Historic Resource Study 

Boston African American National Historic Site 

31 December 2002

Kathryn Grover 

Janine V. da Silva
Contents

Acknowledgments 1

Executive Summary 3 

Introduction 21 

Historic Resources 42 

1: Site of David Walker House 

81 Joy Street 42 

2: John T. Hilton House 

73 Joy Street 45

3: Robert Roberts House 

71 Joy Street 48

4: George Putnam / Robert Johnson House 

69 Joy Street 51

5: Site of Coffin Pitts House 

67 Joy Street 55

6: James Scott / William C. Nell House 

3 Smith Court 61

7: George Washington House 

5 Smith Court 67

8: Joseph Scarlett Tenant House 

7 Smith Court 69

9: Holmes Alley House 

7A Smith Court 70
10: William Henry / Joseph Scarlett House 

2 Smith Court 71

11: African Meeting House 

8 Smith Court 73

12: Abiel Smith School 

46 Joy Street 79

13: George Middleton / Lewis Glapion House 

5 Pinckney Street 82

14: Second Site of Home for Aged Colored Women 

27 Myrtle Street 87

15: Second John P. Coburn House

2 Phillips Street 88

16: Site of Henry L. W. Thacker House 

5 Phillips Street 92

17: First John P. Coburn House / Coburn Court 

3 Coburn Court 94

18: Site of Twelfth Baptist Church 

43-47 Phillips Street 96

19: Lewis Hayden House 

66 Phillips Street 100

20: Site of John Sweat Rock House 

81-83 Phillips Street 107

21: Thomas Paul House 

36 West Cedar Street 115

22: Site of John A. Andrew House 

110 Charles Street 116

23: Charles Street Meetinghouse / Charles Street AME Church 

62-76 Charles Street 118
24: John J. Smith House 

86 Pinckney Street 119

25: George and Susan Hillard House 

62 Pinckney Street 121

26: Charles Sumner House 

20 Hancock Street 125

 

Suggestions for Further Research 131 

Notes 137 

Annotated Bibliography 175 

Appendix A:

Site Descriptions and Chain of Title 

Appendix B:

Maps of Boston’s West End 
Acknowledgments

The research undergirding this historic resource study has been greatly aided by numerous 

people and institutions, but no one has been more critical to it than Michael P. Terranova, 

who lives on Joy Street in the John T. Hilton House. At literally a moment’s notice—at 

many moments’ notice—he has shared all of his research, gathered over years in tax 

records, deeds, and other sources about African Americans who have lived in the West 

End. His work is meticulous, detailed, and thoroughly documented. We can never 

adequately thank him for his unstinting assistance. 

We also wish to thank the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society for compiling the 

database Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630-1800, built largely on the 

125,000 index cards Annie Haven Thwing compiled during her research for her Crooked 

and Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston, published in 1920. The cards listed everything 

Thwing found in town and church records about residents of Boston between those years. 

Between 1993 and 1999 the historical society converted the cards to an electronic database 

and added another five thousand records for spouses, children, native Americans, and 

African Americans. The entire CD-ROM database was copublished with the New England 

Historical Genealogical Society in 2001. Terranova’s work, this database, and our own work 

in censuses, directories, and assessors’ records made it possible to assemble fairly detailed 

information on many West End residents. We have attempted in this study to synthesize 

this primary data with what other primary and reputable secondary sources reveal as we 

focus on the people who owned and occupied the homes and institutions on the north slope 

of Beacon Hill. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 1
Others who were extremely helpful and generous with their time were Lorna Condon and 

Rebecca Aaronson at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities Library 

and Archives, Colleen Meagher of the Boston Landmarks Commission, Kristen Swett and 

David Nathan at the City of Boston Archives in Hyde Park, James Capobianco at the 

Massachusetts Archives, and Donald Yacovone at the Massachusetts Historical Society. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 2
Executive Summary 

This Historic Resource Study presents detailed descriptions both of properties already 

included within Boston African American National Historic Site (BOAF) and of properties 

that, on the basis of their historical and architectural significance, we have judged worthy of 

inclusion in BOAF. These descriptions are preceded by an examination of how the 

neighborhood BOAF interprets evolved and a brief discussion of the people who lived 

within it. There are two appendices. The first is a set of architectural descriptions of sites 

accompanied by photographs and a chain of title; the second is a set of map reproductions 

illustrating the physical development of the West End of Boston between 1722 and 1884. 

The Griffin M. Hopkins Map of the City of Boston, and Its Environs (1874) has been marked 

to show both current and recommended BOAF sites. 

Two supplements to the study not included in the scope of work—biographical files of 

Boston’s African American population compiled from federal censuses, selected city 

directories, tax records, and primary or secondary sources examined in the course of this 

research; and a database in Microsoft Access that permits correlations of the data in the 

biographical files—have been completed and submitted separately. 

