The guy’s name was Crapps Dingle?!? And his son had his name changed to Negro Dingle. Wow, this is an object lesson about how much one man hated his slave name and the lengths he would go to in order to disassociate himself from it.
“With the end of the Civil War, slaves – whose surnames, if they had one, indicated their ownership – were able to choose names of their own. At the time, Washington was probably the best-known and revered name a person could take. The modern legacy of those countless choices is that better than 90 percent of all Americans named Washington [in 2002] are black, according to David Word, a Census Bureau demographer…. It is the common American name whose bearer is most likely to be black…. The rush to choose the name Washington began even before 1865. When the African American Civil War Memorial, which lists the names of the more than 200,000 United States Colored Troops, was unveiled in Washington, D.C. in 1998, Edwin Washington of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society calculated that 1,885 of those soldiers were named Washington. Nearly half of them were named George Washington. Another 15 were named General Washington.”
Jonathan Tilove, “A lot of Washingtons make black history,” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Feb. 13, 2002), pp. A1, A15.
At the time G. Washingtons forebears emigrated the town of Washington was very small (it’s been expanded a lot since the 1960’s), so there probably weren’t many people of that name to start with.