Rezin Prather (b. circa 1800 - d. 1872)
MSA SC 5496-047817
Emancipated from Slavery, Cracklin District, Montgomery County,
Maryland, 1864
Biography:
Born around 1800, Rezin Prather was the patriarch of the family that founded Prathertown, one of Montgomery County's free African American communities. Prior to emancipation, he worked as a slave on Nathan Cooke Sr.'s farm near Gaithersburg.1 By 1870, Rezin was living with Levi and Martha Prather near Goshen.2 Formerly Dorothy Williams' slave, Levi was likely Rezin's son. A twenty-one-year-old George Prather also lived at the same residence, with all three men working as farm laborers. Rezin R. Prather Jr., a twenty-six-year-old, literate carpenter, lived several houses away with his wife, Albina Riggs, and their two daughters.3 Despite his name, Rezin Prather Jr. was probably the son of the carpenter Wesley Prather, another of Dorothy Williams' former slaves.4
In 1870, trustees of the newly-formed Brooke Grove United Methodist Episcopal Church purchased two acres in the Goshen area. The trustees included Wesley Prather, Rezin Prather (the deed did not specify Jr. or Sr.), Levi Prather, James Ross, and Wesley Randolph.5 They bought the property from Vachel Duffie, an black landowner who had paid $1,000 for his fifty-eight acres of land three years earlier. The property originally belonged to a much larger tract of land called "Addition to Brooke Grove," which also encompassed Deborah W. Canby's farm in nearby Sandy Spring. Six years after the first purchase, Rezin Prather Jr. bought another two acres of land from Duffie for the church.6 The church served as the center of the African American community, eventually known as Prathertown, that took root during the next twenty years.7
Rezin Prather Sr. passed away on January 8, 1872, as recorded in one of the Prather family's bibles.8 Following his death, the rest of the Prather family continued making land purchases. The growing community of Prathertown stood just east of the Great Seneca Creek, and a few miles southwest of Goshen, near Nathan Cooke's farm. From 1880 to 1897, Prather family members—including Rezin Prather Jr., the brothers Marshall, Moses, and John W. Prather, John's wife Ann V. Mockabee, and Levi's widow Martha—purchased several portions of a tract of land called "Dorsey’s Meadows," with their purchases totaling about sixteen and a half acres by the turn of the century. The Prathers purchased most of their land from the farmer William H. Benson Sr. and his wife, Jane Trail,9 a white couple who lived closer to Gaithersburg but who also owned land near Goshen. Other families who appeared in the census records for Prathertown included Boyd, Carter, Copeland, Crawford, Davis, and Riggs.10
An
"R. Prater," probably Rezin Prather Jr., appeared on G. M. Hopkin's 1879
map of the Cracklin District of Montgomery County. The Prather residence
stood across the street from the Brooke Grove United Methodist Episcopal
Church. Vachel Duffie's residence stood farther down the main road, although
the cartographer accidentally changed the name to Rachel Duffy.11
Although many family members chipped in, the brothers Marshall and Moses Prather conducted the majority of the land transactions, usually jointly. Marshall and Moses were born in 1848 and 1858, respectively, to Tobias Prather and his wife, Patience Hall. While Rezin Prather Sr. was enslaved on Nathan Cooke's farm prior to emancipation, the two brothers were enslaved several miles away on the farm of William W. Blunt, along with nine other Prather family members.12 Both the Cooke and the Blunt farms stood approximately the same distance from Prathertown, the former to the south and the latter to the west.
However, in 1897, Martha Prather purchased land from an African American
farmer, Nicholas Mackabee, and his wife, Hariet S. Mackabee, to whom the
Prathers may have been related through John W. Prather's marriage to Anne
V. Mockabee.13 Other former slaves, like Wesley Boyd, also began
purchasing land in Prathertown. A "kinship community" continued developing
among these closely intertwined families and friends,14 with
portions of Prathertown's land remaining with the Prather family and their
descendents for over a century.
1. MONTGOMERY COUNTY COMMISSIONER OF SLAVE STATISTICS (Slave Statistics), [MSA CM750-1]. William W. Prather, May 9, 1867.
2. U.S. Census Bureau (Census Record, MD) for Rezin Prayther, 1870, Montgomery County, District 1, Page 64, Line 5 [MSA SM61-275, M 7256].
3. MONTGOMERY COUNTY, CIRCUIT COURT, (Marriage Licenses), 1867-1899, [MSA T2490-1]. Rezin Prather and Albina Riggs, March 4, 1867.
4. Robyn Smith. Personal and Email Interviews. April - August 2009.
5. MONTGOMERY COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT (Land Records), Liber EBP 7, Folio 424, 1869-1870, [MSA CE 63-17]. Vachel Duffie to Wesley Prather, Levi Prather, Wesley Randolph, Vachel Duffie, and James Ross, trustees, July 6, 1870.
6. MONTGOMERY COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT (Land Records), Liber EBP 15, Folio 21, 1876-1876, [MSA CE 63-25]. Vachel Duffie to Rezin Praither, April 25, 1876.
7. Ira Berlin. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1974) 302-303.
8. Prather Family Bible Records. "Reclaiming Kin." http://msualumni.wordpress.com.
9. Maryland Marriage Record for William H. Benson and Jane Trail, February 5, 1842, Montgomery County. Jordan Dodd, Liahona Research, comp. Maryland Marriages, 1655-1850. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004. www.ancestry.com.
10. U.S. Census Bureau (Census Record, MD), 1880, Montgomery County, Cracklin District, District 107 [MSA SM61-324, M 4748-2].
11. G.M. Hopkins, Atlas of Fifteen Miles Around Washington Including the County of Montgomery, Maryland (Baltimore, MD: Garamond/Pridemark Press, Inc.: 1975) 22.
12. MONTGOMERY COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT (Land Records), Liber JA 58, Folio 22, 1897-1897, [MSA CE 63-104]. Nicholas Mackabee and Harriet L. Mackabee to Martha J. Prather, February 26, 1897.
13. Ibid.
DEPARTMENT
OF HEALTH BUREAU OF VITAL STATISTICS, (Death Record, Counties), 02/1939,
[MSA S1179-6266]. Ann Virginia Prather, February 23, 1939, Montgomery County.
14. Michael Dwyer.
Montgomery County
(Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006) 120.
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