Mary Ann Green-Cain

Today is the last day of Black History Month and tomorrow is the first day of Women's History Month, so we thought it might be interesting to take a trip back in Greenwood history to discover the story of a Black woman who died over 100 years ago leaving an indelible imprint on the people of Greenwood back then—and who has mostly been forgotten today until now!

We want to introduce you to Mary Ann Green-Cain--or as she was usually known, Ann (or even Annie) Cain--a runaway slave who came to Pleasant Township around the end of the Civil War and who moved into the Johnson Homestead (today's Folktale Greenwood) in the 1870s and lived there for the majority of her life. Ann served as the Johnson family's domestic servant for many years and was mourned by many in Greenwood when she died.

There is no historical secret that Greenwood did not have a good record of race relations in much of the century after Ann Cain passed away in 1917 (another story for another day), but even when Ann moved to Greenwood, it was, to the say the least, unusual for a Black person to live in the town. The Indiana Historical Society has a mention of her on a website dedicated to researching early Black settlements by county. Though they do not indicate what document they are referencing, they said, "The brief, unattributed article about her life begins '…there have been few, if any, of the colored race living in Greenwood. Not that the inhabitants had anything against the colored people, but it seems that for some reason or other they did not settle here.'"

Though African Americans did not settle in Greenwood, the early European-descendant settlers, including the first ones who had emigrated from Kentucky such as Isaac Smock and the Greenwood Presbyterian Church's Rev. P.S. Cleland, formed the “Greenwood area Anti-Slavery Society” on the 4th of July 1841. The people of Greenwood also held lectures against "colonization" advocates and wrote in newspapers as proponents of immediate abolition. You can read more about that discussion here: https://www.facebook.com/OldTownGreenwood/posts/pfbid02H1MVaDrbGKSVLznRcWZbJ6qrp7rKupq3Zpp6eSceNDVCePtEvKmL1x5JJkLAxxb2l

The U.S. Civil War started in April 1861 and Greenwood sent many soldiers to fight the Confederacy. One soldier, Rev. and Mrs. Hannah Cleland's son John, even fought with the U.S. Colored Troops (there will be more on him in the future with the delayed but ongoing stories about the people who have lived in the Folktale Greenwood house). But even with these early Greenwood citizens advocating for abolition and fighting in the war partly for the cause of abolition, Greenwood did not attract Black citizens to settle here.

As the Civil War progressed, the Union's noose around the neck of the Confederacy tightened especially when General Ulysses S. Grant captured the port of Vicksburg, Mississippi on the 4th of July 1863. Former Hoosier-by-way-of-Kentucky, President Abraham Lincoln, knew the river well from his time working on boats that traveled from the North to the Port of New Orleans where huge slave markets were held; once Lincoln heard Vicksburg was captured and the Mississippi no longer had a Confederate presence on it, he said, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea."

Further south of Vicksburg is the city of Natchez. By the time of the Civil War’s start in 1861, Natchez was the fourth richest city in the country. Its wealth, though, came from the fact it hosted the "second-largest slave market in the United States second only to New Orleans." Estimates by a local historian place the number of human beings sold into slavery as being about 2,000 per year between the 1830s and 1860s, and they were sold at the price of around $500-700 in the 1830s to around $1,600 by the 1860s--though "no one really has an accurate count because no one really kept numbers like that."

With the Union soldiers liberating Vicksburg and the Mississippi River basin, those human beings were finally freed in July 1863. Many emancipated people sought refuge at a place called "The Forks of the Road" in Natchez which today has a historic marker denoting the second-largest place in this country where human beings were sold as property.

We do not know, but there is a good possibility, that a young Mary Ann Green was one of the slaves freed in 1863 and possibly sought refuge at The Forks of the Road. Slave records are notoriously hard to comb through, but luckily for us one of Ann Cain's employers had a genealogy written about his family and the author dedicated a few pages to her—and also included a picture of her outside of the Johnson Homestead!

