From the Ledger to the Stars

The Ledger and the Stars

Hannah Guion was born into slavery at New Bern about 1831, the daughter of the enslaved woman Sukey. In 1842, at ten years old, she was appraised at $350 in the probate inventory of John W. Guion; in 1843 she was allotted to his son, the Lincolnton attorney Haywood W. Guion, and carried 280 miles from her mother. In 1899 she died a property-owning matriarch of two counties, whose will — signed with her mark — secured a home for her daughters and granddaughters that could not be sold out from under them. Her only enslaver's only known bloodline descends through her; her great-great-grandson, Guion Stewart Bluford Jr., became the first Black American in space. This archive gathers both research sessions — the survey of the enslaved families of the Guion network (Session I, December 2025) and the full documentary reconstruction of Hannah's life (Session II, June 2026) — with every recovered record organized so the story and its evidence can be read side by side.

“Hannah Guion, one of the best known colored women of the city… She was honest and faithful, and was respected by white and black.”
— The Charlotte Observer, 28 April 1899

The Story in Brief

• 31 January 1832Sukey, about 38 — Hannah's mother — is pledged as loan collateral in the Blackledge trust deed to John W. Guion of New Bern.
• November 1842The probate inventory of John W. Guion lists thirty-four enslaved people in family clusters. Hannah, ten, is appraised at $350 under her mother Sukey.
• 10 January 1843The estate is divided among eight heirs. Hannah is allotted to Haywood W. Guion and taken 280 miles west to Lincolnton, with Kit, George, and five-year-old Cicero. She never sees her mother again.
• c. 1849 & c. 1856Her daughters are born at Lincolnton: Elsie, and Maria Elizabeth — whose 1921 death certificate names Haywood Guion as her father.
• 1860Haywood Guion's Lincolnton slave schedule lists a 27-year-old woman and 23-year-old man — the ages of Hannah and Cicero — the genealogical bridge from the New Bern ledger to freedom.
• 1867–1869The Shuford estate is sold for debts by administrator David Schenck. Freedpeople buy the lots; on 14 April 1869 Hannah Guion, “Col'd,” takes title to Lot No. 3 — a founding purchaser of the settlement the census would name Freedman Town.
• 23 June 1870The Charlotte census records Hannah, cook, presiding over the Young daughters' household, her daughter Maria beside her — a family whose estate papers lay in Haywood Guion's own files.
• 1876–1886She assembles her Boundary Street estate: the Johnston half-acre ($225, 1876) and the Amy Owen strip (1886) — 119 feet of frontage with a frame house.
• 1883Freedman Town's congregation buys its church acre from Benjamin S. Guion — the enslaving family's own block, carved for a Black church.
• 1894Hannah buys in Salisbury's West Ward, beside the rising Livingstone College — buying her family's place inside an elite Black intellectual community.
• 17 January & 27 April 1899She executes her will — trusts, exact parcels, four generations named — and dies suddenly at Salisbury. Funeral at Clinton Chapel, Charlotte.
• 30 August 1983Guion Stewart Bluford Jr., her great-great-grandson, flies aboard Space Shuttle Challenger — the first Black American in space, carrying her family's names into orbit.

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