Thomas McElwain wrote that many CRP identified as an Indian-white mixed group, or as Native American, but they are not enrolled in any officially recognized tribe.
[3] Paul Heinegg documented that many individuals were classified as free people of color, or similar terms in a variety of colonial, local and state records.
Records in the Barbour County Courthouse indicate that a dozen men successfully petitioned the courts to be declared legally white after serving in the war for the Union.
Since the late 19th century, their neighbours have described them variously as free black or colored people, mulattoes, descendants of Italian railroad workers, or even survivors of the ill-fated Roanoke Colony.
[7] In the 1930s, a local historian recorded that "on several occasions suits have been entered in Taylor and Barbour courts seeking to prevent these people from sending their children to schools with whites but proof of claims they have negro blood in their veins never has been established".
[8] As recently as the late 1950s, a few Philippi businesses still posted notices proclaiming "White Trade Only", directed against the Chestnut Ridge people, as they were believed to be part African-American.
Although the local public schools were not segregated, truancy laws — which were strictly enforced for white children — were typically neglected with regard to "Ridge people".
[9] If related individuals in the surrounding counties of Harrison and Taylor are included, the CRP probably now number about 1,500, almost all of whom bear one of fewer than a dozen surnames.
[10] The Taylor County group (also long referred to by their neighbors as "Guineas" and mostly dispersed in the 1930s due to the flooding of their community — known as the "West Hill settlement" — by Tygart Lake) bore the surnames of Mayle, Male, Mahalie, Croston, Dalton, Kennedy, Johnson and Parsons, among others.
[13] In an interview, he said that the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania press had carried repeated sensational magazine articles in the early 1900s about the area, highlighting its poverty and mixed-race communities.
[citation needed] Genealogist Paul Heinegg has used a variety of colonial-era court and tax documents to trace the ancestors of families identified in the South as free blacks in the first two censuses of the United States (1790, 1800).
As an adult, around 1784, Wilmore Sr. purchased a Bahamian slave named Priscilla "Nancy" Harris, who was recorded as also having unconfirmed Indigenous Caribbean heritage, and took her as his common-law wife – interracial marriage being illegal in Virginia at the time.
[19] From 1805 onwards, records reflected Wilmore, Sr.'s family circumstances and the views of his neighbors: he was listed as a "free mulatto", which legally described someone with a quarter or more black heritage.
Traditional accounts, such as the work by Thomas McElwain, had previously asserted that Nancy was white and Native American, citing family stories, a lack of records, and Male's circumstances as a bricklayer (meaning he may have been unable to afford to keep slaves).
[29][25] Finley's work also identified a number of other Chestnut Ridge families that can trace their heritage back to Revolutionary War-era mixed-race forebears, such as Sam Norris (1750–1844), Gustavus D. Croston (1757–c.