The author, a renowned female journalist named Damaris Knobe, provided many details about Ann. Some of her wording, though, is…well, it is emblematic of her time when she published the book in 1924. Damaris mentioned more that once at the how the Johnson homestead "was pervaded with the rare atmosphere of the Virginia plantation" of which Grafton Johnson the First's ancestors had once lived in Virginia. And in the "servants' quarters at the back", it was "supervised by the colored ex-slave, a modern edition of the 'black mammy…"

Despite the wording being shocking to us 100 years later, Damaris undoubtedly had a fond viewpoint of Ann that was probably provided with fondness by the Johnson family to whom she provided "faithful devotion to this family, at different periods, of forty years." Damaris then went on to document much about Ann's life, and from there we have tried to find as much as possible in historical newspaper articles, censuses, and other documentation to complete as much more as we could find.

Ann was born into slavery in August of about the year 1850 (her gravestone says 1850, but she was possibly born 1852-53 per the 1870 census—or 1860 per the 1910 census but this date seems like an outlier. The 1900 Census had her birth month of August but “Un” for unknown year). Ann was owned by a Mrs. Zeno of Natchez. There is no trace that could be easily found of a Mrs. Zeno in Natchez newspapers of the era and nothing could be found in the 1850 or 1860 census for the area with that surname (and the stories not having a first name for Mrs. Zeno made the search harder). There was a man with the surname Zeno in the 1840s but there is no way to confirm in what way he might be related to Mrs. Zeno, whose first name is also a mystery.

There is also a possibility that Ann's name of Green—if that was her maiden name—was the name of her enslaver because that was a very common practice where the former enslaved had their enslavers' surnames tied to them because their own family names had been taken from them years before then.

However, there is a Mississippi death notice record dated 28 May 1856, with an intriguing entry for an unnamed person aged 40 years old with the name "Zeno", estimated to have been born in 1816. She was a Black female and lived in Natchez, Adams County, Mississippi. Could this Zeno have been an enslaved woman who possibly was Ann's mother, and Ann's name was later changed to Green? We will probably never know, but the name, age, and location leave that possibility open.

We do know how Ann Cain came to Greenwood, Indiana (700 miles away!) because of the Grafton Johnson genealogy. At some point after being freed, she made her way to Memphis, Tennessee, presumably "without bidding good-by to her own people" and without knowing if she would ever see her family again. Captain Robert Wishard of Greenwood was traveling with his nephew Dr. William Henry Wishard (he had trained under Dr. Benjamin Noble, Greenwood's first physician, and lived for a while with the Noble family in their large home on the west side of the Madison State Road across from Rev. P.S. and Hannah Cleland's family home that is today Folktale Greenwood). Dr. Wishard was providing his extensive medical knowledge to the Union cause during the Civil War, and in 1864 they were both on a chartered boat commissioned by Governor Oliver P. Morton to gather wounded and ill Hoosier soldiers.

Captain Wishard came upon the young Ann, aged about fourteen, and asked if she wanted to go north and "she readily assented" and stayed on the boat heading back to Indiana. She lived with the Wishard family in their house located between Greenwood and Whiteland for about eight years. She was listed in the 1870 census with the last name Green and an occupation "Domestic Servant" though her age was only listed as eighteen instead of twenty. Her birthplace was also listed as Louisiana, but two other censuses, her obituary, and the genealogy book say she was born in Mississippi.

Dr. William Niles Wishard, who we know today as the namesake of the former Wishard Hospital, remembered being a small child visiting his great-uncle Robert Wishard who liked to have guests meet Ann: "…I remember very distinctly his calling Ann into the room to show her off before the assembled company, and as she sat in a chair near his own, he put his hand upon her head, saying, 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is my opinion of the Emancipation Proclamation.'"

The genealogy book about the Johnson family intimated that she then went to live with the Johnsons after living with the Wishards (which would be around 1872 per the book), but there was a problem with the 1880 census. Grafton and Julia Noble Johnson (herself the niece of Dr. Benjamin Noble who lived across the street--as well as being a niece of an Indiana Governor, Noah Noble, and Indiana's first U.S. Senator, James Noble) and their children lived in the sprawling house on the Madison State Road but Ann was nowhere to be found in the 1880 census. This seemed quite confounding, but luckily an obituary for Ann found in The Greenwood News, via an edition of The Franklin Evening Star, had a clue.

