Hunter Research has just recently completed for Mercer County a year-long study of the storied section of Baldpate Mountain known as Honey Hollow. For decades, this locale has been posited as a focus of free black settlement, with as many as 50 families supposedly living in close proximity to one another on the mountain’s wooded, rocky slopes. Through exhaustive research into primary documents, field survey and oral history, the African-American presence on Baldpate Mountain is shown to be relatively light, widely dispersed, and peaking in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There was no nucleated black settlement per se on Baldpate Mountain and this idea apparently originated in the mid-20th century in the writings of popular folklorist Henry Charlton Beck. The report is available here.
