The Legend of Bip Vawn

 

The story of Solomon "Bip" Vawn is well known throughout Pennsylvania's Cumberland Valley, and it is a classic tale of a runaway slave who, despite unbelievable odds, finds freedom north of the Mason-Dixon Line and lives out the remainder of his days in peace and prosperity. There are many different versions of the story; in some accounts, Bip dies at a ripe old age and is buried on his farm in Mont Alto in Franklin County, while other versions of the story have him retiring to Ohio or Southern California. The story is so well known in Franklin County, that findagrave.com even has a page devoted to his burial place.

But what is the truth-- if there is any-- behind this classic Pennsylvania fable?

Much of what we know about Bip's life comes from newspaper accounts published after his death. Vawn was supposedly born in Africa, and was reputedly the son of a king, tribal chieftain, or some other important personage. He remembered that his father, along with many wives and concubines, lived in a "bark hut surrounded by big-leaved trees", and that his father was always treated with reverence by the other tribal members. He recalled that his parents wore enormous gold and brass hoops in their ears, and that his mother wore broad bracelets around her wrists and ankles. 

Vawn recalled that when he was just a small boy of about five years of age, his entire family, along with other members of his tribe, were seized by members of an enemy tribe and marched in shackles a long distance to the coast, where they were portioned off to a number of white men who carried them away in boats. Vawn never saw his father again, though he and his mother were corralled into the same vessel with hundreds of other captives, many of whom perished during the long sea voyage.

When the ship landed, Vawn and his mother were taken away by a dark, cruel-looking man with a wide straw hat who put them into a wooden enclosure. The following day, a white man selected the boy and his mother, and they were carried away to a large plantation. The mother was immediately put to work in the fields. It was only years later when Vawn discovered that he was in Cuba. When Vawn was fifteen, he, along with a number of other teenage slaves, were sold to the owner of a sugar plantation in New Orleans. Bip, as he was now called, would never see his mother again.

Bip was purchased at an auction by a man named Delacroix, who, in turn, sold him to an Arkansas cotton planter by the name of Rix, whose plantation was in the Little Rock area. Bip spent four years on the Rix plantation, and even though Rix was a kind master who treated his slaves well, Bip was determined to escape. Rix rewarded his slaves with one day of freedom each year, and Bip seized this opportunity to flee.

One night, late in the fall of 1821, Rix made a break for freedom. He had no idea where he was, or where he was going, and even had less of an idea of what he was going to do when he got to his destination, wherever it may be. He proceeded in the direction he perceived as north, deciding to walk as straight a course as he could until he found the Mason-Dixon Line. He traveled by night and slept by day, wading across rivers and floundering through swamps. He satisfied his hunger by digging in the mud for turtles and eating them raw. 

On the third night of his journey he came suddenly to a clearing in the woods illuminated by the light of a full moon. Bip cautiously explored the area, which he believed was in the vicinity of Prairie Grove, and found it to be a "face camp". In those days, when much of northern Arkansas was wilderness, settlers from other states set up these simple open-faced shanties in order to stake a claim on the land. They would live for a year in these shanties until they could plant and harvest their first crop, and then they would use these earnings to build a permanent home.

This face camp was a crude shack, enclosed on only three sides. Because the climate in that part of the state was mild and settlers were racing against each other to establish their claims, these squatters saw no need of wasting time building a proper cabin. When Bip came upon this camp he was naturally cautious, though desperately hungry. He saw the carcass of a freshly-killed deer hanging from a pole in the clearing, and slowly crept toward the deer with a knife his hands, intending on hacking off a chunk of meat. But Bip had scarcely made it into the moonlit clearing when he saw two large, black creatures skulking in the shadows near the pole. Bip watched the two bears with curiosity, but suddenly the settler's dogs sprang out of the shack and attacked the bears, awakening the owner of the camp in the process, along with his wife and three children.

A fierce battle between man and beast ensued, and Bip, thinking only of his own safety, fled into the woods. But when he remembered the fearful faces of the settler's three young children, his conscience compelled him to run back to the clearing and render assistance to the pioneer family. He arrived just in time to see the settler pinned to the floor of the shanty by one bear, while the other hovered nearby menacingly. As the settler's wife and children screamed hysterically, Bip thrust his knife into the breast of the bear that was on top of the helpless man, then turned his attention to the second bruin. Bip seized the bear by its ear, and with a powerful jerk pulled its head upward. With one lightning quick movement, Bip slashed the animal's throat. The bear rose up on its haunches, staggered, and then fell dead on top of Bip, knocking him out cold and knocking down the primitive shanty.

When Bip awoke he discovered that it was daylight, and that he was buried beneath a pile of boards and shingles. Upon extricating himself from the debris, he saw a big-whiskered man consoling a young woman and her two weeping children. The baby had been killed when the shanty collapsed, and Bip, fearing that the settler would blame him for the tragedy, turned to run. But the whiskered settler stopped him, and told him that he had probably saved their lives. Bip helped the man rebuild his shanty and bury the baby, and in the process learned that the settler was Israel Vawn, a Baptist preacher from Pennsylvania who had gone to Arkansas to minister to the pioneers. Vawn asked Bip if he was the slave who had escaped from Rix's plantation, and Bip confessed. After the child had been buried, Vawn left to attend to some business in Little Rock, but bade the fugitive slave to remain at the face camp until his return, assuring him that he would assist him on his journey to freedom.

