Shavetown is a small community in eastern Liberty County, on the road from the Midway Congregational Church to Fleming. Recently I was asked if I knew why it was called Shavetown, since my 2d great-grandmother was a Shave.
That research question sent me on a deep dive into what was in many ways both a typical Liberty County antebellum planter family — and also a completely atypical family.
John Shave was among the group of early white residents of Midway who came to the area from the Dorchester and Beach Hill areas of South Carolina in the 1750s. They founded and were early members of the Midway Congregational Church. John Shave and his family were said to have arrived in the Midway and Newport area on April 6, 1754. He was granted land by the Crown.
John and his wife had at least two children, Richard (b. 1752) and Sarah (b. 1756), who were both baptized in the Midway Congregational Church. Sarah appears to have died in 1769. Richard was received as a member of the Midway Congregational Church in 1773.
John and Richard Shave were still members of the Midway Congregational Church as of May 18, 1776, when the church had 54 white men members and 71 white women.
These white migrants from South Carolina brought with them about three times their number in enslaved people of African descent. The Midway Congregational Church had Black members, mostly enslaved, since at least June 26, 1756, when Scipio and Judy were admitted to membership. The names of their enslavers were not recorded. The original membership of the church is not known, because the South Carolina records were lost, so it is not known if there were any Black members when the Church was founded in 1752. Over the history of the Midway Congregational Church from its founding to its dissolution in 1867, there were at least 1100 African American members, according to the Church’s records.
Did John Shave bring enslaved people from South Carolina? If he did, no Liberty County records of that have survived, but it seems likely, since land grantees had to meet certain requirements to be able to keep the land, including developing it, and that would have been virtually impossible without the labor of enslaved people.
We do know that he did own people, though, from a surprising source. Liberty County was named for its role in pushing Georgia into the American Revolution on the American side, and many Liberty County residents played prominent parts in the War as patriots.
Not the Shaves, however. The conflict fractured communities, and the Shaves, like many others, chose the British side. John and Richard Shave joined the British Army in Savannah on January 6, 1779, and by the 1780s had fled to Nova Scotia, where they submitted claims for restitution of property lost to the Americans. The claims were rejected, but John Shave claimed that he had had 150 acres, a town lot in Sunbury, and four enslaved people.
Many enslaved people also fled to Nova Scotia as a result of the Revolutionary War; it is possible, at least, that people enslaved by the Shaves did also.
A Mary Shave who may have been John’s wife died in 1784, and two enslaved people–Wil and Celia–were named in her estate inventory.
The Shaves returned to Liberty County by at least 1790, when Richard Shave married Nancy Amey Wilson at the Midway Church. Their sons John and William R. Shave (1794-1856) were born within a few years after the marriage.
John Shave, Richard’s father, may also have returned to Liberty County, as a John Shave’s 1795 death was recorded by the Midway Church.
Richard Shave wrote his will in Liberty County in 1801. Because the will did not mention enslaved people, it is very likely that Richard did not own any. Many white families were impoverished after the Revolutionary War and many enslaved people did flee to the British side.
Slavery is a deep, indelible stain on America’s history, and Liberty County white families were very involved. In my research, I have normally found that if a Liberty County family did not own at least some people, it was due to poverty. The Shave family was not wealthy prior to the Civil War but they were not impoverished either; yet I can find no records between 1800 and the end of the Civil War showing that people with the surname Shave owned people. The records that would show involvement in slavery range from probate (wills, estate inventories) and deed (bills of sale, deeds of gift, chattel mortgages using enslaved people as collateral) records to federal slave censuses to church records. It is certainly unusual that I could find no evidence of them owning people in the 19th century.
They did not appear to have moral qualms about slavery, however. In 1858, John R. Shave did receive a “negro woman” named Bettie, plus $43.33 1/3 cents, from the Elisha Smith estate on behalf of his wife, Mary (nee Smith), who was one of the heirs. He and other heirs had earlier sued the estate to force the sale of “the man slave Jim” so they could divide the profits from the sale.
It turned out that John S. Andrews, trustee for Elisha Smith’s children, had already sold Jim for $880 to William G. Martin and Lafayette S. Andrews as trustees for Ann Jane Way, wife of Moses W. Way and had loaned the money out at interest.
John R. Shave and representatives of the other heirs had also sued to force the estate to divide among them “the slaves, a negro woman named Miley and her two children Betty and Abner, together with the stock of cattle.” Mary’s share of this was evidently Betty.
John R. Shave died of dysentery in Liberty County in 1863, apparently while serving in the 25th Georgia Infantry Regiment C.S.A. His brother William R. Shave had served in the Confederate Army for a few months in 1861. Their sister Emma married James S. Ashmore before the War and had three children. James died in the Confederate Army in Tennessee during the War, and she married his uncle Joseph and became my 2d great-grandmother.
The fortunes of the Shave family, now comprised of William R. Shave (the younger) and his family, appeared to pick up in the 1860s and afterward, as they bought and sold land. Family members with the Shave surname owned about 2000 acres total in Liberty County in the 25 years following the Civil War. Thomas J. Shave (William R. Shave’s son) and Benjamin Stiles Butler, along with James Clark, a neighbor of the Shaves, operated a turpentine and resin manufacturing business under the name “Shave, Butler and Clark” after the Civil War.
In 1886, William R. Shave sold two acres of land to the trustees of the Beach Hill Missionary Baptist Church, an historic Black Church that is still an active congregation. The trustees were Richard Livingston, Peter Stewart and Will Baker. At that time, the land was surrounded by land owned by William R. Shave. It seems likely that the name came from Beach Hill, South Carolina, the origin of many of the white settlers of Midway in the 1750s. Is this possibly an indication that some of the Church’s founders were descended from enslaved people brought from there?
By 1900, most of the family had moved to Florida, concentrating in the Amelia Island area. William R. Shave’s grandson, also named William R. Shave, stayed in Liberty County, dying in 1940. He is buried at the Flemington Presbyterian Church, but earlier members of the family are buried at the Mt. Olivet Methodist Church in Fleming.
A family member, Powell Fleming (“Buck”) Shave, owned the Five and Dime store in downtown Hinesville for many years, and members of his family still live in Hinesville.
The name William R. Shave has been in continuous use from 1794 to 2020. The line: William R. Shave (1794-1856) -> William R. Shave (1825-1902) -> Thomas Jefferson Shave (1848-1910) -> William R. Shave (1873-1940) -> William R. Shave (1911-1964) -> William R. Shave (1940-2020).
When did Shavetown start being called that? I still don’t know. It could have been because the Shave family had lived in that area since colonial times (other than their brief flight to Nova Scotia). It could have been because William R. Shave was briefly the postmaster of “Grestville” in 1860. Maybe it was renamed Shavetown in his honor? I also speculated that it might have been where the workers in the Shave, Butler and Clark turpentine business lived after the Civil War, but couldn’t prove it. The question remains open.
I have a much more detailed writeup of this information about the Shave family, with more genealogical research, that I will be happy to share with anyone who is interested. Write me at jnscole@yahoo.com.