VERGENNES — An unexpected phone call to Oakham, Mass., by resident Larry Schuyler ultimately led to the installation of two historic markers — one in Vergennes, one in Virginia — highlighting Stephen Bates’s rise from slavery to become the first Black sheriff in the Northern United States.

Schuyler, Bates’s great-grandson, recounted in an October speech at the historic Virginia Shirley Plantation how he and professional and amateur historians in Vermont and Virginia ensured that former longtime Vergennes Sheriff and Chief of Police Stephen Bates, born a slave in 1842 on the Shirley Plantation — back then partly owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s mother — would receive his due with the two markers.

Schuyler was addressing a gathering of several dozen on the Shirley Plantation honoring the second marker installation. The group included many of Bates’s descendants, Vergennes residents Bo Price and Alicia Grangent, a local choir, and Charles City, Va., and Shirley Plantation officials.

He talked about Bates’s history and the recent circumstances that brought them all to “Historic Shirley.”

“It all started with this phone call of, ‘Do you know this person is in this picture?’” Schuyler said at that sunny Oct.12 dedication ceremony.

Asking that fateful question in late 2019 was Clark University Professor Janette Greenwood, doing so in the interest of her own research. The people in the grainy black-and-white photo proved to be Larry Schuyler’s grandfather, Raymond Schuyler, and his wife and their three children.

Raymond Schuyler’s wife was the former Rose Mary Bates, daughter of Stephen and Frances Bates of Vergennes. Rose Bates had moved to the Worcester, Mass., area from Vermont to pursue her education, and met Raymond there. To wed, Raymond and Rose returned to the Bates family church, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Vergennes.

STEPHEN BATES

Not long after seeing the black and white photo, Larry Schuler and his wife traveled to Vergennes to learn more about the family history, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Or, as Schuyler said in his speech: “It opened up Pandora’s box.”

With help in Vergennes, Larry Schuyler soon confirmed for the first time the legacy of his great-grandfather, which previously he had dismissed, he told the gathering in Virginia, as “folklore.”

The little-known story of Stephen Bates’s journey from slavery to elective service in Vergennes was uncovered, thanks not only to Schuyler, but also the efforts of folks that included Price, a St. Paul’s parishioner, and Grangent, now the CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Vergennes. Both, among others that included Waltham’s Liz Ryan, would sign up for the City of Vergennes Marker Committee, which also helped sponsor the Virginia marker as well as the Bates marker in Vergennes.

Enter also Jane Williamson, the former director of Ferrisburgh’s Rokeby Museum and a member of the Vermont Historic Marker Committee. Williamson in 1992 made a major contribution by fleshing out Bates’s history before he came to Vergennes.

Williamson wrote what is essentially a full biography of Bates in Vermont History Vol. 90, No. 2. In it she uncovered many details of the first 28 years of his life. (It may be found online at vermonthistory.org/journal/90/VH90_02_Williamson.pdf.)

“I still to this day can’t believe that there’s going to be two markers in this country celebrating the legacy of my great-grandfather, who was born on a plantation owned by the family of Robert E. Lee,” Schuyler told the Virginia gathering. “What an incredible story.”

RESPECT IN CITY

In October 2021, when the first historic marker in Bates’s honor was installed near St. Paul’s in Vergennes, the story of the sheriff’s life in Vergennes was already well researched. He arrived in 1870 in the employ of former Congressman Frederick Woodbridge, a city resident. Bates eventually was elected a half-dozen times as sheriff, and was finally appointed chief of police, before dying of an apparent heart attack in 1907 after 37 years in his adopted home.

There seems to be little question Bates was well liked in Vergennes, as winning those elections might attest. Some context: There were about 1,500 people in Vergennes when Bates arrived, 13 of them Black, per Williamson’s research.

Price provided the Independent with a number of 19th-century stories from the Vergennes Enterprise and Vermonter and Middlebury Register that spoke to Bates’s character and personality, and showed how the people of Vergennes probably felt about him.

One reported Bates had given a winter jacket to a vagrant, another indicated he donated a coal stove to a charity raffle, and another said in 1876 he was chosen to be a member of the local Republican Party committee. The Register stated that upon Bates’s return from a visit to New Rochelle, N.Y., in August 1883, he was greeted by “a host of friends who were glad to see him about town once again.”

Several papers also reported on an unfortunate incident after which city residents rallied around their new sheriff. Schuyler also told the story in his Virginia speech:

“Someone tried to burn his house down … and he was so much loved in the community at that point they raised $100 for him to continue on with his life.” ($100 then is equal to about $3,000 today.)

Williamson does not call the fire suspicious in her article. Schuyler explained his point of view to the Independent.

“He gets elected sheriff, and three or four months later his house gets on fire when nobody was home,” he said. “And one of the articles indicated it was a racial incident.”

Regardless of how the blaze started, the citizen response to the fire and the multiple election results probably speak for themselves as to how city residents felt about Bates.

“Stephen had to be a community-based, loved person,” Schuyler said in Virginia. “He got elected four or five times.”

The fact residents were casting votes for Bates was significant, Schuyler added.

“Here we are in the 1880s, we’ve got my great-grandfather arresting white men, putting them in jail, and doing it in the Jim Crow era. That in itself, you go, Oh my God,” he said.

