They Couldn’t Legally Marry—So He Gave His Former Slave 198 Acres | Richard Morrey & Cremona

In colonial Pennsylvania, a black woman could be bought, sold, inherited, and denied the legal rights that white people took for granted. But in the 1740s, one woman would do something unbelievable, especially as she was a black woman. Her name was Cremona, also known as Moony. She had once been enslaved by the Moory family.

And then the son of that family, Richard Moory, became the father of her children. They lived together as a couple. They had five children. But Pennsylvania law stood between them and a legal marriage. And then in 1746, Richard did something extraordinary. He placed nearly 198 acres of land under Cremona’s control. Land on which she had once been enslaved.

This story begins long before that 198-acre transaction. It begins with a powerful family in colonial Pennsylvania. Humphrey Moory was a wealthy British-born Quaker merchant who became one of the earliest important landowners in the Philadelphia region. In 1691, William Penn appointed him the first mayor of Philadelphia. Moory also owned substantial land in what is now Cheltenham Township, just outside Philadelphia.

But being a Quaker did not automatically mean rejecting slavery. The Moory family enslaved people, and among those people was a young black woman known as Moony, later identified as Cremona. Some historical accounts suggest she was born on the Moory property, the child of enslaved parents. When Humphrey Moory died in 1716, his estate was divided.

His human property was treated as part of that estate. Cremona went into the household of Humphrey’s son, Richard Morey, and that detail matters because Richard was not some stranger who happened to meet Cremona years later. He belonged to the very family that had controlled her life.

Richard himself was a substantial landowner. He had inherited property, including land around Cheltenham, and for a time lived the life expected of a wealthy colonial gentleman. But the family suffered a series of deaths. Richard’s nephew died. His son Thomas died without leaving children. Then Richard’s wife, Ann, died. By the 1730s, Richard’s household had changed dramatically, and Cremona was still there.

Historical accounts describe her as a servant in the Morey household after her freedom. At some point, Richard and Cremona became involved in a relationship that would last for years. We have to be careful here. Later sources sometimes describe theirs as a love story, but we cannot know exactly what Cremona felt. No surviving first-person account from her tells us that.

What we do know is what happened next. Cremona and Richard had five children, Robert Lewis, Caesar, Elizabeth, Rachel, and a daughter who was also named Cremona. Their children were born between approximately 1735 and 1745. Five children, a white father, a black mother who had once been enslaved, and a family living in a society that had deliberately placed legal barriers between people of different races.

Because by this time, Pennsylvania had made interracial marriage extraordinarily dangerous. In 1725 to 1726, the colony enacted a law prohibiting marriage between black and white people. The law even threatened punishment for white people who lived with black people under the pretense of marriage.

And for a free black person who married a white person, the consequences could be catastrophic. The law provided that the black spouse could be enslaved for life. Ministers and magistrates who performed such marriages could also be heavily fined. So, Richard and Cremona could build a household. They could have children.

Their community could recognize them as a couple. But, the law would not give their relationship the same legal status that a white couple could claim. And yet, somehow Cremona was moving towards something even more extraordinary than marriage. She was becoming a landowner.

This is where the story takes a turn that sounds almost unbelievable, but it is preserved in the historical record. In January 1746, Richard Morey went to the Philadelphia County Recorder of Deeds. And there, he made a transaction involving Cremona. The surviving record identified her as his now freed negro woman Moony, otherwise Cremona Morey. The document transferred 198 acres of Richard’s land in Cheltenham to her.

And it wasn’t a symbolic piece of property. The transaction included the land, buildings, improvements, woods, waters, rights, and privileges connected with it. The arrangement was structured as a 500-year lease. A complicated legal device that researchers have connected to the restrictions placed on black property ownership.

The same record states that Cremona had previously purchased her freedom for 20 pounds. Think about what that means. The woman who had once been listed as property in the Morey estate had now acquired her freedom. And the woman who could not legally marry the white man with whom she had built a family was now controlling 198 acres of land.

