Black Families of Hampden County, Massachusetts: 1650-1865 (2024)

Uncovering the Stories of Black Families in Springfield and Hampden County, Massachusetts: 1650 – 1865 Joseph Carvalho III

Hampden County, Massachusetts, was a significant center of African American life . . . Its location at the “crossroads of New England” . . . made Hampden County a haven for escaped slaves. The establishment in Springfield of the U.S. Armory in 1794 placed the city at the very epicenter of America’s Industrial Revolution . . . As the seat of Hampden County . . . Springfield soon became a place where an African American community could take root and thrive. In the generations before the Civil War, Springfield became a center of anti-slavery sentiment. Regionally, colonizationist and anti-slavery societies were established by sympathetic white citizens. More importantly, the first African American church in western Massachusetts was formed in Springfield in 1844, literally providing a pulpit for African American leaders to speak freely about America’s slave system

Jails, Marshalls, and Sheriffs of Old Hampshire County, Mass., 1661-1811

Out of the Darkness: History of Corrections Reform at the Hampden County, MA Sheriff's Department, 1661-2022, 2022

History of the Jails, Marshalls, and Sheriffs of Old Hampshire County, Mass., 1661-1811

“So Succeeded by a Kind Providence”: Communities of Color in Eighteenth Century Boston

The Freedom Trail has become an iconic symbol and major tourist attraction in the City of Boston. Yet since its Cold War-era inception, the Freedom Trail has remained problematically focused on a consensus history of leading white men who brought forth the American Revolution. Other heritage trails—most notably the Black Heritage Trail—have been established to correct the deficiencies of the Freedom Trail. These organizations have attempted to provide a revisionist counter-point by telling stories of internal struggle and by exploring groups traditionally overlooked by historians. However, with so many trails possessing so many particularized foci, many different narratives compete for the limited attention of visitors to Boston. This divide among the different heritage trails threatens to "resegregate" history as perceived and interacted by the public. Using methods successfully employed in researching the antebellum black community on Beacon Hill, this thesis makes use of government minutes, deeds, court documents, census data, church records, and other public records to fill a gaping hole in the Freedom Trail‘s narrative. Four generations of communities and people of color were studied, spanning the entire eighteenth century. Slavery dominated the lives of people of color through much of the century. However, by the 1760s, the first landowners of color on Beacon Hill purchased and developed their land: Tobias and Margaret Locker and Scipio and Venus Fayerweather. Others, such as Lancaster Hill, organized and petitioned against slavery and exploitation alongside the freemason Prince Hall. Following the Revolutionary War, the legacies of activism and property ownership combined on Beacon Hill. The Smith, Watts, and Barnes families are used as case studies of those who subdivided, developed, and sold land and homes along today‘s Joy Street to house other families of color and formed a physical neighborhood that would thrive as black Beacon Hill for generations to come. Such stories bridge the interpretive gap between the Freedom Trail and the Black Heritage Trail, deepening the narrative of the former and building a prologue for the latter. The end result offers a far more vivid, critical, and complete public understanding of Boston‘s history.

Black History Makers in Burlington County, New Jersey: Revolutionary War Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society Journal, 2023

Antebellum Black history in Burlington County, New Jersey, has several fascinating historic figures that can become interesting classroom lessons. These include soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War, a clockmaker born before the war who owned a successful clockmaking business, a man who became so fascinated with Quakerdom that he pleaded throughout his life to become a member of the group, only to be rebuffed until he was seventy-nine, two settlers from an antebellum free Black community called Timbuctoo who were influential in their community's development, a physician, a prominent Underground Railroad operative, and others. Most were born enslaved, but some were born free. Many were assisted by Quakers, who clearly facilitated emancipation in many cases, even while clearly limiting their association with Black people in some cases. This article describes the lives of eight men whose lives contribute to our understanding of Burlington County during enslavement and emancipation.

Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Lineage: The Cultural Biography of a Colonial Massachusetts Parcel of Land

Historical Archaeology, 2012

The Fullness of Enslaved Black Lives as Seen through Early Massachusetts Vital Records

Genealogy, 2022

In genealogy, tracing names and dates is often the initial goal, but, for many, desire soon turns to learning about the embodied lives of those who came before them. This type of texture is hard for any genealogist to locate, but excruciatingly hard for those seeking to trace family histories that include ancestors who were enslaved in the northern parts of the colonies that would become the United States. Often, records thin to nearly nothing and frame all lived experiences through the lens of an enslaver. This is true especially of public records, created, maintained, and curated by the state apparatus. By adhering to the proposition that even materials that do not immediately reveal much about Black life may be useful if we consider what is missing and left out, this article suggests that these types of documents might help breathe some fullness into the individual and collective lives of those Black ancestors whose humanity the state denied. Emerging from a larger project to loc...

Teaching packet for "Hands-On-History of Local Black Changemakers." Conference session at “A Community of Changemakers: Exploring the History of Black Activism in Essex County” Essex Heritage, Salem State University, Salem, Mass.

2023

In this session we will first examine easily discoverable printed and manuscript local history sources about Nancy Parker (fl. 1752–1825), an Andover woman of Native and African ancestry. We’ll consider transmission of nuggets of biographical information from oral to written forms, and how subsequent history writers drew from previous sources and transformed meanings when they created their historical narratives. Reading original and secondary source texts, we will look for common stereotyping and representative tropes about people of color in this region (e.g., “the last Indian”). We’ll be attentive to explicit and implicative meanings invoked by racialized terms and stereotypical ideas that reflect then-current precepts. Lastly, we’ll examine legal documents, and their technical features will be pointed out. The documents relate to Nancy Parker’s 1771 “freedom suit”—a civil action for liberty from enslavement that she with her attorney brought in the Essex County Court of Common Pleas. Between 1769 and 1779, at least nine successful freedom suits were brought by enslaved Andover people of color of Native, African, and Caribbean ancestry and heritage. Freedom suits were among several modes of resistive, rebellious, and emancipative actions long-used by enslaved people. The earliest lawsuits for liberty in Essex County were brought by Native people and their allies in the 1660s.

Notable Women of Central and Western Massachusetts from the 1600s to today.docx

Draft of List of Women from The Power of Women: Notable Women of Central and Western Massachusetts from the 1600s to today

A Sufficient Number: The Historic African American Community of Peterborough in Warren, Maine (MA Thesis 2013)

Warren, Maine is located in the midcoast region of southeastern Maine. The small town has a long history that is intrinsically linked to the maritime activities of the region, which began in the mid-seventeenth century. Sometime around 1782, Sarah Peters was brought to Warren as a slave on a ship owned by Captain James McIntyre. After slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783/1784, Sarah successfully sued for her freedom and married a man named Amos Peters. Together, they raised a large, mixed-racial family, and settled near South Pond, a good distance away from the main village. By the 1820s, they had their own school district, were part of the Baptist church, and had a good deal of land. Their population and wealth peaked in the 1850s and 1860s, with as many as eighty-two mixed-race people living in the village of Peterborough. This thesis focuses on how African American and mixed-racial communities were able to establish themselves in maritime northern New England in the years prior to the Civil War, particularly during the antebellum period. Peterborough is a case study toward understanding African American communities outside of the plantation setting, and their relationships between agriculture and the sea.

African-American Families Database: Community Formation in Albemarle County, Virginia, 1850-1880

2017

The African-American Families Database project involves a unique partnership between local historians, anthropologists, database designers, and community residents to develop an on-line database for connecting African-American families to their antebellum roots and tracing patterns of community formation in the post-bellum period. Working with historians and researchers we will develop a research methodology for entering information from standard archival records -- such as wills, census tallies, personal property taxes, and birth, marriage, and death certificates. Once entered into Excel spreadsheets we will export the data to a relational database, such as MySQL, and develop algorithms for searching for individual people. In this pilot study, we will test the associations between generations of families by tracking the 19th-century descendants of several dozen enslaved individuals listed on two antebellum "slave lists."