About

The history of slavery and the experience of enslaved people at Hampden-Sydney College has been largely uninvestigated and, in many respects, obscured. The College joined the Universities Studying Slavery consortium in 2018, but this was followed by little sustained effort to pursue this research. In 2020, the College hired the first archivist in its 250-year history, and its archival collections remain largely unprocessed. Over the centuries, archival materials have ended up at many other institutions. The OTG team at the College has begun identifying and analyzing materials primarily using the Board of Trustees minutes and session records of area churches charged with raising money for the College’s founding. We are also attempting to locate pertinent mentions in local histories and working backwards to discover the primary source material.