But, Richard’s decision created another question. What would happen to that land after he was gone? And what would happen to Cremona’s five children? Because Richard was already growing old, and the answer would eventually produce a black family community that survived long after both Richard and Cremona disappeared from the scene.

That is where we go next. Richard Morey had put something unusual on paper in 1746. Cremona was no longer simply a woman connected to the Morey household. She had a legal claim to nearly 198 acres in Cheltenham. But owning land on paper was one thing. Keeping it was another. Colonial Pennsylvania was still a society where black people faced restrictions that white landowners did not.

Even after emancipation, freedom did not suddenly make a person equal under the law. Cremona understood that reality better than most. She had already paid 20 pounds toward her own freedom. Now she had land, and she had five children whose futures depended on what happened to that land. Richard Morey died in 1753, only 7 years after the great land transaction.

His death could have destroyed everything Cremona had built. Instead, the property became the foundation of a family legacy. Cremona remained on the land and later married John Fry, a formerly enslaved black man. They had a child together, Joseph. Cremona continued living in the Cheltenham area until her death around 1770.

But Richard’s children by Cremona were still connected to the property. And this is where the story becomes less about one unusual relationship and more about generational survival. In 1770, a deed of trust referred to the children of Richard Morey and his freedwoman Cremona. The land was being dealt with as an inheritance.

The children were no longer simply the descendants of an enslaved woman. They were heirs to property. That distinction mattered because land meant security, could provide a home, could produce crops, could be passed to children, and it could give a family something slavery had tried to make almost impossible, a permanent place of its own.

Cremona’s children took different paths. Her daughter Elizabeth married Cyrus Bustill, a black baker and businessman whose family would become prominent in the Philadelphia region. Another daughter, Rachel, married Andrew Hickey. Her son Caesar became a shoemaker, and her son Robert Lewis became associated with farming and the Cheltenham property.

Then there was Cremona Jr. She married a black man named John Montier, and through that marriage, the family name Montier became permanently attached to the land and the community that developed around it. These are the kinds of historical stories that rarely make it into the usual textbooks.

Over the decades, black families settled around the property. The area became known as Guinea Town. The name reflected the African ancestry of many of the people who lived there. It wasn’t simply a collection of isolated houses. It became a community. Families lived there. Children grew up there. People worked, worshipped, raised families, and buried their dead there. And much of that community’s existence can be traced back to the land that Cremona had gained in the 1740s. That is what makes the 198 acres so important.

Richard’s transaction was not simply an unusual gift between two people. It became part of the material foundation for generations of black life in the Philadelphia region. And the family kept building. By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the descendants of Cremona were becoming part of a much larger network of free black families.

Some became farmers, others became tradesmen, some became business owners, others became educators and activists. And one branch of the family would eventually produce people whose names became nationally significant. But before we get there, we need to look at something that is easy to miss. Cremona’s story was not simply about receiving land from Richard.

She had already demonstrated something remarkable before that deed was ever signed. She had purchased her freedom. She had raised five children in a society designed to keep black families vulnerable. And she had managed to establish a claim to property that could outlive her. That is why the wording of the 1746 document matters so much.

It didn’t describe her simply as a former slave. It identified her as Richard’s now freed negro woman. The legal document preserved a transition, enslaved, freed, landholder. And after Richard’s death, the family had to navigate the complicated process of keeping that inheritance intact. The property was divided among descendants.

Some portions changed hands, other portions remained connected to the family. And over time, the original 198 acres became smaller as land was sold, inherited, and developed. But part of it survived. A physical reminder of what Cremona had managed to establish. Today, a historic Montier family homestead still stands on a small portion of the original property.

The surviving house dates to the 18th century, and the site preserves a direct connection to the black family community that developed there. Imagine that for a moment. A woman who had once been treated as property became connected to land that remained in her family’s story for generations. But, the most remarkable part was still ahead because Cremona’s descendants did not simply inherit acres.

