What the papers are

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Alvin Franklin has three bound volumes called abstracts of title. Each is a certified history of a piece of land, typed from courthouse records by a licensed abstract company. It includes deeds and court orders along with mortgages and probate filings. The history reaches back to the original grant from the United States. Buyers paid for abstracts to establish ownership. Families kept them because they needed that proof to sell or mortgage a lot and to defend their claim to it.

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These volumes cover lots in Booker Terrace. The neighborhood was platted in 1929 in McAlmont on the east side of North Little Rock, Arkansas. The earliest entries date to 1836 and 1837. Alvin's grandmother kept the books until her death. His father then took the papers and passed them to Alvin's sister. She gave them to Alvin, who has held them for more than twenty years. The papers arrived folded in thirds. He flattened them under bricks and taped the worn edges. Those are the only repairs anyone in the family has made.

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Lucy Beasley

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Wiley Beasley died in Pulaski County in 1833. His will left everything to his wife Lucy for as long as she remained his widow. After her death the land was to be divided among all their children. Lucy entered 40 acres of federal land in her own name on April 4, 1837. That claim added to the roughly 280 acres she held for life. Making her own federal claim in Arkansas during that period meant acting as the head of her household.

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Lucy remained a widow for the rest of her life. She raised nine children on the land and buried several of them. She held the place for twenty-three years before her death in August 1856.

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The papers also document the people the family enslaved. A guardianship filing dated October 15, 1856 appears at Book C page 332. It says one of Lucy's minor grandsons owned "a valuable negro woman aged about sixteen years." The following year the son-in-law administering Wiley's estate secured a court order to sell the estate's enslaved people. A county chancery court decree at Book F page 587 named Lucy's children and grandchildren. It ordered the land sold and the proceeds divided among them. The core 120 acres sold at public sale for $540 in October 1857. The land never returned to the family.

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The records leave Lucy's origins unresolved. Alvin's family has passed down an account of her as a Black woman raised by the Gilliams. The documents identify Thomas Gilliam as the husband of her daughter Susan Jane. He later became the administrator of Lucy's estate. The papers contain no adoption record and never state Lucy's race. The second book will investigate those questions through census and probate records beyond the abstracts.

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A girl named Ann

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The 1856 filing assigned a value to a sixteen-year-old girl without recording her name. Researchers found two records that name her in the county's scanned probate and deed books in 2026. The guardian's sworn report to the January 1858 probate term describes a sale authorized by a court order dated October 28, 1857. He sold "a certain negro girl named Ann" to James Eason for one thousand dollars. The bill of sale appears in Deed Book B No. 2 at pages 147 and 148. It describes Ann as "aged about fifteen years" and warrants her "sound in body and mind, and a slave for life."

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James Eason's 1860 census slave schedule entry in Gray Township lists a sixteen-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy. The first census after freedom was taken in 1870. It records a free ten-year-old named Mack Eason in the same township. He lived with Patsey Gilliam, a Black woman. Mack was very likely Ann's son. Researchers have yet to find Ann in the 1870 census under any name. The papers Alvin's grandmother kept made it possible to follow the trail to the records that preserve Ann's name.

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The land's second life

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A farmer named Robinson owned the Beasley acres after they left the family. The land later went through an 1894 foreclosure and passed to a Little Rock physician. Arkansas Baptist College bought it in December 1904 for one thousand dollars. It served as the college farm for twenty-five years. The college repeatedly borrowed against it to pay teachers, as the loan papers explain. In May 1929 the Arkansas Missionary Baptist Convention sold the farm to two developers for $7,500. They platted Booker Terrace on July 17, 1929 as a neighborhood of lots for Black families. Each lot's abstract begins with the Beasley entries of the 1830s because it carries the full recorded history of the ground.

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Booker Terrace and the Franklins

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An abstract for Lot 10 in Block 18 was certified the day after the plat was filed. Its cover bears the words "For Chas. F. Franklin". Alvin's relative Ella Caldwell bought Lot 54 in Block 17 for $175 in 1934. His grandmother Gertrude Brooks acquired the adjoining Lots 55 and 56 in 1947. The final certificate on her abstract is dated September 12, 1963.

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Gertrude kept the papers as proof that she owned her land. Those papers also held the history of Lucy Beasley's estate. Keeping them preserved the trail researchers followed to Ann's name.

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The archives

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Alvin checked the papers before showing them to anyone. He called the Arkansas State Archives in Little Rock and read an archivist Book F page 587 and Book C page 332 from his own pages. The archivist called back about half an hour later. The state's copies matched Alvin's originals. The archivist asked whether Alvin had the original abstracts in front of him. Alvin said he did. He and his wife plan to visit the Archives. He also plans to give the state's collection a copy of the finished book under his name.​