History of the Carroll Family
The Carroll House - 9 West Main St
Author Isabel Wilkerson in her book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, characterizes Black migration north after the Civil War as first a trickle, then a stream as Jim Crow laws took hold in the 1890's, and finally “a river, uncontrolled and uncontrollable” during and following World War I.
Three women made the journey north to labor in this house as the great migration was changing from a stream to an uncontrolled river. The 1900, 1910 & 1920 census show a domestic servant employed by the Carroll family who owned this house at the time. There is a different woman in each census, Mary Corbett, Mary Foy, and Mary Howard. Each was born in North Carolina. Two of the women were married at the time of their employment, Mary Corbett had three children. Their husbands and children were not in Warner. Mary Foy was unmarried at the time. If I have identified her correctly in subsequent census’, she returned to North Carolina and worked with her husband on their farm.
Imagine the difficult choices these women had to make to leave their families and travel North. Who knows how often they were able to return home to see their husband, children, and other family members? Imagine coming to a small rural town, not having a Black community to socialize with, to turn to in times of need, to commiserate with, to worship with.
In 1900 the Carroll household consisted of businessman Edward H. Carroll, his wife Susie, a music teacher, their nineteen-year-old son Edward Lee, his wife Edith and Mary Corbett. Corbett was thirty-four and was hired prior to 1900 to take care of the household when Edward was a child.
By 1910 Edward Lee, known as Lee, to differentiate himself from his father, had joined the family business. Edith had given birth two years earlier to a son, Edward H., and Mary Foy had joined the household as a domestic servant. Mary Corbett was living with and working for a family in Hopkinton, NH.
Tragedy would strike the Carroll family in the next decade. Edward, the father died of heart disease in 1917. His son Lee died during the flu epidemic in January 1919. In 1920 the census shows that Susie and Edith were managing the household with the help of domestic servant Mary Howard and trying to keep their husbands’ businesses operating. Young Edward and James were 12 and 6 years old. Mary Howard age 38 had her hands full.
