Josiah the Wealthy: K!lled Master Worth $100,000, Married Widow, Died Richest Black Man in South | HO!!

The Well That Swallowed a Master

On the morning of May 4, 1847, neighbors near the Pee Dee River awoke to shocking news: Edmund Hargrove, one of the wealthiest planters in South Carolina, had been found dead at the bottom of a dry well on his 800-acre estate.

His neck was broken. His body lay twisted as though from a fall. The coroner called it a tragic accident. Within a week, the matter was closed. Within six months, his young widow Catherine Hargrove married Josiah, her late husband’s former slave.

By the time Reconstruction ended two decades later, that same man — once bought and sold like livestock — had become one of the richest Black men in the American South, owning thousands of acres, rail stock, and urban properties from Charleston to Columbia.

The authorities never reopened the case. The neighbors never spoke of it again. And the truth stayed buried for more than sixty years — until a forgotten journal, found in a courthouse basement in 1909, revealed what really happened on that dark Carolina night.

The Planter, the Widow, and the Servant

In 1847, the Hargrove Plantation was a kingdom of its own — tobacco wealth, social isolation, and a master whose mind was unraveling.

Edmund Hargrove, thirty-nine, had inherited the estate from his father six years earlier. He was a hard man — intelligent, proud, and devoid of warmth. His wife, Catherine, was barely twenty-four, a quiet beauty from a declining family. Their marriage had been arranged, and the union quickly soured.

Among their household staff of fourteen enslaved people was Josiah, a man of uncertain age but exceptional intelligence. Purchased decades earlier by Edmund’s father, Josiah had grown up on the plantation, serving first as a stable hand, later as a personal assistant. He could read and write — a crime under South Carolina law — and kept his secret carefully.

By 1847, Edmund trusted him with everything: finances, ledgers, and correspondence. To outsiders, Josiah was invisible — loyal, discreet, and indispensable.

But his journal, discovered decades later, painted a different picture: one of cold calculation and a mind capable of turning servitude into strategy.

“He Will Inspect the Eastern Fields at Dawn”

According to the journal, tension inside the Hargrove house began to rise that spring. Edmund grew paranoid, suspecting his overseer of theft, his wife of infidelity, even Josiah of betrayal.

On March 29, Catherine confided in Josiah that Edmund had struck her during an argument and threatened to sell several servants — including Josiah — out of spite. She was terrified.

Josiah wrote that he said nothing in response, but that night, “I began to think.”

By law, if Edmund died without children, his entire fortune — estimated at $100,000 — would pass to his wife. And if Catherine remarried, her new husband would legally control it. For a Black man in 1847, such a thought bordered on insanity. But Josiah was no ordinary man.

In the weeks that followed, he began subtly manipulating Edmund’s growing paranoia — planting false suspicions, falsifying ledgers, and quietly suggesting that his master personally inspect the farthest edge of the estate “to catch the thief himself.”

On April 20, Josiah helped Edmund draft a new will. The document, witnessed and notarized in Charleston, freed Josiah and gifted him $500 and a small parcel of land for “extraordinary loyalty.”

Two weeks later, on the evening of May 3, Edmund told Catherine he would inspect the eastern fields at first light.

The next morning, he was dead.

The journal’s entry for that night contained only one sentence:

“He will inspect the eastern fields at dawn, as I suggested he should.”

The Widow and the Freeman

Edmund’s funeral was quiet. Catherine wept politely. Josiah stood at a respectful distance, silent as always.

Days later, Edmund’s will was validated, making Josiah a free man.

Within six months, the widow and the freedman were married — an act so scandalous it could have meant prison or worse. But Catherine found a loophole, marrying Josiah under the authority of a minister from Massachusetts and claiming the ceremony took place on land technically outside county jurisdiction.

The law faltered. The couple prevailed.

By 1850, they had rebuilt the plantation as partners — she the strategist, he the financier. And as the years passed, their fortune multiplied.

By 1860, Josiah controlled over 2,000 acres, worth more than $200,000. By the war’s end, he had converted much of it into gold, bonds, and industrial stock. When other planters fell to ruin, Josiah rose untouched.

But wealth, as his journal later revealed, came at a cost measured not in dollars, but in ghosts.

A Web of Secrets

Josiah’s postwar success was not built on labor alone. His journal documented a vast network of surveillance and leverage.

He recorded every secret he overheard: affairs, debts, bribes, Confederate sympathies, and wartime profiteering. He kept ledgers not of money, but of weaknesses.

