901 wrote directly to Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, soliciting financial assistance with $3,500 in debt.

The equivalency of roughly $144,000 today.

The school blended a classical collegiate curriculum — literature, political economy — with hands-on industrial and agricultural training, unlike most schools of its kind.

Over its lifetime, this historically Black college graduated between two and three thousand students.

By 1912 the grounds held fourteen buildings, a working farm, a sawmill, a printing press, and a mattress and furniture-making operation — with running water, a working sanitation system, and a fully electrified campus, meter boxes included. A self-sufficient, self-supportive, thriving ecosystem.

The same power plant lit the streets of Claremont beyond the campus gates.

With no public funding, Smallwood raised every dollar himself — from supporters including Susan B. Anthony and Clara Hay, wife of Secretary of State John Hay.

A three-day dedication, presided over by Virginia's governor, opened Lincoln Memorial Hall — a four-story brick landmark costing $45,987.

$1,586,372 in 2026.

Four months later, Smallwood was gone — age 49.

"I have ruined my health and my life trying to complete this work."

Rosa carried the school forward, but chronic debt forced reorganization — first as Smallwood-Corey Institute, then, in 1926, sold to Marcus Garvey's UNIA.

Without Dr. Smallwood's dominant leadership and presence, it became difficult to raise money from donors.

Garvey's movement renamed Lincoln Hall to Garvey Hall — but his imprisonment and the 1929 crash meant the school never reopened.

The last buildings were demolished by dynamite in 1941.

Only one official marker still exists — a State road marker at the corner of State Route 40 and Route 10 — along with a twenty-foot memorial statue at a church cemetery in Cabin Point, Virginia.