This Historic Resource Study was constrained from covering the entire period between 

1797 and 1897 by several circumstances. In any project dealing with people of African 

descent, it is essential from the start to establish a solid demographic understanding of the 

population in order to deal sensibly, first, with sources that do not identify people by race 

and, second, with kin and friendship networks. On the north slope, a relatively small area in 

physical terms and so well demarcated in topographical terms, these networks seem to gain 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 3
greater significance. Because the Historic Resource Study was to be completed in one 

year, the authors needed to rely as much as possible on data collected by other institutions 

and individuals, yet the authors were unable within the crucial first seven months of the 

project to gain access to the three databases that had been compiled over the last three 

decades of people of color in Boston between 1790 and 1865.1

In the end, the authors compiled data from the federal censuses between 1790 and 1850 as 

well as from the city directories of 1813, 1816, 1820, 1823, 1827, 1830, 1833, 1836, 1841, 

1847, and 1850. They collected data beyond these years for individual in current and 

recommended BOAF properties. They also compiled data from Boston city assessors’ 

records from 1835 to 1860 for Belknap and Southac Street properties and incorporated tax 

record information Michael Terranova had assembled for Belknap Street, Smith Court, 

and Holmes Alley properties from 1822 to 1849. This data is presented narratively under 

the relevant properties in this study, as well as in the biographical files in Word and 

WordPerfect and in the Access database. Because of the amount of demographic work 

that needed to be done simply to establish the contours of the African American 

population in the West End, this project was unable to proceed in demographic detail 

beyond 1860. 

Sources exist that have made it possible, however, to recommend certain post-1860 sites for 

inclusion in BOAF, in particular the site of the Home for Aged Colored Women (site 14) 

and the John J. Smith House (site 24). Sarah J. Shoenfeld’s recent publication of the 

records of application and admission to the Home for Aged Colored Women provides an 

important link between the antebellum and postbellum African American community in 

Boston, and the fact that the home operated within the community it was created to serve is 

a highly significant feature of its existence.2

 The John J. Smith House on Pinckney Street 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 4
(site 24), in the process of being documented, is another site that bridges the half-century 

mark: it can be used to interpret a figure central both to the fugitive slave assistance, 

abolitionism, and school integration struggles of the pre-Civil War years and to the equal 

rights campaigns of the postwar decades. 

Still, because of the study’s general focus on the antebellum decades, it tends for the most 

part to place BOAF’s current and recommended sites within contexts particular to that 

time—the development of the African American community on the north slope of Beacon 

Hill, the growth of its political culture in general, its activism with respect to fugitive slave 

assistance specifically, and its inclinations with respect to integration and separatism. This 

last context had ramifications along the full spectrum of life. It affected North Slope 

residents on a global level in the colonization movement, both as colonization was 

encouraged and effected by people of African descent and by whites. It influenced their 

more everyday existence as well in the school integration struggles, which began as early as 

the 1780s and culminated with the legislative mandate of 1855. The question whether there 

could ever be, as the Quaker William Thornton phrased it in 1786, “a sincere union 

between the whites and the Negroes” provoked debate among both whites and African 

Americans. Just as some north slope African American families decided the question by 

resettling in Sierra Leone and Haiti before the Civil War, others—among them John T. 

Hilton, Anthony F. Clark, John T. Raymond, Henry Weeden, Joshua Bowen Smith, and 

Isaac and Charles Snowden—decided it by moving to Cambridge, where schools were 

already integrated. And even as William C. Nell had many supporters as he made his case 

for integrated institutions, so Thomas Paul Smith (like Nell once an apprentice in the 

Liberator office) had followers for his argument that African American children would 

receive better educations in classrooms with other African American children taught by 

African American instructors. These arguments were not extinguished with the closing of 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 5
the nineteenth century. 

Almost no research has been published to date on the migration of Bostonians of African 

descent from the North End to the West End, and it was beyond the ability of the authors 

within the time frame of this study to do the primary research necessary to date or 

investigate the causes of this movement. Deeds and tax records make quite clear that an 

African American community was in place on the north slope of Beacon Hill well before 

1797, and several decades before the Mount Vernon Proprietors had set out building lots 

for development on the south slope. Very little research also appears to have been 

published on the movement out of the West End to the South End, though this study has 

found the beginnings of migration in the early 1870s. 

One of the most significant contexts in this study is the Underground Railroad, principally 

because the role of so many of Boston’s people of color in this effort can be so well 

documented. An unusual wealth of records related to the Underground Railroad in 

Boston—among them John White Browne’s records from the First Boston Vigilance 

Committee; Francis Jackson’s treasurer’s records from the second Boston Vigilance 

Committee; the correspondence and fugitive records of New York Vigilance Committee 

secretary Sydney Howard Gay, who was in constant contact with Boston abolitionists; the 

correspondence of Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, John A. Andrew, 

the Weston Sisters, William Lloyd Garrison, James Miller McKim, and others; the records 

of the Boston Anti-Manhunting League in the Henry Ingersoll Bowditch Papers—exist 

both in Boston and other repositories in the Northeast.3

 We believe that these primary 

sources, coupled with the few reliable secondary sources that exist, would permit the 

development of a better understanding of how the Underground Railroad actually 

functioned than could be constructed anywhere in the United States. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 6
For this study the authors consulted both sets of Boston Vigilance Committee records, the 

Sydney Howard Gay Papers and Gay’s “Record of Fugitives,”4

 a selected group of the 

Sumner, Parker, Phillips, McKim, and Weston Papers, Wilbur Siebert’s Massachusetts 

notebooks at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, and two key published sources—

William Still’s 1871 The Underground Railroad, and Austin Bearse’s 1880 Reminiscences of 

Fugitive-Slave Law Days in Boston. Again, the time frame of the study limited the amount 

of time we could spend with primary sources, but the authors have been able to document 

the presence of fugitives at many of the BOAF sites in the study, both current and 

recommended. 

The scope of work for this Historic Resource Study raised several questions that needed 

resolution. 

• This study found that no published source and no individual architectural 

historian has been able to document an earlier African American church 

structure in the United States than the 1806 African Meeting House on 

Smith Court. The first black Baptist congregation was founded in Savannah, 

Georgia, in 1779, and there were African American congregations in 

Petersburg, Richmond, and Williamsburg, Virginia, before 1785. But none of 

the original church structures of these congregations have survived (see site 

11). 