“Knowledge is currency,” he wrote. “And I have become the richest man alive.”

When Reconstruction chaos threatened, Josiah’s enemies mysteriously withdrew. Those who considered exposing his past suddenly remembered his generosity — or their own sins.

He never issued threats. He simply let people know, in his calm, deliberate way, that he knew things.

His wife, Catherine, helped him build this empire of silence. She wrote letters, attended churches, and gathered gossip disguised as philanthropy. Together, they turned reputation into a weapon.

But by the 1870s, cracks began to show. Catherine grew restless, drawn to spiritualism and reform circles. Josiah viewed them as dangerous distractions. And after a miscarriage in 1873, their partnership — forged in conspiracy — began to corrode.

The Poison in the Marriage

Catherine’s death in October 1875 was recorded as “gastric fever.” But Josiah’s journal told a far darker story.

He had been poisoning her slowly for weeks, using a blend of arsenic trioxide and lead acetate — undetectable by nineteenth-century medicine.

“She has become a threat to everything we built,” he wrote. “This is necessary.”

Catherine, it turned out, knew.

In her final days, she confessed that she recognized the bitter tang of poison. Yet she continued to drink, believing death the only way to end their shared torment.

“We died the night Edmund fell,” she told Josiah. “Everything since has been a ghost’s dream. You are killing me now, but it changes nothing. Edmund is waiting — and when I join him, he will wait a little longer for you.”

She died the next afternoon, whispering her final words to the nurse:

“Tell Josiah that Edmund is satisfied now. Tell him we’ll all be together soon.”

The Descent

After Catherine’s burial beside Edmund, Josiah began to unravel.

Servants left the house in fear, claiming to hear footsteps and voices near the old well. Josiah himself wrote of muddy footprints appearing by his bed, of Catherine’s ring reappearing in the cellar — though he had seen it on her hand the night before.

He dreamed of Edmund calling from the well:

“You took everything, Josiah. My life, my wife, my fortune. But debts must be paid.”

By Christmas 1875, Josiah admitted he was afraid to die — not of hell, but of joining them.

“If I die by my own hand,” he wrote, “I will descend immediately to where they wait. I am too frightened to die and too weak to live.”

The Haunted Years

For eight years, Josiah lived as a prisoner of his own mind.

He withdrew from politics, gave away his wealth to churches and schools, and founded the Catherine Hargrove Memorial Academy, perhaps hoping good deeds could balance the moral ledger.

“I am a fool,” he wrote in 1879. “Money cannot wash away blood.”

By 1882, his body had failed as completely as his sanity. Neighbors saw a stooped figure wandering his estate before dawn, muttering to unseen companions. He told visitors that Edmund and Catherine stood in the corner of his study, “patient and waiting.”

He died on March 7, 1883, at 3:00 a.m. — the exact hour Catherine had died eight years earlier. On his desk lay a final note:

“I am ready now. Take me to where we all belong.”

He was buried between Catherine and Edmund. No one attended.

The Unearthed Ledger of Guilt

When Josiah’s journal surfaced in 1909, it reignited a century-old question: was this a confession or the ravings of guilt-induced madness?

He described the perfect crime — a murder without violence, executed through suggestion and patience. But no physical proof remained. Historians debated for decades whether Josiah truly killed Edmund and Catherine, or whether his guilt had invented the ghosts that haunted him.

In 1951, construction crews building a shopping center on the former plantation unearthed the old cemetery. The bodies were supposed to be moved, but the records vanished. The site, locals say, has been cursed ever since — floods, electrical failures, and stories of three figures seen at dawn near the surviving patch of woods.

They call them the Watchers: a tall man, a woman in white, and a stooped shadow between them.

Folklore, perhaps. Or an echo of what Josiah himself wrote in his final lucid moment:

“The height I thought I had climbed was only the depth of my descent. I have won everything — and lost my soul.”

A Legacy of Silence

Josiah’s name has all but vanished from history, buried beneath the weight of his own ambition. His fortune built schools and hospitals that still stand today. Yet the man himself endures only as a whispered legend — a slave who killed his master, married his widow, and outwitted the world, only to be devoured by his conscience.

His story is not one of triumph, but of transformation — how intellect without empathy, and freedom without morality, can turn liberation into damnation.

We will never know if the voices Josiah heard came from the grave or from within. But as the locals still say when fog gathers over the old well:

“Some debts are paid in silence. Others echo forever.”