LEBANON COUNTY, Pa. (WHTM) -- For most of us, living to be 112 years old would be the most remarkable thing about us, if we were that fortunate and rare.
Not Joseph Johns, otherwise known as "Old Black Joe."
Johns, born and enslaved in Fauquier County, Virginia, in about 1794 -- that's actually a conservative estimate for a man who remembered George Washington's funeral procession as a young boy -- escaped a half-century later and made his way north, traveling at night and hiding by day, said David Matterness, camp ranger for the Bashore Scout Reservation in Union Township, Lebanon County.
Matterness, known locally as "Ranger Dave," is one of a handful of local people who know a lot about a man few people outside the area know anything about.
According to Matterness and others, Johns traveled with another escaped slave to the west shore of the Susquehanna River, across from Dauphin Borough. Neither could swim, but Johns managed his way across; the other died.
Johns continued east to what is now Bashore, back then farmland owned by a farmer who took Johns in at great personal risk: Twice, Matterness said, southern bounty hunters came looking for Johns.
Johns did a little of this and a little of that to get by. His most notable trade was making charcoal for local people, most of whom were white.
They didn't just accept him but embraced him, evidenced by the fact that not only is he buried in a cemetery full of graves for white people -- nearly unheard of in 1906, when he died -- but his headstone is more elaborate than many others in the graveyard thanks to a collection appreciative townsfolk took up.
That gravestone is one physical marker of Johns's life. A larger one is a reconstructed collier's hut where Johns lived at the end of his life, up a trail on scout reservation property (private land not generally open to the public; contact the Pennsylvania Dutch Scouts Council if you're interested in visiting).
It was there that just two weeks before he died, someone took the first-ever and only photograph of Johns.
"It's very fortunate," Matterness said of the well-timed photo outside the hut, in which a dog is visible. "Otherwise we would really have no connection to that -- putting a face to the story, so to speak."
The sites of Johns's various huts up the trail were clear because of the difference in the soil where he burned coal, Matterness said, but a collier's hut itself doesn't last forever. The replica of Johns's hut, on the site of his final hut, was first reconstructed by an Eagle Scout in 1969, said Nicole Welch, a senior district executive with the Pennsylvania Dutch Scouts Council, and other scouts have reconstructed it since then -- the outside is now made of stucco, to preserve it more permanently.
"It's honoring his memory. It's honoring the spirit of who he was because he truly was self-sustaining. He was trustworthy," Welch said. "He was a valued member of the community, and he really embodied a lot of the beliefs and the spirit of what scouting is."
Welch said scouts who come to Bashore from around the world have a chance to hike to the hut and learn about Johns.
As for Johns's nickname, "Old Black Joe," a memorial strone constructed in the 1990s doesn't mention that, because Matterness said the well-intentioned white people who commissioned it -- applying modern standards -- figured it was derrogatory.
But scout leaders here heard from leaders of predominantly African-American troups in southern states.
"They said, 'No, that's how he was known. That's his name. We're we're fine with that,'" Matterness recalled.
abc27 News first learned the story from Welch's mother, Sally Maxwell, who had enjoyed other stories on the station about Black History Month.
"But I kept hearing the same thing over and over about how the cemeteries are all segregated," Maxwell said. "Joe's not in a segregated cemetery. He is buried right smack dab with the rest of the community."
In a leap year, when Black History Month has an extra day, yet another largely untold story, just in time on Feb. 29.