• This study consulted architectural historians and historians in cities with 

early African American populations on the question whether a public school 

for children of color existed before 1812, when the school in the African 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 7
Meeting House began to receive a subsidy from the city of Boston. No one 

was able to document an earlier school or to guide us to a published or 

primary source that addresses the question. The authors regard this question 

as still an open one (site 12). 

• This study uncovered no reliable documentation for the claim that John P. 

Coburn used either 3 Coburn Court (site 17) or 2 Phillips Street (site 15) as a 

gaming house. 

• John J. Smith’s wife, Georgiana O. Smith, was active in the efforts to desegregate 

Boston’s schools as well as in the postwar Freedmen’s Aid Society. Their daughter 

Elizabeth is claimed to have been the first African American teacher in the 

integrated Boston public schools, and their son Hamilton was a lawyer, dentist, and 

accomplished avocational photographer (site 24). 

The Historic Resource Study has made several new findings: 

• While several scholars, most notably Albert J. Von Frank, had revealed 

that the fugitive Anthony Burns had stayed with Coffin Pitts, the site of 

Coffin Pitts house had not been pinpointed. This study has done so; see site 

5. 

• This study has found that sailors’ shipping agent James Stewart and his 

wife, the African American lecturer and activist Maria W. Stewart, lived at 8 

Belknap Street, the house black activist and author David Walker had just 

vacated. Stewart’s likely role in distributing Walker’s Appeal cannot be 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 8
overlooked. Michael P. Terranova and Horace Seldon had previously 

identified originally 8 (later 4 ) Belknap Street, now 81 Joy Street, as one of 

Walker’s Boston homes. 

• The architect Richard Upjohn, far better known for his church designs, 

prepared the plans for the Abiel Smith School; it was his first commission for 

a public building. 

• Asher Benjamin designed 2 Phillips Street for John P. Coburn, and the 

plan may well have been the architect’s last commission before his death. 

• Peter Wilcox, one of five African American families from Boston who 

settled in Sierra Leone with Paul Cuffe in 1815, probably lived on the site of 

5 Smith Court (site 7).

For interpretive purposes, this study recommends the addition of thirteen structures and 

sites of structures to Boston African American National Historic Site. Seven are 

nineteenth-century homes owned and/or occupied by men and women significant to 

African American society, politics, and culture of the time; four are the sites of homes of 

such historically significant persons; and two are the sites of important African American

institutions. Two—site 17, the first John P. Coburn House, and site 20, the site of the John 

Sweat Rock House—are part of enclaves of African American settlement. Like other 

communities within cities, the north slope of Beacon Hill was not simply a collection of 

dwellings and institutions; the connections between people in these houses and institutions 

formed small neighborhoods within a larger neighborhood or subcommunity. Holmes 

Alley was certainly one such neighborhood; the authors suggest that Coburn Court (site 17) 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 9
and the area around the homes of Lewis Hayden and William Riley near and on Southac 

Court (site 20) and Wilberforce Place were probably others. In future research BOAF may 

wish to construe its interpretation so as to embrace neighborhoods. This study’s 

recommendations for additional sites are presented here by site number with brief 

arguments for and against including them within BOAF’s interpretive reach. 

• 1 • Site of David Walker House

The David Walker House should be added to BOAF for numerous reasons. First, it 

was occupied between 1827 and 1829 by the most articulate and radical man of color 

of his time. Just as the Massachusetts General Colored Association preceded the 

white-founded Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Association, David Walker emerged 

before William Lloyd Garrison in his recognition that it was only through the press 

and such publications as his own Walker’s Appeal that people of color, great 

numbers of them isolated on disparate plantations throughout the South, could 

come to unite themselves for their own betterment. Second, it was later occupied by 

other important figures in the north slope community. One was a great admirer of 

Walker, the early African American orator Maria W. Stewart, and her husband 

James, a shipper of sailors who could have been involved in distributing Walker’s 

Appeal. Later tenants, including the fugitive Leonard Black, were important in the 

history of the African Meeting House. Finally, its site represents the northernmost 

range of African American habitation on Joy Street. With Smith Court at the 

southern end, these two Joy Street landmarks anchor what was once a thriving, 

politically active African American community. 

Mitigating against including the Walker House is its extensive alteration since the 

time Walker, the Stewarts, and Leonard and George Black occupied it. Only the 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 10
north and south walls and the foundation of the 1825 structure remain, and only the 

north wall is now visible. It may also be difficult to interpret Walker’s importance to 

general audiences. 

• 2 • John T. Hilton House

Built in 1825-26 for the black hairdresser and musician George B. Holmes, the 

Hilton House remained in African American ownership for half a century. Occupied 

briefly by John Telemachus Hilton, one of the most politically active of all Boston’s 

men of color, the house was associated for a longer time with the brothers Anthony 

F. and Jonas W. Clark. Anthony Clark lived in the house, while Jonas Clark used it 

as a rental property. It was the site of one of at least four of the boardinghouses of 

John R. Taylor, cited in several primary sources as a fugitive assistant. Most 

significant, though, is this house in its landscape. With the two dwelling just south of 

it (see 3 and 4), also extant, it forms a rare survival, a cluster of brick homes like 

those that lined the east side of antebellum Joy Street; this group somehow escaped 

the rebuilding of the northern part of the street that took place about 1900. 

