Charles Rollins
Charles Rollins
Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida
Charles Rollins, a man born into slavery in Florida, was the first person to open an account at the Tallahassee branch of the Freedman’s Bank. After Emancipation, Black citizens immediately moved towards independence by forming mutual-aid societies to care and provide for their communities. They also formed churches, schools, fraternal orders, women’s clubs, and labor unions. Charles Rollins’s life exemplified this determination.
Copy of Rollins’s entry into the Tallahassee Branch of the Freedman’s Bank book, 1866, and photograph of Charles Rollins
Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida
Rollins probably learned to read at the Sunday school of the church established by enslaved preacher James Page on the Bel Air Plantation. By 1866, this Sunday school employed twelve teachers. Rollins, a church trustee, opened an account for the Bethel Baptist Church at the Freedman’s Bank. He was also a founding member of the Mt. Olive Masonic Lodge.
Personal Freedman’s Bank book issued by the Tallahassee branch, ca. late 1860s to early 1870s
Courtesy of the University of Georgia
Rollins married Susan McClain in 1853, and in 1868, they obtained five acres on Old Bainbridge Road in Tallahassee in exchange for carpentry work for the Call family. Through a political alliance with Governor Marcellus Stearns, Rollins used the Homestead Act to apply for free farmland around Lake Jackson, now known as Rollins Point. By the 1880s, Rollins’s farm had 80 acres under cultivation and employed 40 workers.
In 2024, the family still owns land on Lake Jackson and on Old Bainbridge Road, which has been under Black ownership for more than 150 years.
