by Randy Reynolds and Chris Russo
(4-g and 5-g grandsons of Bartemous Reynolds of Hall County , Georgia
Bartemous Reynolds died without a will on November 22, 1854, at the age of 85. He was a settler who had once claimed 3,000 acres of Indian land in what would later become Hall County, Georgia. He was a farmer as well as a minister. He founded Timber Ridge and Mud Creek Baptist churches. He was the enslaver of Dick, Sophia and Selia, among others. Bartemous had also been an elected Justice of the Peace, so it was surprising that he died without a will. A justice of the peace should have known better.
This oversight triggered a ritual known as an "inventory settlement" of his estate, wherein officials of the court made a list of Bartemous' property and the value of each item, after which the estate was divided among his children. (His wife, Mildred Taylor Reynolds was already deceased.)
The first item on the list was the most valuable: a forty-year-old (?) enslaved man named Dick whose value was listed as seven hundred dollars.
A ten-year-old girl named Sophia, who was apparently Dick's daughter, was valued at six hundred dollars. A forty-one-year-old woman named Selia, listed at five hundred dollars must have been his wife. (See update below.)
(According to later records, we think her name was Sylvia. The people doing the "property" inventory may or may not have heard the name correctly and if they did, they may or may not have spelled it right. Spelling of names wasn't always consistent in those days, as we learned by seeing Bartemous spelled 8 different ways in official documents.)
In the Nov. 28, 1854, inventory settlement there was a Selia but no Sylvia.
When Sharp S. Reynolds sold the lot of them 10 months later, the name was spelled Sylvia not Selia.
After slavery, Dick somehow earned enough money to purchase 50 acres of land that he was quite familiar with: It had formerly been owned by Bartemous Reynolds, Sharp Reynolds and, later, Ebenezer Gower who sold it to "Old Uncle Dick Reynolds," as The Gainesville News of August 19, 1903, called him. The article mentioned the girl Sophia and Dick's wife "Silvey," a name that could have been a misunderstood "Seeley" or "Selia," the enslaved woman present at Bartemous' inventory settlement.
The family was in the news in 1903 because some people believed Dick Reynolds was haunting Gainesville.
Richard "Dick" Reynolds' first enslaver of record was Bartemous Reynolds, Randy Reynolds' 4-g grandfather and Chris Russo's 5-g grandfather.
Richard "Dick" Reynolds' final enslaver of record was Sharp Spencer Reynolds I, Bartemous' oldest child.
