Legacy of Hugh Carr / The Village of Hydraulic Mills

Legacy of Hugh Carr, also, The Village of Hydraulic Mills. . , Legacy of Hugh Carr , The Ivy Creek Natural Area was once the home of Hugh Carr, born into slavery around 1840 in Albemarle County. The end of the Civil War in 1865 was for Hugh the start of a new life founded in freedom.

In 1870, Hugh Carr put down a hard-earned $100 in "part payment" for a 58-acre tract of land near the village of Hydraulic Mills, land that would form the core of his family farm and, 100 years later, the heart of the Ivy Creek Natural Area. By 1880, Carr had amassed 80 acres that he named "River View Farm" and where he and his wife, Texie Mae Hawkins, raised six daughters, Mary, Fannie, Emma, Peachie, Hazel and Virginia, and one son, Marshall. Using horses and oxen, Carr planted wheat, corn, oats, potatoes and tobacco along a half-acre orchard. He also raised milk cows, pigs and chickens. By 1900, Carr had expanded the farm to a total of 125 acres.

Although Hugh Carr never learned to read or write, he and Texie Mae instilled in their children the value of education. Mary, the oldest of Hugh and Texie Mae Carr's children, like her siblings, began her education at the Union Ridge Graded School, later known as the Albemarle Trading School. After earning a teaching certificate at the Piedmont Industrial Institute, Mary went on to further her studies at the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute (now Virginia State University), Fisk University and Cornell.

In 1913, Mary Carr married Conly Greer, whom she met at Virginia State where he received a degree in Agriculture.

After Hugh Carr's death in 1914, Conly and Mary Carr Greer moved back to River View Farm. Their only child, Louise Evangeline, was born here in 1916.

Under Conly and Mary Greer's stewardship the River View Farm expanded to 225 acres. Greer grew hay for the livestock, in addition to wheat and corn, and sold eggs, milk and cream locally. In 1918, Conly Greer was hired as Albemarle County's first African-American Extension Agent and served in this position until his retirement in 1953. His duties included teaching the latest agricultural techniques and modern farming practices to local African-American farmers as well as working with area youth in the 4-H program. In the mid-1930s, Greer built this barn from lumber harvested at River View Farm, using a portable sawmill. The barn's state-of-the-art design lumber harvested at River View Farm, using a portable sawmill. The barn's state-of-the-art design served as a model for area farmers.

After teaching at area schools, Mary Carr Greer returned to her alma mater, Albemarle Training School, where she taught for 15 years before being appointed to the school's first female principal. Under her leadership, ATS grew both physically and academically, ATS became accredited as a full four-year high school, and offered extracurricular classes in art, drama, and music as well as opportunities in community leadership. During her tenure, students often came to River View Farm to learn advanced methods of farming or practical domestic skills. The farmhouse at River View served as a second home to many students who lived too far away to travel to and from school every day.

Shortly after her death in 1973, and in honor of her dedication to the education of African American children, the Albemarle County Public School System named a new school in her honor. In 2011, the Fifth Grade students at the Mary Carr Greer Elementary School rededicated the school, to celebrate Mrs. Greer's contribution to education.

The Carr and Greer legacy has been memorialized in the creation of the Ivy Creek Natural Area, a place for learning, and an official site on the African American Heritage Trail of Virginia, where visitors can study both the rich mutual natural history of Central Virginia as well as the cultural history of this inspirational family.

The Village of Hydraulic Mills , In the nineteenth century, Hydraulic Mills was a thriving village at the junction of of Ivy Creek and the Rivanna River. The mills there provided lumber for the construction of the University of Virginia and processed local crops of corn and wheat. The village included two grain mills, a sawmill, blacksmith and cooper's shops, a wool carding machine, store houses, dwellings, and the Hydraulic Mills post office.

In 1865, a month before the end of the Civil War, Union soldiers under the command of Gen. Philip Sheridan ransacked Hydraulic Mills, a scene witnessed by an enslaved boy, Fountain Hughes. Many years later he recalled, ,

"The Yankees just come along and just broke the mill open and hauled all the flour out in the river and broke the store open and throwed all the meat out in the street.

In 1870, a devastating flood carried off the lumber and grist mills and all the structures at nearby Rio Mills. Both mill villages were soon rebuilt.

After the war, the large estate of Nathaniel Burnley, owner of Hydraulic Mills since 1829, was dispersed. This provided an opportunity for many former slaves, like Hugh Carr, to purchase and cultivate their own farms in the neighborhood. One freedman, Berkeley Bullock, Carr's next-door neighbor had a 75-acre farm with hogs, poultry, bees, and a milk cow, plots of corn and potatoes, an apple and peach orchard, and a vineyard.

In 1872 an African American miller, Rollins Sammons, in partnership with W.W. Worledge, paid $6,000 for the mills and operated them for two decades. The mill complex became the commercial center for a growing African American community of farmers and tradespeople. Freedmen like carpenter Albert Southall, cooper Frank Carr, and blacksmith Albert Wheeler provided essential skills to the mills and the community. Other worked as farm laborers, dressmakers, laundresses, railroad hands, teachers and preachers.

Schools and churches were central to the developing community of freedpeople. The Union Ridge and Pleasant Grove Baptist churches, founded right after the Civil War, still flourish today. The miller's son Jesse S. Sammons was teacher and principal at the Union Ridge Graded School, which later became the Albemarle Training School, the first black high school in the county. Mary Carr Greer was its third principal.

In 1966, the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir flooded the surviving structures of the village of Hydraulic Mills, erasing all vestiges of the hub of a once dynamic rural community.

The African-American community around Hydraulic Mills in the last decades of the nineteenth century included the neighborhood of Allentown, Cartersburg (later Woodburn), Georgetown, and Union Ridge. These are some of the families who lived there: ,

Allen, Armstead, Beck, Blakely, Bowles, Brown, Bullock, Burkett, Byers, Carey, Carr, Carter, Clark, Clayton, Coleman, Coles, Crawford, Dawson, Dickerson, Douglas, Estes, Flannagan, Fleming, Gentry, Gibbons, Gillette, Gilmer, Gilmore, Givens, Gofney, Hare, Harris, Hawkins, Henderson, Holmes, Howard, Hughes, Irving, Jackson, Jefferson, Johnson, Jones, Kennedy, Key, Knox, Lincoln, Logan, Magruder, McKenny, Mills, Minor, Nicholas, Overton, Piper, Preston, Ragland, Rives, Sammons, Shepherd, Smith, Solomon, Sorrel, Southall, Spinner, Sullivan, Thomas, Tinsley, Tyler, Walker, Watson, Wheeler, White, Williams, Winn, Winston, Wood, Woodfolk, Young