Interpreting the Hilton House provides an opportunity to talk about Hilton’s life as 

well as to continue the story of Leonard Black, who most likely stayed here when he 

first came to Boston. It also provides a site at which to discuss the lives of the Clarks, 

who deserve more research. The house was owned by people of color for half a 

century (1825-75). 

In view of John T. Hilton’s limited connection with the house, BOAF might consider 

renaming this property for Anthony F. and/or Jonas W. Clark or for George B. 

Holmes, the dwelling’s original owner. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 11
• 3 • Robert Roberts House

The Roberts House should be included in BOAF because of the integrity of its 

relation to the Hilton and Putnam / Johnson Houses (see 2 and 4), because of the 

property’s long history of African American ownership (1823-78), and because of 

the significance of Roberts’s life and his family history. Roberts married into the 

Easton family, one of the most prosperous and politically aware families of color in 

the commonwealth, as well as into the large Paul family of Exeter, New Hampshire. 

In relative terms, a good deal is known about his early life, and his seminal House 

Servant’s Directory sheds light on the world of domestic service in early national 

Boston. Moreover, the experiences of Roberts’s son Benjamin in the school 

desegregation struggles of the 1840s and 1850s as well as in printing and on the 

antislavery lecture circuit are well worth interpreting. This house, though never 

Benjamin’s, is probably as appropriate a place as any extant dwelling to begin to tell 

his story: Benjamin Roberts’s own home, on the north side of Cambridge Street, has 

not survived. The connection of the Freeman family to the property is also worth 

interpreting, related as they are to the Lews of Boston and Dracut; as do the Pauls, 

both the Freemans and the Lews illustrate the stream of migration from rural 

northern New England to Boston, a pattern common among both blacks and whites. 

The only argument against including the site in BOAF is the lack of long-term 

tenancy before 1859; however, Robert Roberts owned the property between 1824 

and 1859, and some of the tenants were significant persons in the community and 

can be interpreted in their own right. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 12
• 4 • George Putnam / Robert Johnson House

Built in 1826-27, the Putnam / Johnson House is the third member of the intact 

cluster of African American dwellings on Joy Street. The structure should be 

included within BOAF’s interpretive purview for other reasons as well. It was owned 

and occupied by two significant families of color for seventy-eight years, from its

construction until 1904. The first, that of George Putnam, actively worked to realize 

the tenets of Garrisonian abolitionism and fought for school desegregation. The 

second, that of Robert Johnson, was born in slavery. Johnson himself was a fugitive, 

and the purchase of his wife, mother-in-law, and other relatives is well documented 

in the papers of Charles Sumner. The papers of John A. Andrew need to be 

researched as well for more information on the case of Seth Bott, a fugitive who

married the sister of Johnson’s second wife, Evelina Bell. The extent of information 

available on both Putnam and Johnson, and of known and probable documentation 

of the Bott case (involving persons associated with three sites recommended for 

inclusion in BOAF) argues strongly for its inclusion. So, too, does the fact that 

Johnson was a fugitive who came to Boston at a relatively early point and chose to

settle in the city rather than in Canada or England. 

 • 5 • Site of Coffin Pitts House

Owned for sixty-five years by the family of black abolitionist Coffin Pitts, the 

structure now on this site may encompass a brick house on the site when Pitts 

purchased the property in 1835. Exactly analogous to the site of the David Walker 

House, it took preserves the north wall of the earlier structure in the current 

dwelling on the site. This site deserves inclusion in BOAF because of Pitts’s 

connection with the well-known fugitive Anthony Burns, whom Pitts sheltered on 

this site and for whom Pitts found work. Pitts’s career in church and antislavery 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 13
reform is also relatively well documented. Other aspects of his life may be 

interpreted here: he was among the many black activists who worked as used 

clothing dealers in Boston, a connection that calls for detailed examination; and, like 

Robert Roberts and Robert Johnson, he had been born in the South and was a 

relatively early migrant to Boston. His status, free or fugitive, is not known. 

The chief obstacle confronting inclusion of the site of the Pitts House is the extent 

of alteration of the existing dwelling from the house in which Pitts lived and Burns 

stayed. However, its antebellum appearance should not be difficult for visitors to

imagine, given the existence of the 1835 plan and the house’s immediate 

juxtaposition to the Putnam / Johnson House, built at roughly the same time and of 

the same materials. 

• 14 • Second Site of Home for Aged Colored Women

The authors recommend including one of the three structures occupied by the 

Home for Aged Colored Women because of the institution’s unique role both within 

the history of such homes and within its community. As historian Sarah Shoenfeld 

has pointed out, most homes for the elderly do not exist within the communities of 

their constituents, and in that respect alone the Home for Aged Colored Women 

arguably benefitted from the racism that triggered its creation. The home’s founding 

and operation involved an alliance of whites and people of color on Beacon Hill, 

including Rebecca Clarke, John A. Andrew, Leonard Grimes, and Georgiana O. 

Smith, and its residents included Louisa Nell Gray, women of the Barbadoes family, 

and others. The stories of its occupants span the nineteenth century and reach into

the centuries on both sides. In these respects the transcribed records of the home 

are rich interpretive resources about migration, work, the lives of ordinary women of 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 14
color, and the Beacon Hill community generally. 

The authors recommend the Myrtle Street site because the Home for Aged Colored 

Women was longest at this location and records from its years at this site have been 

transcribed. The Myrtle Street site was also the southernmost extension of the 

Belkap/Jenner/Carnes ropewalk. However, the building that stood on this site as the 

Home for Aged Colored Women has not survived. The Home’s final site (1900-

1944) at 22 Hancock is extant and shares the double house with site 26, the Charles 

Sumner House. Yet this site is interpretively less rich because the records from 

these years have not been transcribed. 

