new environment and later showed in the accumulation of property evidences
of actual progress. Among the successful Negroes in Columbus was David
Jenkins who acquired considerable property as a painter, glazier and paper
hanger.[28] One Mr. Hill, of Chillicothe, was for several years its
leading tanner and currier.[29]

It was in Cincinnati, however, that the Negroes made most progress in the
West. The migratory blacks came there at times in such large numbers, as
we have observed, that they provoked the hostile classes of whites to
employ rash measures to exterminate them. But the Negroes, accustomed to
adversity, struggled on, endeavoring through schools and churches to
embrace every opportunity to rise. By 1840 there were 2,255 Negroes in
that city. They had, exclusive of personal effects and $19,000 worth of
church property, accumulated $209,000 worth of real estate. A number of
their progressive men had established a real estate firm known as the
"Iron Chest" company which built houses for Negroes. One man, who had once
thought it unwise to accumulate wealth from which he might be driven, had,
by 1840, changed his mind and purchased $6,000 worth of real estate.

Another Negro paid $5,000 for himself and family and bought a home worth
$800 or $1,000. A freedman, who was a slave until he was twenty-four years
of age, then had two lots worth $10,000, paid a tax of $40 and had 320
acres of land in Mercer County. Another, who was worth only $3,000 in
1836, had seven houses in 1840, 400 acres of land in Indiana, and another
tract in Mercer County, Ohio. He was worth altogether about $12,000 or
$15,000. A woman who was a slave until she was thirty was then worth
$2,000. She had also come into potential possession of two houses on which
a white lawyer had given her a mortgage to secure the payment of $2,000
borrowed from this thrifty woman. Another Negro, who was on the auction
block in 1832, had spent $2,600 purchasing himself and family and had