One of the more remarkable stories in West Virginia history is the relationship between Mary Barnes and Samuel Cabell. Barnes had been enslaved by Cabell on his Kanawha River plantation at what is now Institute, Kanawha County. While similar stories from slavery are somewhat common—the most prominent being Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings—this one is rather unique because Barnes and Cabell were implicitly married, even though interracial marriage was illegal in both Virginia and West Virginia. However, due to the power dynamics of slavery and the many unknown facts about this case, it would be improper to label this an uncomplicated “love story,” as some have.

Cabell, from a wealthy, politically connected Virginia family, was born around 1802. Barnes was born in Tidewater, Virginia, in 1815.  In 1840, Cabell purchased Barnes and other enslaved people to work at his Kanawha Valley salt works and on his farm and orchards at Institute, just west of Dunbar. Barnes and Cabell soon began a long-term relationship, and she gave birth to 13 of his children. Interracial marriage was illegal in the majority of the United States until at least the 1950s. In West Virginia, laws banning interracial marriage remained in effect until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case. As such, Cabell technically risked arrest by recording the births of all his children with Barnes in the Kanawha County Courthouse. By no means, though, was Cabell an abolitionist. In multiple wills, he ordered that in the case of his death, his other slaves should be sold, with the income benefiting Barnes and her children.

In one will, Cabell referred to Barnes as “my woman,” 19^th-century legal jargon implying “wife.” In another will, he clearly claimed all 13 of Barnes’ children as his own and noted they “always have been free.” He wrote,

“In the event of sudden demise, this instrument of writing is intended to show or make known that Mary Barnes and all her children—namely, Elizabeth, Sam, Lucy, Mary Jane, Sidney Ann, Soula, Eunice, Alice, Marina (or Bobby), Braxton, and an infant not named—are and always have been free, as I have every right to believe they are my children.”

Language such as this in a public document from the 1850s was quite rare, and, despite his public support of slavery, Cabell openly admitted to his relationship with Barnes and being the father of their children.

The story took a bizarre twist on the night of July 18, 1865. Just months after the Civil War ended, tensions were still high in the Kanawha Valley. Seven supposed pro-Union men killed Cabell for his alleged pro-Confederate sympathies. The West Virginia Journal reported the incident: “The community here was thrown into considerable excitement on last Thursday evening, by the report of the death of Samuel I. Cabell, a bitter and open rebel who lived some nine miles below Charleston.”

All seven men were acquitted of murder on the basis of self-defense, claiming that Cabell had attacked them first due to their Northern allegiances. Family tradition holds that the situation was actually reversed and that Cabell was murdered by pro-Confederate factions because of his interracial marriage and family.

After Cabell’s death, Barnes personally probated his wills. In December 1865, Kanawha County ruled they were valid, acknowledging that Barnes was Cabell’s widow. In 1869, she successfully petitioned the county to bequeath all of his estate property and assets to her and the children. She and each child acquired a strip of his former land running perpendicular to the river. In 1871, executors valued the entire estate at $42,128, equivalent to about $1 million in 21^st-century dollars. The county also granted Barnes’ request to change her family’s surname to Cabell.

Barnes’ daughter, Mary Cabell, later sold 30 acres of that land to the state to establish the West Virginia Colored Institute (now West Virginia State University). It opened its doors as the state’s Black land-grant college in 1892; the Cabell lands comprise approximately three-eighths of today’s campus.

Mary Barnes Cabell died in 1900 at age 85. She never remarried after her husband’s death. She and Sam Cabell are buried beside each other in a cemetery on the university’s campus.

In 2020, Charleston film director Calvin Grimm made a docudrama about Barnes and Cabell, River of Hope.