On July 15, 1821, travel writer and future Washington, D.C. journalist Anne Newport Royall described Florence, Alabama as bustling with activity. She wrote: “The great Military road that leads from Nashville to New Orleans, by way of Lake Ponchatrain [sic], passes through this town, and the number of people who travel through it, and the numerous droves of horses [headed] for the lower country, for the market, are incredible.” Florence was established just three years prior.

Here, we can imagine a young Black man standing outside an inn. His hand rests on the neck of a tired horse just handed to him by a white patron. “People may have called him Sam. Later, he’d be known as Dred Scott.” As a hostler at the Blow Inn, Scott looked after the travelers’ horses. “He was the property of Peter Blow, but exactly when and how he became Blow’s property is unknown.”

Dred Scott was born to enslaved parents in Virginia between 1795 and 1809. In the early 1800s, he lived and worked on the Blow plantation in Southampton County, Virginia. In 1819, Peter, his wife Elizabeth, and their children moved to Madison County, Alabama, and settled in Huntsville. The Blows brought Scott and other enslaved people to work on their cotton plantation.

In December 1821, the Blows relocated to Florence in Lauderdale County. Peter and Elizabeth Blow acquired a brick tavern built by the Cypress Land Company and converted it into Florence’s first hotel. The Blow Inn opened in May 1822.

Scott lived in Florence for the next eight years. His time there can be understood as a “prelude to freedom” because of the events to come.

In 1830, the Blows moved to St. Louis, Missouri. Elizabeth and Peter Blow both died within two years. Scott was sold to Dr. John Emerson, a military surgeon, who used him as a personal servant and valet. Scott met Harriet Robinson in 1836. The couple soon married and had two children.

After Emerson’s death in 1843, his widow, Irene Emerson, relocated with the Scotts to her father’s Missouri plantation. In 1846, Scott sued for his freedom because slavery was illegal there. “In 1857, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not outlaw slavery and that Scott was property, not a citizen. The Dred Scott decision outraged abolitionists and further divided [a] nation” on the brink of Civil War.

Afterward, Scott was sold to Taylor Blow, the youngest son of Peter and Elizabeth Blow, who freed him and his family. Dred Scott died of tuberculosis only sixteen months later. Back in Alabama, the Florence Gazette reported on his death and observed that his name would one day be famous in our country’s history.

For more stories of northwest Alabama’s Muscle Shoals National Heritage Area, visit msnha.una.edu.