• General Notes

  Note:
  Joel Todd was a member and supporter of John G. Fee's "Free Church," Glade Church (American Missionary Association) He was a radical abolitionist and was in the group of exiles when they fled to Cincinnati, Ohio. Later he would sell land to freed african american slaves. Joel gave land for the founding of Berea College.
  
  From A Utopian Experiment in Kentucky, pg. 81: "One family of white Bereans sold hundreds o f acres to black settlers: Joel Todd, Sr., and his wife Nancy Mills, who had been exiled for their support of abolitionism in 1860, made land available to many black families. On February 17, 1868, Todd sold land on Bushy Fork to Anderson Crawford, Stephen Hagan, and Horace Yates. These settlers living neighbors to one another, constitutes the now nonexistent town of Canton, apparently their name for black settlers on Bushy Fork. Daniel Herron bought town lot no. 4 in Canton from Joel Todd, Sr., February 2, 1869. (Lest it appear that [Rev. John] Fee's policy of interspersion was spoiled by this black village, it should be pointed out that everyone in it owned land neighboring a white person's land on one boundary line at least.) In 1873, Joel Todd, Sr., sold another parcel of land on Bushy Fork to Henry Adams, who had purchased materials for building a house in 1866. Probably blacks were permitted to erect houses on land they planned to purchase sometime later; Adams is not the only instance of a black man in Berea building a house before he owned land to put it on. The five acres Stephen Hagan bought in 1868 included the house where he already lived. Joel Todd, Jr., a pre-Civil War student in the Berea school and owner of land near his father's, also sold to blacks, including Horace Yates (1874) and Gibson Gill(1878)."
  

Details of Joel Elias "Uncle Joel"'s family with Nancy Ruth Lee