The obituary indicated she lived with Captain Wishard's family (though it stated she did for only two years) and then moved into the Grafton Johnson home. Then, "a few years later", she married in New Augusta, Indiana. That clue led to the 1880 census for Pike Township in Marion County (where New Augusta is still located today) where there is a "Mary Cain" listed, age 27, and race of Black. Her birthplace is denoted as Louisiana, she is listed as single, and her occupation is a "Servant" for the John and Elvira Guion household. If that name sounds familiar, that is because Guion Road is named after that family. Although there is no concrete proof Mary Cain and Ann Cain are the same person, there still seems to be a good possibility based on the evidence this is indeed the same lady.

There is no mention of her husband's name or anything about him, really, but we know he died before 1900 because the 1900 and 1910 censuses show she is a widow. Her obituary mentioned he did predecease her but the article has a syntax issue and makes it seem like he might have died in the Johnson home; his life might remain an unknown which is very unfortunate.

Whatever time period Ann did move in and back in with the Grafton Johnson family, she very much became a part of the family: "Ann might be appropriately termed an institution, so long was she identified with the affairs of this family, having taken her place in the household when the older children were small and the younger ones yet unborn. As these sons and daughters grew up and their friends foregathered there, no visit was complete without an invasion of her domain at the back of the house, where they were greeted with a hearty pump-handle sort of hand-shake and the happy chuckle…" Though this description could not be completely accurate (because the eldest Johnson child was born in 1860 and the youngest was born in 1871), it is a wonderful portrayal of how much Ann meant to the family.

Damaris Knobe continued with some humorous stories about Ann: "Though naturally smart she employed may delightful mispronounced expressions, as 'I'm completely nonplushed' when she meant to say 'nonplused.' Despite her joyous nature she possessed a pessimistic streak, constantly prophesying that some dire catastrophe was about to befall the children, as the running-away of the staid old family horse; and if, by chance, her mistress [Julia] asked her to find them if they were missing, she invariably peered first into the rain-barrel and then searched the creek that slowly meandered to the south [Pleasant Creek], in one of which she was always positive they had accidentally drowned themselves."

Ann was very protective of the family as well from this account set in probably the late 1890s/early 1900s: "This ominous fear of imaginary disaster was offset by real courage in the face of danger as, one dark night, when an explosion was heard at the bank one block from the house, James Albert Johnson, who had founded it [the bank], started out across the lawn with a revolver, whereupon Ann, before he could deter her, darted ahead with a lamp in her hand. 'You stay in them shadows on the sidewalk,' she commanded, 'for I ain't afraid. Nobody wants to kill me nohow'; and as the thieves, alarmed by the approaching light, rapidly drove away in a buggy, they shot into the air to prevent pursuit."

When the children were smaller, she used to chase them with a switch when they were "mischievously encroached on her special precincts", but because "she was short and fat they usually succeeded in keeping somewhat in advance of the threatening end of the chastening rod. Her one warning comment on these strenuous occasions was: 'I'll take you chillun behind the house and bring you back again."

Much like how the family adored Ann, Ann "adored them, nevertheless, and as the daughters grew up and were married, one by one, she invariably indulged in a copious outburst of weeping that continued long after the wedding. So impressed was she with the indispensable part she had in their upbringing that, once when her mistress was ill, she thus confided to the nurse: 'I done give them chillun all the raisin' they got. Mrs. Johnson just sits on a chair in the front room but I'm out here where I can watch 'em; and as I say, all the raisin' they ever got, I give 'em."

When news arrived that Mary Louise Johnson-Longden gave birth to twins, Ann "rushed into the dining-room and with a broad smile that spread over her radiant countenance, eagerly asked of the assembled family, 'Can't they call me Granny?'--and so, from that time forth, she was the proud 'Granny' to all of the grandchildren. This had to have been special for her because based on all the available evidence, Ann did not have children of her own. The newspapers and Knobe's book do not mention her having children, and the 1910 census (though censuses are, as you can see with Ann's life, notoriously unreliable).