When Israel Vawn returned a few days later, he presented Bip with a bill of sale showing that he had legally "purchased" Bip from Rix while in Little Rock. This sale meant that Bip was no longer a fugitive, and had no need to worry about being recaptured. He remained with the Vawn family in the Arkansas wilderness until 1830, taking the name of Solomon Vawn. That year, Bip and the Vawn family settled in Miami County, Ohio. Israel Vawn died in Ohio in 1835, and after the death of his benefactor Bip relocated to Virginia, where he remained until the outbreak of the Civil War. He eventually made it to the Cumberland Valley, and spent the remainder of his days as a farm hand in various parts of Cumberland and Franklin counties. Upon his death in August of 1887, he was buried in an unmarked plot on a farm near Mont Alto owned by famed abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens.

Or, at least that's how one version of the story goes-- the well-known Pennsylvania version.

A different version of the story comes from another famed abolitionist-- not Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, but Rev. Henry Ward Beecher of Connecticut. In January of 1885, Beecher corresponded with "an aged Negro in the Pomona Valley" of California named Samuel Brade, who died near Lordsburg at the age of 85.

Beecher had learned about Brade through the latter's prayer meetings, in which Brade would tell colorful stories about his past as a slave. According to newspaper accounts, Brade's prayer meetings were attended by hundreds of white and black worshipers alike, and, as you might have guessed, these stories include being born to African royalty, being sold into slavery in Cuba, escaping from the Rix plantation in Arkansas, and saving Israel Vawn from marauding bears. In fact, Beecher's version of Brade's life story, which was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on August 20, 1894, matches an earlier version of the Bip Vawn story that the very same newspaper published in 1887. And, except for the first paragraph, it matches it virtually word for word, right down to the "bark hut surrounded by big-leaved trees".

 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Aug. 8, 1887

 

In both stories, the slave in question is named Bip, though in one story he takes the name of Solomon Vawn, while in the Beecher version of the story, he takes the name of Samuel Brade. In the Pennsylvania version of the story, Bip dies of old age in the Cumberland Valley, while in the Beecher version, Bip dies of old age in Lordsburg, which is the present-day city of La Verne in Los Angeles County. 

 

San Francisco Chronicle, April 30, 1893

 

So which version is the truth and which is fiction? Is it possible that a black man in California read the Bip Vawn story from 1887 and spent the next seven years pretending to be him? Or was Samuel Brade the original Bip and Solomon Vawn the imposter? Or is it possible that both stories are nothing more than fictitious escape-from-bondage parables concocted by anti-slavery preachers?

There exists no census records or death certificates for anyone named Solomon Vawn or Samuel Brade who fit in with the story. The only Solomon Vawn appearing on a U.S. census record is a white man from Huntingdon County born in 1848, not a black man born in or around 1800. And it appears that there was a black man named Samuel Brade who came to America from Cuba, but this occurred in 1920, long after the abolishment of slavery, and he never lived in California. For that matter, there is also no record of Israel Vawn in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arkansas, or any other state. 

 

 

There is also no record of a plantation owner from Arkansas named Rix, and even if there was, it's highly unlikely that he'd ever allow his slaves one day each year of total freedom. And even if Bip did manage to escape from a plantation in Little Rock, there's no way he would've been able to reach Prairie Grove in three days on foot, because Prairie Grove is 200 miles northwest of Little Rock, not far from the Oklahoma border. And this, of course, begs the question... what are the odds that a fugitive slave could slog 200 miles to a clearing in the wilderness, only to run smack dab into a frontier preacher who just so happened to know the slave's master?

The legend that Bip Vawn was buried in an unmarked grave on land owned by Thaddeus Stevens is also highly suspect. While it's true that Stevens owned property around Mont Alto, the property in question was an iron furnace, not a farm, and any Thaddeus Stevens researcher will tell you that Stevens, who died in 1868, never married and never had children. Upon Stevens' death, much of his estate was bequeathed to his long-time housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith. But Smith herself died in 1884, three years before the supposed death of Bip Vawn. So who permitted the burial of Bip Vawn on Stevens' property?

In all likelihood, there never was a former slave named Bip Vawn who lived, or died, in Pennsylvania, but if there was, it is possible that some fellow from California stumbled across the newspaper story, plagiarized it, and submitted it to Rev. Henry Ward Beecher as his own autobiography. We know this must have been the case because the first version of the Solomon Vawn story appearing in print comes from 1887, while the first mention of Samuel Brade doesn't appear until 1890.

In the years that followed, other papers picked up the Brade story, and some of these stories even included sketches of the man in question. The drawing below, for instance, comes from the August 5, 1894, edition of the Chicago Tribune.

 

 

Not surprisingly, this Bip story-- and several others like it-- are copied verbatim from the original 1887 story about Solomon Vawn. Other similar stories also appeared in print around this time, which would seem to indicate that the Antebellum South was teeming with bear-killing, preacher-saving slaves descended from African royalty. These stories almost always begin the same way: There died in [name of town] the other day a pure African-born Negro named [name of deceased], otherwise known as Bip.

There are, of course, many variations as well, such as this rather racist version published by the New York Sun on July 27, 1897, which places "King Bip" in North Carolina:

 

 

While it's unlikely that the Pennsylvania Bip ever existed, it does seem evident, at least to this historian's mind, that our state was the birthplace of the legend. I've encountered dozens, if not hundreds, of weathered, old headstones inscribed with the Vawn family name in graveyards across Juniata, Mifflin and Huntingdon counties. As these pioneering families spread to other parts of the country, the name was changed to Vaughn or Vaughan. But here in Pennsylvania, there are many folks still living going by the Vawn spelling, just as their ancestors did over two centuries ago.

 

Sources:

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Aug. 8, 1887.

Pike County Dispatch, March 6, 1890.

San Francisco Chronicle, April 30, 1893.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Aug. 20, 1894.