By 1838 ten black farmers had purchased of public lands in Jackson Township and were living at Roberts Settlement. Although the 1840 census recorded only five families (38 individuals) in Hamilton County's Jackson and Adams Townships, Stephen Vincent, an historian who has studied the Roberts community in detail, believes that the number was an estimated seven to ten families (50 to 75 individuals). Most of the settlement's early pioneers were free blacks and mixed-race people from Halifax County, North Carolina; Northampton County, North Carolina; or Greensville County, Virginia. These early settlers migrated west due to more oppressive government acts against free blacks following Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831.