 • 16 • Site of Henry L. W. Thacker House

The site of the Thacker House deserves inclusion in BOAF because of Thacker’s 

documented involvement in fugitive assistance and his reputed connection with 

Joshua Bowen Smith, though the latter needs more research. The tangled Thacker

genealogy also needs to be researched thoroughly, as do other primary sources on 

the presumed father and son. 

Arguing against inclusion of this site is not only the replacement of the 1830s-1870s 

dwelling but the replacement of adjacent structures on this block of Phillips Street. 

The streetscape does not resemble its antebellum counterpart in any respect. 

Moreover, without more research on both the Thacker family and their connection 

to Joshua Bowen Smith, himself not an adequately understood figure, the site lacks 

the interpretive strength of other suggested additions. 

• 17 • John P. Coburn House / Coburn Court

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 15
The Coburn House is the sole survivor of a pair of brick townhouses built before 

1830 in one of the north slope’s many courts. It was not only black clothier John P. 

Coburn’s first Beacon Hill home, but it was part of a neighborhood of kin and 

friends that existed throughout the nineteenth century in this block of Southac 

(Phillips) Street. Even if it were not associated with the Coburn, Nell, Gray, and 

Williams families, it warrants interpretation as reflective of a prevalent north slope 

landscape pattern. Although this pattern and the genealogy of these families can be 

interpreted now, much remains to be both synthesized and documented. The early 

lives of both John P. Coburn and Ira Smith Gray deserve intensive research. 

Moreover, the particular distribution of courts in the north slope should be 

analyzed. 

The chief obstacle to including Coburn Court is the difficulty of public access. 

However, it seems critical to the authors that BOAF work to achieve some way of 

acquiring access to this court, perhaps the least visible of all from Phillips Street. 

Should documentation of gaming activities on Coburn Court arise, the invisibility of 

the court is a critical part of the interpretive story. 

• 18 • Site of Twelfth Baptist Church 

The Phillips Street site of the Twelfth Baptist Church should be included with 

BOAF because of the importance of the church and its pastor in the community, 

especially during the 1850s, its first decade. Leonard Grimes was at the center of

every fugitive rendition case in Boston, even as he sought funding in every corner to 

complete the church edifice. He was a documented fugitive assistant, raised funds 

for the purchase of Anthony Burns’s freedom and members of his own 

congregation, worked for the creation of the Home for Aged Colored Women, 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 16
encouraged John A. Andrew to created the commonwealth’s regiments of men of 

color, and served as an agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau as an agent in Boston. His 

church was publicly and widely known as the “fugitive slaves’ church.” 

However, interpreting the schism that gave rise to Twelfth Baptist, an event still not 

well understood, may be a difficult challenge. In addition, the fugitive presence in 

this “fugitive slave church” has yet to be fully documented. Finally, nothing remains 

of the original 1850s structure, and interpreters will need to rely on engravings and 

photographs of the original church. Grimes’s home on Grove Street has also not 

survived. Unfortunately, there is no other logical place to interpret his life and the 

church he led, so important to the lives of so many residents of the north slope. 

• 20 • Site of John Sweat Rock House

The site of the structure in which physician and activist John Sweat Rock lived and 

in which John R. Taylor and William Manix ran boardinghouses is significant not 

only for these associations but for the neighborhood in which it existed. Here was

Primus Hall’s soapworks, home, and school for children of color; and the homes of 

Lewis Hayden, William Riley, Samuel Snowden, Thomas Cole, and, it may be 

speculated, scores of fugitives from American slavery. Within two blocks was the 

home of the Rev. Thomas Paul, whose grandson married the daughter of William 

Riley. Within this neighborhood are two courts, Southac Court and Wilberforce 

Place, the former with a documented Underground Railroad association and the 

latter associated with one of the north slope’s earliest tradesmen and activists. 

What argues most strongly against including this site is the current structure, which 

replaced the dwellings built at 81 and 83 Southac in 1848. Until a great deal more 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 17
research is done on the built environment of lower Southac, it cannot be known how 

much remains of its antebellum landscape. Much more work remains to be done in 

tax, census, directory, deed, probate, and other primary records to develop an 

understanding of the emergence of this neighborhood and its residents. Still, the 

authors have little doubt of its significance based on what is known to date and 

strongly advise further research on this area rather on this structure alone. 

• 21 • Thomas Paul House

The Paul House should be included in BOAF because of Paul’s importance to the 

north slope community, because the house is extant, and because it is part of the 

early lower Southac neighborhood. Though this neighborhood is as yet little known, 

its importance is undoubted. Paul was living in this house, and Primus Hall was 

living two blocks away, when Mayor Josiah Quincy cracked down on rowdiness in 

the area in 1823 and rioting took place three years later. What occurred here needs 

to be researched, and why Paul lived here rather than at the African Meeting House 

bears further examination; all is the stuff of lively and meaningful interpretation. 

However, the history of this house has not been undertaken, and much remains to 

be done before it can be included in any BOAF interpretive offering. The Paul 

family itself deserves more intensive research. 

• 22 • Site of John A. Andrew House

Though currently discussed at the Shaw Memorial, John Albion Andrew deserves

fuller interpretation. His connection to the north slope African American 

community precedes his authorization of the Civil War black regiments by fifteen 

years or more, and as a figure in antebellum abolitionism, civil rights, and 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 18
Massachusetts history generally he is woefully underinterpreted. Like Charles 

Sumner, he practiced an abolitionism different, but arguably not less effective, than 

that of Garrison, and his alliances with people of color were probably no less strong. 

