Battersea was the home to John Banister and Judge May, but it was also the home to dozens of enslaved people.
Recent research has sought to elaborate on and understand more of what enslaved life was like at Battersea. Surviving sources from the period share some information on the people that lived here. For the Banister era, property tax records from the 1780s lists the people he enslaved by their first names. His runaway slave advertisements from the Virginia Gazette give us physical descriptions of what some of these people looked like. In the early May era, surviving cookbooks from the early nineteenth century list first names and birthdates of enslaved people serving as cooks at Battersea.
Our research on slavery at Battersea is ongoing, please check back in as we share our findings on the enslaved community.
