Mary Anderson (c. 1830–1941) was a formerly enslaved woman whose life spanned slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the early twentieth century. At the time of her death, she was believed to be 111 years old—an age attested to by family records and oral history—making her one of the oldest known residents of the region.
Anderson was born around August 8, 1830, in Amelia County, Virginia. She was born into slavery, as was her mother, who was enslaved by the Wilson family. As a young girl, Mary was sold to the Randall family of Dinwiddie County, Virginia, a common and traumatic experience that separated families and uprooted lives within the slave system. She lived through the Civil War and experienced emancipation as an adult, carrying firsthand memory of slavery into the twentieth century.
In the early 1910s, Anderson moved north, eventually settling in northern New Jersey. For the last decades of her life, she lived in Hackensack and Englewood, where she became part of the area’s growing Black community during the Great Migration. At the time of her death, she had been living on Second Street in Englewood.
Mary Anderson was the mother of eighteen children, a testament both to her resilience and to the harsh realities of nineteenth-century Black family life. She outlived all but two of her children, many of her grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren. Her surviving family included children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren living in Hackensack and Virginia, linking multiple generations across regions and eras.
Despite her advanced age, Anderson was described by family members as mentally sharp and active until shortly before her death, which followed a fall at her home. She died at Englewood Hospital on November 23, 1941.
Her funeral services were held at Mount Olive Baptist Church in Hackensack, a historically Black congregation that served as a spiritual and social anchor for African Americans in Bergen County. She was laid to rest following services that marked not just the end of a long life, but the passing of a living witness to American slavery.
Mary Anderson’s life embodies the long arc of Black American history—from enslavement to freedom, from the rural South to the urban North. Her story reminds us that slavery is not ancient history; it lived on in memory, family, and community well into the twentieth century.
"Kin Give Proof Former Slave 111 Years Old." The Record, November 24, 1941.