John and Hannah Johnson (ca. 1833 - 1883)

John and Hannah Johnson (ca. 1833 - 1883)

The Johnsons lived in a small frame house on a 12-acre farm in the area of present-day South Meadow Drive. Photo made with AI.
Around campfires and during sleepovers, under covers and under stars, generations of North Tonawanda children heard the tale of “Black Hannah.” It was whispered that she was an escaped slave from the South, a fortuneteller, a seer of past lives who was silent about her own beginnings. Ancient beyond estimation, she was said to keep company with unseen forces in a shack in the primordial woods at the village edge. After she died, folks said strange flowers sprung up around the place—a sign that Hannah had never entirely belonged to this world, or that her spirit refused to leave her old home.

Her real name was Hannah Johnson.

Hannah Johnson’s story is not just a ghost story. It is one of those local legends where fact and invention have grown together until the roots are hard to untangle. How did a Black woman born a slave come to settle in a small, overwhelmingly white canal town—one that, it needs to be said, had a reputation for hostility toward Black people? Was she connected to the Underground Railroad, as some have hoped to prove? And if her 1883 obituary is right that she was buried in Sweeney Cemetery, where is her grave?

To get anywhere near the real Hannah Johnson, we have to leave the woods and campfires of the raw west and go back east, to the older, post-colonial New York that produced her. According to her obituary, before she was a legend in North Tonawanda, Hannah was a Black girl born into the uneasy aftermath of slavery in the Hudson-Mohawk world—a place where freedom arrived slowly, grudgingly, and even then, often only on paper.

Hannah’s early life

The aftermath of slavery in New York State

Hannah—we do not know her maiden name—was born in Albany County, New York, around 1803. If later accounts of her birth are correct, she entered the world in the strange half-freedom created by New York’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1799. Under that law, Black children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1799 were not enslaved for life, but neither were they free in any meaningful childhood sense. Girls remained bound servants until age 25.

Serving in the house of the governor?

In her obituary, we encounter a startling claim: that Hannah “lived for a time” in the household of Joseph Christopher Yates of Schenectady, one of the most powerful men in New York State. During Hannah’s girlhood and young adulthood, Yates served as mayor of Schenectady, New York state senator, New York Supreme Court judge, and finally governor from 1823 to 1824.

If the obituary is correct, Hannah’s girlhood and young adulthood placed her unusually close to the rituals of power. She may have listened from the edges of rooms where judges, senators, governors, college men, canal boosters, and visiting dignitaries passed through. In 1825, when Lafayette came through Schenectady during his triumphal return to America, he called upon Governor Yates; if Hannah was still attached to the household, she may have been near enough to witness the machinery of public honor from the servant’s side of the room. The later legend of Hannah as a reader of tea leaves also looks different in this light. Whether or not she learned such arts there, an elite household would have exposed her to genteel rituals of tea, visiting, gossip, performance, and feminine social authority—worlds far removed from the rough settlements of the Niagara frontier.

The obituary leaves some daylight between itself and this claim, adding only, “we are told.” That phrase matters. Can we take the story at face value? Was it something Hannah herself told people? Was she already shaping her own legend in life, as others would do after her death?

Conclusive evidence has been difficult to find either way. The 1820 federal census does show an unnamed free Black female, aged 14 to 26, living in the Yates household; however, as customary on this census, only the head of household (Joseph Christopher Yates) is named. Hannah later consistently gave her county of birth as Albany to state census-takers, which roughly fits the geography of the Yates claim: Schenectady County was not formed from Albany County until 1809.

Gradual emancipation

If Hannah was born around 1803, she would have become legally free around 1828. But legal freedom was not social equality. In Schenectady, for Black women, that “freedom” often meant domestic service, washing, cooking, childcare, or continued dependence on the households where they had served. Schools, skilled trades, property, and public authority remained difficult to reach. Some looked westward, toward canal towns, port cities, and frontier settlements, where opportunity might be rougher but less fixed.

When Hannah next appears in the record, she appears almost 300 miles west in the Town of Wheatfield, alongside John Johnson.

Hannah’s husband: John Johnson

John Johnson was a Black man born around 1800 in Washington County, a little further up the Hudson River from Hannah and the Yateses. Though not from the same county, both were from the old upper Hudson–Capital District world, close enough for their paths to plausibly cross through work, family, or chance.

John’s early status is unknown. He may have been free-born, or he may have been, like Hannah, one of the Black New Yorkers caught in gradual abolition — legally free on paper, but bound to service until adulthood. For men, bound servitude lasted until age 28. If he were also born “in bondage,” it would mean John and Hannah would both be newly free around 1828.

The Erie Canal and the promise of the west

When the Erie Canal opened in October 1825, it transformed the movement of goods and people across New York. What had once been a long, expensive, uncertain overland journey could now be made by water, from the Hudson River toward the Great Lakes, through a forty-foot-wide, four-foot-deep artificial river cut across the state. From the Johnsons’ perspective, the Grand Canal may have looked like a corridor to a new life: away from the old world, westward into the interior of a changing country.

According to Hannah’s obituary, she arrives in 1834. It is very unlikely that the Johnsons’ move to Wheatfield was random. A Black couple born into slavery’s aftermath in eastern New York did not simply travel hundreds of miles west and select a wooded corner of someone else’s farm by chance. Their arrival almost certainly depended on some prior connection — work, permission, kin, church, land-company labor, or a relationship with an owner or agent.

“A place to be avoided”

One later source says Hannah arrived from the south with a small “colony” of Black people who settled along the banks of Tonawanda Creek. (Ten years later, German Lutherans establish Martinsville there.) But according to this account, the earlier Black settlement did not last. “Some trouble” arose with the white residents. A white mob raided the settlement, scattered its people, burned their cabins, and threw their belongings into Tonawanda Creek.

Hannah alone was permitted to stay, the account says, because she was useful: she did housework for white families.

It is a grim story, and a thinly documented one. The only possible support I have found is a 1909 article about human bones discovered during sewer work in Tonawanda. In that article, an old resident claims the remains are from what the paper calls an “old colored war.” I have found no other evidence of this “war,” nor the raid. But the larger premise is not difficult to believe. The Tonawandas were not welcoming places for Black people. The same 1909 article continues:

The Tonawandas are known to the negroes of the South as a place to be avoided and since the time that Black Hanna left North Tonawanda, 40 years ago, no negroes have lived here. Many times they have hired out here, but not longer than a week or two. The Tonawandas are two of the few cities in the country that have no negro population.

“Human Bones Tell Old Story,” Niagara Democrat, February 5, 1909.

The first census appearance: 1840

The first record of the Johnsons in the area is the 1840 U. S. federal census for the Town of Wheatfield. Only John Johnson, as the head of household, is identified by name. The household includes three free Black individuals: one man and one woman aged roughly 24 to 36, likely John and Hannah Johnson, and an older Black man between 55 and 100. All three are marked as “employed in agriculture.” This could mean working their own farm, hiring out to work on someone else’s or both.

Great Lot 10

When the Johnsons arrived, the region was still sparsely settled and heavily wooded. Tonawanda was a small canal village near the junction of the Erie Canal and the Niagara River. Along Tonawanda Creek, flooding remained common, worsened by canal construction and damming. The Tonawanda village. Not much here. But whites had already been carving up the land for 150 years. Holland Land Company and Joseph Ellicott carved up lots.By no means wilderness you could just plunk down in.,

On the 1840 Census, nearby Johnson on enumerator’s route, we see two names that are also in the land records: Jacob Hook and George (Christopher) Van Slyke

Hannah is the subject of a song by my musical gang Yellow Jack on our album "A Horse Apiece"