They inherited opportunity, and some of them would use it to build lives that reached far beyond Cheltenham. One descendant became connected to the early black intellectual and abolitionist world of Philadelphia. Another branch entered the growing network of black political and cultural leaders. And generations later, the family tree would reach one of the most recognizable black Americans of the 20th century, Paul Robeson.

But, to understand how the descendants of a woman once held in slavery could eventually connect to a figure like Robeson, we have to follow the family tree carefully because the connection runs through Cremona’s daughter Elizabeth, the Bustill family, and several generations of black Philadelphia history. And that is where the story becomes much bigger than Richard Morey and Cremona.

It becomes the story of what their children built after slavery was supposed to have defined their entire lives. Cremona died around 1770. Richard Morey had been gone for nearly two decades, but the family they had created was still there, and the land was still there. That is where Cremona’s story takes a different direction.

She did not leave behind a famous autobiography. There is no long memoir in which she explains what she endured or what she hoped her children would become. What survives instead are deeds, wills, property records, family histories, and the physical remains of the community her descendants helped build.

Those records allow us to follow the family long after Cremona disappeared from the historical record. Her children became part of the growing population of free black people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And one of the most important connections came through her daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth married Cyrus Bustill, a black baker who became a respected member of the Philadelphia area black community.

Bustill was born enslaved but later became free and established himself as a successful baker. The marriage connected Cremona’s family to another important black family network and that network would continue expanding through the generations. This is one reason the 198 acres matter so much. Property could be inherited, names could be carried forward, families could establish themselves in particular communities and children who were born into a society that had once treated their mother as property could grow up with something their ancestors had been denied, a family legacy tied to land.

By the 19th century, the descendants of Cremona and the families connected to her were part of a much larger black community in the Philadelphia region. The area around the original Maury property became associated with Guinea Town, a settlement of black families whose lives were tied to the surrounding land.

People farmed, they built homes, they raised children, they formed families and eventually they established a cemetery. In 1798, a burial ground associated with the black community was established in the area. For people whose ancestors had been denied control over their own lives, having a place to bury their dead was another form of permanence.

You could be born there, you could live there and eventually you could be buried among your own people. But the family story didn’t stop with the people who lived around Guinea Town. It continued through several generations. One branch descended from Elizabeth and Cyrus Bustill. Their descendants became teachers, craftsmen, activists, and community leaders. Another branch continued through the Montere family. And eventually, members of these connected families became part of the broader struggle for black education, civil rights, and political equality.

One of the families worked that land. Generations came and went, and the property remained connected to their history. Today, that surviving homestead helps make Cremona’s story unusually concrete. We can look at the records and know she existed. We can trace the names of her children. We can find the land transaction.

And we can still point to a surviving piece of the landscape where her descendants built their lives. But there is another detail worth remembering. Richard Morris’ 1746 transaction did not erase the inequalities surrounding Cremona. Giving her land did not suddenly make Pennsylvania an equal society. Black people still faced discrimination.

Interracial marriage remained legally prohibited for decades. Slavery itself continued in Pennsylvania until its gradual abolition was completed in the 19th century. So, this is not a story where one piece of land magically solved everything. It is a story about what one family managed to preserve despite the limitations imposed around them.

Cremona had been born into a world where someone else could claim ownership over her. She eventually became free. She became a mother. She became connected to nearly 200 acres of land. And after her death, her children and grandchildren continued building lives connected to that property and to the wider black community.

The legal system had tried to define people like Cremona as property. But the documents she left behind tell another story. They show a woman whose name entered a land deed. A mother whose children became heirs. A family whose descendants remained connected to the region, and a community that grew around the legacy of that land.

So, perhaps the most remarkable sentence in this entire story isn’t about Richard Morey. It’s about Cremona. She had once been property, then she became a person with property of her own. And almost three centuries later, the evidence of that transformation is still there. A deed, family tree, a historic house, and the descendants of a woman whose life could easily have disappeared from history, but it didn’t. Cremona’s name survived.