Mitigating against including the site of Andrew’s Charles Street home is the fact that 

an 1890-1910 commercial/residential structure has replaced the house he and his

family inhabited. His correspondence has not been researched; many letters to and 

from him are in the correspondence of Charles Sumner and James Freeman Clarke 

and should be consulted to construct a well-informed story. 

• 25 • George and Susan Hillard House

The Hillard House should be included in BOAF because of its repeated use to 

shelter and employ fugitives and its ability to demonstrate the role of committed 

white abolitionists in that aspect of abolitionism. George Hillard’s role as a federal 

commissioner, supporter of Webster, and partnership with Charles Sumner is an

ironic wrinkle in this historical tale. That the Hillards’ actions were attested by a 

variety of sources enhances the value as well as the complexity of this story. The 

house is also next door to the home of James Freeman Clarke, whose mother was 

moved to found the Home for Aged Colored Women by the plight of her own 

retired domestic, Rosanna Miller. 

The authors can think of little that argues against including this structure. The life

stories of the Hillards and of the various fugitives they assisted and hired can 

probably be better documented; this study did not ascertain, for example, if Hillard 

correspondence or papers of other types exist. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 19
 • 26 • Charles Sumner House

Built across the street from what was reputed to be the largest distillery in the 

United House, the house to which the family of Charles Sumner moved in 1829 

remained the senator’s home for thirty-eight years. It should be part of BOAF’s 

interpretive offering because of Sumner’s importance to civil rights law in the 

federal arena, a sphere in which the cause had achieved markedly little success 

throughout the nineteenth century. Sumner’s willingness to take a stand against, as 

he called it, “the power of slavery in the national government” brought him lifethreatening physical harm, and his legal achievements, particularly during and after 

the Civil War, are inestimable. His work in Roberts v. City of Boston and in other 

lesser known events should neither be discounted and should be better documented. 

So should his longterm relationships with Joshua Bowen Smith and John J. Smith. 

Like Andrew, Sumner’s importance generally and to the African American 

community in particular is vastly underrated, and his relation to that community was 

of quite a different character than that of the Hillards. Moreover, the house is 

intact. It is also in the midst of an African American community, being sandwiched 

between Joy Street and Ridgway Lane, where numerous African Americans lived, 

including parts of the Barbadoes and Howard families.5

The only possible obstacle to including the Sumner House is the notion that Sumner 

himself may be hard to interpret, but the best resources are his speeches and 

writings, as well as letters to him. His oratory, perhaps in opposition to Garrison’s 

writings and speeches, might make his positions clearer and more provocative to 

general audiences than any attempted paraphrase. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 20
Introduction

The “west end” of Boston, as many local historians have noted, was one of the last sections 

of the Shawmut peninsula to be developed because of the presence of the three hills (giving 

it its Trimountain, or Tremont, name) that made development difficult. These hills were, 

roughly from east to west, Pemberton, Beacon, and Mount Vernon, and together they 

formed a ridge that is identifiable, though in truncated form, in the topography of Beacon 

Hill today. 

As Annie Haven Thwing wrote in 1920, Beacon Hill “was the section devoted to pastures 

and mowing ground, and land was granted to those deserving of a grant for some service 

rendered, or who had been an adventurer in the common stock, or for some good reason, 

from two to twenty acres each.”6

 On the northwestern side of this slope near Mount 

Vernon, though, streets were laid out “as early as 1730,” Allen Chamberlain noted in 1925, 

“and a number of small and scattered houses had been built between Myrtle and 

Cambridge Streets.”7

 

By 1743, when a city census recorded 1,374 people of color in Boston, William Price made a 

map showing “Southack” (now Phillips) Street laid out along the shoreline of the Charles 

River, about on the alignment of what was later George and later still West Cedar Street, 

and then turning the corner along its current alignment (map 2). May (now Revere) Street 

is shown roughly on its current alignment. Grove, Centre (now Anderson), and Garden 

Streets ran from Cambridge Street south on their paths, but they reached only two and a 

half blocks to an orchard or pasture, as did Butolph (Irving) Street. Only another street 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 21
called George (now Hancock) traversed the entire hill from Cambridge to Beacon Streets, 

taking a jog to the west along the ridge line (now Mt. Vernon Street) and crossing to 

Beacon Street along the alignment of Belknap Street, then called Clapboard Street on the 

south slope. Belknap Street existed as a named street from 1734 but was not delineated on 

Price’s map.

8

 

Another map made in 1743 labeled the westernmost section of the north slope, at the angle 

in Southack Street, “Hell Hill,” and in 1775 Lieutenant Thomas Page of the Royal Welsh 

Fusiliers labeled Mount Vernon “Mount Whoredom” (map 3), a nickname Nathaniel I. 

Bowditch remembered seeing with a slightly different spelling in 1855 on a map “made 60 

or 70 years ago.”9

 Why this area had become the center of brothels and licentious activity is 

not entirely clear; one may speculate that its lack of development, and the fact that the 

North End was in this period still home to numerous of Boston’s affluent citizens, may bear 

some role. Its hilly topography created other features that made it unattractive to 

developers—and attractive to other types of speculative ventures. As Beth Bower has 

pointed out, “The north slope was and is the dark side of Beacon Hill,” a shadowy place 

and, in low-lying areas by the river, swampy.10 By the 1770s the West End was chosen as the 

site for a powder magazine, and by 1793 a pest house for victims of infectious disease was 

located there as well, at the southwest corner of Grove and Cambridge Streets.11

By 1790, 766 free African American people lived in Boston, according to the first federal 

census. The census did not indicate place of residence nor every resident by name; it lists 

only heads of household, 108 of whom were people of color, both men and women. 