At some point probably after the children had grown up, "Ann once took a notion she would go to Martinsville to live with another family. But one day she walked unexpectedly into Mrs. Johnson's sitting-room and sat down, and shortly thereafter a wagon drove up to the side door with some baggage. "I wonder whose trunk that is,' remarked Mrs. Johnson. 'I guess that's mine,' complacently answered Ann and, without further explanation, she took off her hat and proceeded to the kitchen. That was the last of her departures from the family to which she was so warmly attached, except a temporary one taken a few years before her death, yielding to irresistible desire to know if her kinsfolk were still alive, she went back to Mississippi…"

She returned "to the sunny south where she was reunited with her father, brother and half-brother. She returned to Greenwood and was contented since she had learned that her father and brothers still lived and were out of the bonds of slavery." This was such a special moment for her that both her obituary and Damaris Knobe's book mentioned the trip.

Knobe's book mentions that Grafton Johnson the First left Ann through his estate two lots in Greenwood, and the narrative indicates "subsequently she bought another lot whereon, as an investment, she erected three good-sized houses, constructed of wood, one of which, adorned with two stone lions at the entrance, effectively conformed to her architectural ideals."

County deed records show she purchased property in 1899 for $650 (around $25,000 today) and later bought more land in 1911. The properties seemed to have been located in the area around the intersection of North Brewer Street and Longdon Street. Ann possibly fell into financial trouble, though, because in 1915 the Greenwood Building & Loan Association filed a lawsuit in the circuit court to foreclose on a $2,000 mortgage on property she owned that also had a claimed interest with the Greenwood Lumber Company. On the day she died (or possibly day after), a newspaper announcement indicated Greenwood Lumber and Ann had another judgment made against them in the total of $215.61.

A month after the Greenwood Building suit was filed, there was an announcement of a Sheriff's sale where there would be a public auction held to sell the property. The particular property that was auctioned, which might have been one of the houses she had built on the properties she had bought in 1899 and 1911, was in the Longdon Addition lot 39 which is today's 199 N. Brewer Street. (After she died, her estate was settled by the Farmers Trust Company, appointed by the courts, which had to attempt to settle debts with the Greenwood Building & Loan Association. Eventually, her last parcel of property was deeded away in 1918).

The lots were finally all deeded from Ann's estate in 1919 and some of them included Lots 40-47 in Longdon's Addition (and some of the properties south of them it appears). These are the houses of 169, 165, 161 N. Brewer St., 184 and 186, 196, and 198 N. Meridian St., and 1 Longdon St., matching Longdon's First Addition Lots 40-47, respectively, of today.

In her later years, she seems to have visited with her friends, the Fossetts, fairly often in Franklin and they would visit her in Greenwood. John Fossett was a Civil War veteran and he was the preacher of the Franklin African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. He and his wife, Mary, helped kick-off the construction of their new church built in 1911. Their daughter, Hattie, was the first African American to attend both Franklin High School and Franklin College.

Around August 1916, Ann Cain's health started to fail. She went to Dr. Joseph H. Ward's Sanitarium and Training School for Colored Nurses in Indianapolis. Dr. Ward was a Black surgeon who was not allowed to practice in the city hospital so he had to start his own hospital on Indiana Avenue. At the sanitarium, Ann "was given every care by the entire [Johnson] family" and her obituary indicated "she received the best of care" there.

By either the evening of Monday 26 March 1917 or 6:30 PM on Tuesday 27 March 1917 (oddly the two obituaries differ), Mary Ann Green Cain died of "dropsy" (which today is called edema), aged about 65-67 years. Funeral services were held at the Greenwood Methodist Church, where Ann was a member, on Wednesday the 28th conducted by the Rev. C. C. Bennett. It was noted that her services "were attended by many persons in that community who respected her" and that "the high esteem that this former slave was held, in her northern home, was evidenced by the large number of Greenwood friends who called to view the body." The obituary noted she had "A life that reads as interesting as any story book…"

Ann was buried in Greenwood Cemetery. Her headstone reads, "Ann Green Cain 1850 - 1917", and is amongst the graves of other Greenwood citizens who got to know her so well in her many memorable years in the town.

Ann is probably the very first Black person to live in Greenwood, and the fact she also lived such an extraordinary life makes her an even more fascinating person for us to learn about today. From being considered property from birth, to escaping from slavery during a war ostensibly fought to end that evil institution, to traveling hundreds of miles at a young age with complete strangers, to serving wealthy families but this time as a free woman and raising their children as she would have her own had she had the chance, Ann Cain should be celebrated for having such a profound impact on the Greenwood community in her day--and also never forgotten again.