POSING IN VIRGINIA this past fall are two great-grandsons of former Vergennes Sheriff Stephen Bates, the first Black sheriff in the Northern U.S. Nick Schuyler, far left, and Larry Schuyler, far right, stand at a marker honoring Bates at the Virginia plantation on which Bates was born. Vergennes residents Alicia Grangent, left, and Bo Price, right, helped make the marker a reality,.
Photo courtesy of Alicia Grangent

VA TO VT

As a teen, Williamson noted, Bates was almost certainly groomed to become a personal servant of the Carter family that owned the Shirley Plantation. That meant a less physically difficult life than working in the fields, but also a lack of privacy, and essentially being at the beck and call of the family 24/7.

Life on the Shirley Plantation changed dramatically in 1862, when it was in the path of Union General George McClellan’s march on the Confederate capital of Richmond, Va. Essentially, the plantation was commandeered as an infirmary for wounded Union soldiers.

McClellan’s advance has been well documented as slow and deliberate; that meant a long stay by the occupying troops at the plantation. Williamson writes that Bates during that time was almost certainly employed by a Union officer.

And when McClellan abandoned his advance on Richmond and ordered his troops back to Washington, D.C., Williamson writes that Bates made the difficult decision to leave his family and the plantation behind and travel to the nation’s capital with the Union Army.

Bates, along with many of his Black peers in similar situations, apparently stayed in Washington when the army moved on to another campaign. “Movements during the following months, even years, are undocumented,” Williamson writes. But she notes that somehow Bates met and became employed by Congressman Frederick E. Woodbridge of Vergennes, who represented Vermont’s First District in the U.S. House from 1863 to 1869.

And when Woodbridge was not reelected in 1870, Bates made another decision: He would move to Vermont with his employer, again leaving friends and family behind.

In Vergennes, Williamson recounts, he married Frances Mason, a cook for a retired hotelkeeper, and they had a daughter, Rose Mary, and a son, Frederick Napoleon. They rented a North Street home from Woodbridge and bought it after his death in 1888. They joined St. Paul’s, next to which the Vergennes marker now stands.

THIS HISTORIC MARKER erected in October 2024 on the Shirley Plantation in Charles City, Va., honors Stephen Bates, the elected sheriff of Vergennes in the late 19th and early 20th century. Bates, who is honored with a similar marker in Vergennes, became the first Black sheriff in the Northern U.S. after being born into slavery on the Shirley Plantation.
Photo courtesy of Bo Price

Bates’s skill with horses brought him some work, according to Williamson: He managed a business for Woodbridge’s son, one that imported Percherons, and that, “occasionally transported horses for their owners.” He was soon appointed a local agent for the Vermont Humane Society, and also worked as a night watchman and a police officer after an appointment from the city council.

Williamson suspects Woodbridge’s influence might have helped with that latter appointment, as might have his Republican Party affiliation. But she also noted this: “After four years of police service, Stephen Bates had no trouble convincing a few hundred voters that he should be city sheriff and was elected unopposed and by acclamation in 1879.”

And he eventually served as sheriff for decades — with two interruptions after election losses and after making a few high-profile arrests, including earning a $1,000 award for catching wanted men from a Brooklyn robbery.

At the time of his death in 1907, he was doing yet another good deed, Schuyler noted.

“He died milking a neighbor’s cow. The legacy he had of helping people went way beyond,” he said.

WHO WAS STEPHEN BATES?

It is, of course, difficult to assess the character and personality of someone who died more than a century ago.

But there are informative facts. Bates had a reputation for generosity and kindness that newspapers reported at the time, as Schuyler noted at the marker unveiling.

“He would take care of vagrants, the homeless, if they came into town. He gave them shelter until they were ready to get out of Dodge. He had that kind of heart,” he said.

Price said the very fact he was elected so many times in an era where elsewhere Jim Crow laws were enforced speaks to Bates’s personal qualities and competence.

“Just for the times, he was living in the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, he was elected by a predominantly, or almost exclusively, white electorate,” she said. “That’s pretty significant on the face of it.”

Price said there was probably more than respect for Bates, pointing to the time when the city raised money after the fire, and that according to newspaper he was included in city clubs: She said he “was probably loved.”

Bates’s accomplishments are even more notable considering his odyssey from “an enslaved life,” Grangent said.

“He had to have some grit, for sure,” she said. “His character had to have been something that stood out … He had a charismatic personality.”

Grangent and Schuyler both talked about Bates being an example of not letting circumstances determine outcomes.

“I think it is an important Vergennes-Virginia story to be told,” Grangent said. “For me it’s, your background doesn’t necessarily determine who you’re going to be.”

Grangent also feels that Stephen Bates left an important story to remember “especially in the time frame of Black History Month,” because she said in the current political climate that commemoration has been widely ignored.

Both Schuyler and Grangent said Black history is integral to American history. Schuyler summed up his great-grandfather’s story for the gathering in Virginia.

He pointed out that Bates was elected in Vergennes to police white people, “Where in the South, sheriffs were appointed to arrest Black people. As I went further and further into this history, I just felt so much connected to not just only Vermont, but to this country,” Schuyler said.

“Because let’s face it, there was so much division going on. And then for my great-grandfather to do what he did at that point in time and be loved by this community, this is not just Black history, this is American history.”

Note: The Bixby Library has an archive dedicated to Bates and plans to add the video of the Shirley Plantation dedication ceremony to that collection. The archive may be found at bixbylibrary.org/the-stephen-bates-collection.