Dorris Keeven-Franke
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Next day proceeded on our way to Louisville, a handsome well built business-like place on the Ohio River. Staid sometime in market house which was abundantly supplies with fish, flesh, fruit and vegetables. Supplied ourselves with provisions and left…
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This is the journey of Archer, the enslaved property of James Alexander of Lexington, Virginia. Alexander is a member of a caravan of families moving from Rockbridge County, Virginia to Saint Charles County Missouri. If we listen closely to this journal of William Campbell, we might hear the voices of the enslaved… after all this…
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On September 24, 2022, residents of St. Charles County, the City of St. Charles, and the City of St. Louis would commemorate the emancipation of Archer Alexander…
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Isn’t it time we tell the whole story? There is so much more to this man’s life than we knew. Recent research has uncovered so much more…
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On March 30, 1863, Eliot would address a letter to Archer’s owner Richard H. Pitman asking to purchase him, as he wanted to see Archer Alexander emancipated. In his book, The Story of Archer Alexander, Eliot would later write …
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Archer was a hero in his own right, an unknown American hero, whose untold story is difficult to share yet needs to be told. Don’t you think the time is right? For more about Archer visit https://archeralexander.wordpress.com/ online anytime.
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A recent entry in the Virginia Humanities’ Website Encyclopedia Virginia shares the story of Archer Alexander. The contributor is Dorris Keeven-Franke who is an award-winning author of books on Missouri history
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This is the story of two men named James Alexander, one white, one black. One was the owner of Archer Alexander, one was his son. This son lived and died in St. Charles County.
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Missouri was a slave state that the great orator Henry Clay had compromised with over 10,000 enslaved people when it reached statehood.
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The Emancipation Monument “Freedom’s Memorial” was paid for entirely by funds from the formerly enslaved. It sits in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. today. It was dedicated by Frederick Douglass on April 14, 1876.
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Learn the Hidden History of the Emancipation Monument from historians, researchers and authors.
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Free program via Zoom about Archer Alexander’s journey from Rockbridge County Virginia to Missouri in 1829. Details below…
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In July 2019, Archer Alexander’s great-great-great grandson Keith Winstead and author Dorris Keeven-Franke visited Lexington and the Rockbridge Historical Society in Virginia.
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Take a closer look please, as Archer’s shackles have been broken and he is rising to stand next to Lincoln.
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Boston’s copy was placed there as a tribute to the people of Boston who were the nation’s largest contributors to the Western Sanitary Commission. That is what people of America saw when they visited your statue in the 1870s.
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In 1829, a small group of four families, Campbell, McCluer, Wilson and Alexander, all wealthy and well educated . planters from Virginia, came with their enslaved, about two dozen of them. They settled in “Dardenne” along the Booneslick Road, south of the Zumwalt place, (O’Fallon) in St. Charles County, Missouri. They were all members of…
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When Lincoln, a personal friend to Eliot, was assassinated, the formerly enslaved wanted a monument to Lincoln, and St. Louis’ former slave, Archer Alexander would be the one, to represent them, rising up and as Eliot says “breaking his own chains”.
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In an effort to trace Alexander’s early roots Keith Winstead and I will begin in Virginia. Join us as we take a journey along the same route, footstep by footstep, laid out in Campbell’s diary that brought these people to Missouri. Winstead, who shares the DNA of his cousin Muhammad Ali, has been researching his…
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The search for that special slave known as Archer Alexander has begun and needs to be found. Only then can that “true” story, as Keith Alexander calls it, be really known. Not easy when you are trying to find the genealogy of a slave. This is what is known as thorough and exhaustive research, for…
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Using DNA the family is looking for other descendants of Archer Alexander. They are planning a reunion in St. Charles County in August 2019.
ARCHER ALEXANDER 