Another three unnamed “negroes” were listed at the end of the enumeration, and another 

thirteen “negroes and mulattoes” were enumerated at the almshouse. The total population 

of Boston, the census stated, was 18,038. People of African descent were 4.2 percent of the 

city total, a share of the population they rarely if ever held again until after 1900.12 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 22
Boston city directories did not list residents by race until 1813, so it is not possible without 

extensive research in tax records, church records, deeds, and probate records to determine 

precisely how many of these pre-1800 African American householders lived in the West 

End. John Daniels, a sociologist and settlement house worker who began studying Boston’s 

black community with the guidance of Robert A. Woods of the South End House and 

published the first comprehensive history of that community in 1914, placed its origins in 

the North End: 

In the earliest days most of the Negroes who did not, as slaves and servants, live in 

white households, were congregated about the wharves at the extreme northern tip 

of the North End, opposite Charlestown. This locality was customarily referred to as 

‘New Guinea.’ Till about 1820, probably a majority of the Negroes continue to live 

in various parts of the North End and of the middle portion of the city, now the 

downtown business section, for the reason that these were till then the only thickly 

settled districts. Even before 1800, however, there had begun a shifting of the Negro 

population to the comparatively new and open West End.13

It is known that a great number of people of African descent lived in the North End and 

that as many as one thousand are buried in Copp’s Hill Burial Ground on Hull Street. Yet 

it seems possible that people of color had settled in the westernmost part of the West End 

at an early point, perhaps as early as the 1740s.14 This section of the West End is woefully 

underdocumented, and because of events that occurred there and its long association with 

people of African descent it deserves far greater attention that has ever been paid to it. 

That people of color were present there in significant numbers seems apparent from the 

Rev. James Davis’s 1817 warning about the “awful impieties” of Southack Street. There, he 

declared, “multitudes of coloured people . . . are influenced into habits of indolence” by 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 23
“this sink of sin” where, he stated, “five and twenty or thirty shops are opened on Lord’s 

days from morning to evening and ardent spirits are retailed without restraint, while 

hundreds are intoxicated and spend the holy sabbath in frolicking and gambling, in fighting 

and blaspheming; and in many scenes of iniquity and debauchery too dreadful to be 

named.” Three years earlier Boston selectmen recorded “disorderly conduct . . . 

occasioned by a number of Spanish sailors and the sailors from the Constitution frigate 

assembling at West Boston,” and in 1815 Charles Bulfinch confessed that he had made 

enemies of some for attempting “to roll back the torrent of vice at the Hill at West 

Boston.”15 Oddly, though, the J. G. Hales Map of Boston, made in 1814, shows virtually no 

structures on the two westernmost blocks of Southack Street at this time (map 7). 

The degree to which people of color were responsible for or involved in this “torrent of 

vice” has never been established, but in 1821 the Massachusetts legislature took two actions 

strongly suggesting that body’s belief that people of color were in large measure at the root 

of “the Hill’s” problems. First, the legislature appointed a commission to determine 

whether to limit the admission to the commonwealth of free blacks—“a species of

population, which threatened to become both injurious and burdensome,” its mandate 

stated. Second, it went on record in complaint against “violent riots in that part of the town, 

where persons of colour are collected in great numbers” over the past several years. 

On 15 June 1821 the appointed committee, through chair Theodore Lyman (later mayor of 

Boston in 1834-35, when the Abiel Smith School was built), reported that Massachusetts 

already had a law placed on its statute books in 1788 regulating the residence of certain 

persons of color16 but that it had never been enforced and was therefore “ineffectual.” 

Lyman concluded, “The history of that law has well convinced the Committee that no 

measure (which they could devise) would be attended with the smallest good consequence” 

and that, in any event, “both in the public mind and in the courts of law . . . the people of 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 24
the Commonwealth have always believed negroes and mulattoes to possess the same right 

and capability to become citizens as white persons.”17

Boston historian Walter Muir Whitehill has stated that in 1823 Josiah Quincy, then mayor 

of the city, used a provincial ordinance to arrest fiddlers in West End dance halls and divest 

tavern owners of their licences, “and soon cleaned up the area.” But accounts exist of a riot 

in the West End on 14 July 1826 and in the North End in 1825, the latter occurring when a 

crowd in blackface carrying pitchforks and noisemakers mobbed that district’s black 

section, wherever that may have been. Boston was not the only northern city to have been 

subject to racial violence in the 1820s, a topic not yet studied in any detail by historians.18

Fortunately, the eastern side of the north slope of Beacon Hill is better documented. In 

the mid-1600s Thomas Buttolph had assembled an eight-acre pasture in two purchases. 

This pasture embraced what is now Joy Street. Buttolph died in 1667, and in 1702 his estate 

was divided between his grandchildren: Abigail Buttolph Belknap, wife of Joseph Belknap 

Jr., received the middle portion of the pasture. On 5 August 1732, she divided her land in 

seven equal portions among her children and grandchildren. Intending to sell off individual 

house lots, by 1734 they laid out a thirty-foot road—Belknap’s Lane, later called Belknap 

Street—along the eastern margin of their mother’s pasture land. 

Two years earlier, on 17 April 1730, Abigail Belknap had sold the single 24-by-647-foot 

portion of the pasture not divided in 1732 to her son Nathaniel, which suggests that 

Nathaniel Belknap intended to construct a ropewalk there; deeds indicate that between 17 

April 1730 and 31 December 1733 he had done so. On the latter date Nathaniel Belknap, 

working as a bookbinder, sold the lot he had purchased from his mother for £130 three 

years earlier to Charlestown ropemaker Thomas Jenner for £700, the property being 

described as “a Certain Peice [sic] or parcel of Land being a Ropewalk now in the 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 25
improvement of Thomas Hawding . . . together with the Wheelhouse & Loft over it & all 

the Posts, hooks, Gates fences, Trees, Gates, [?] Barrs, and Buildings on the premises.” 

Terranova suggests that Jenner had probably leased the works to Hawding.19

Rosebrock has suggested that this ropewalk may be the one depicted on John Bonner’s 

1722 map of Boston (map 1), based on the fact that it appears “tantalizingly close” to the 

site of what became known in 1822 as Holmes Alley.20 Terranova notes that a ropewalk 

appears in a similar location on the 1728 William Burgis map of the city, but that in view of 

the general imprecision of maps of this period all that might safely be claimed about this 

ropewalk is that it was “somewhere on the north slope, running southward up the hill, with 

an enlargement at Cambridge Street.” Terranova speculates that the maps more likely 

depicted one of the several ropewalks owned by Samuel Waldo, in particular the one that 

ran along what is now Ridgeway Lane. Thwing stated in 1920 that there were fourteen 

ropewalks on Beacon Hill, a district “chiefly noted for its ropewalks, distilleries, and sugar 

houses. . . . There was only one church, the West Church, a windmill, and as far as known 

only one tavern, the White Horse Tavern, which in 1789 was somewhere on Cambridge 

Street.”21 

On the south or Boston Common side of Beacon Hill, Clapboard Street had been laid out 

beginning in 1661 as a ten-foot right-of-way for Samuel Bosworth, and in 1715 his grandson 

Elisha Cooke (on whose pasture land George Middleton and Louis Glapion built their 

house between 1786 and 1791) extended it to the three ropewalks blocking the passage to 

the north slope (maps 5 & 6). These east-west ropewalks ran from Hancock Street to a 

point west of Anderson Street, and Rosebrock has noted that they “effectively blocked the 

area [that is, the north slope] from contact with the area to the south until the beginning of 

the 19th century when they were closed.”22 Clapboard Street was unified with Belknap 

Street extended to connect Beacon and Cambridge streets. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 26
The ropewalk Nathaniel Belknap sold to Thomas Jenner in 1733 was twenty-four feet wide 

and extended 640 feet, and it ran up the hill from Cambridge to what is now Myrtle Street, 

in the middle of the block between South Russell and Joy Streets. Deeds identify it as 

“Nathaniel Belknap’s,” “Thomas Jenner’s,” or “Carnes’” ropewalk. In 1734 Jenner 

purchased another lot from Nathaniel Belknap: part of Nathaniel’s share of his mother’s 

pasture, the property was adjacent to the ropewalk and had sixty feet of frontage on 

Belknap Street. This adjacent parcel belonged to the ropewalk through the end of the 

1700s, and it was on this parcel that Smith Court was laid out in 1798.23 By 1763 other lots 

to the north of this lot, fronting on Belknap Street and extending west to the ropewalk, 

were being sold to men of color. 

The first parcel to be sold was to the African American laborer Tobias Locker, or 

Lockman, who according to Boston town records had been a free man only since 1 March 

1756.24 He married twice, first to Mercy Barnabas on 15 October 1755 at New South 

Church and second to a Margaret (her last name is not recorded) on 13 September 1764. 

On 1 October 1763, Locker bought from Belknap heir widow Mary Belknap Homer a 

parcel of land on Belknap Street 59 feet wide by 113 feet deep. Locker paid a little more 

than £26 for it. On 8 December 1764 Locker and his wife Margaret mortgaged the 

property to “Scipio, a free negro man.” 

This Scipio was probably Scipio Fayerweather, who had been freed in 1761 by the will of 

John Fayerweather.25 In June and November 1766, in the same records, the town assessed 

both Locker and Fayerweather for failing to perform their required highway work, which 

suggests that they were living next to or with each other at that time, and the fact of the 

mortgage in 1764, which Locker paid off by early October 1766, certainly suggests the two 

men knew each other well. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 27
On 27 September 1765 and 16 October 1767 Scipio, “a free negro man of said Boston 

Labourer heretofore servant and slave to John Fayerweather late of said Boston,” bought 

two adjacent lots on Belknap Street which included the modern-day extent of both sides of 

Smith Court as well as sixty-nine feet to the north. In 1765 Scipio bought the first, a parcel 

sixty feet wide that had belonged to the ropewalk, from Joanna Jenner, the widow of 

ropemaker Thomas Jenner for £24. In 1767 he acquired the second, immediately to the 

north with roughly eighty-nine feet of frontage on Belknap Street, from Ebenezer Storer Jr. 

In two subsequent deeds Scipio sold back to Joanna Jenner the original sixty-foot-wide 

ropewalk parcel and an adjacent parcel nineteen feet wide. In 1798, when the ropewalk was 

taken down, a new passageway twenty feet wide was laid through the middle of this land; 

first known as May’s Court, it was later renamed Smith Court. Scipio Fayerweather was 

left with sixty-nine feet immediately to the north of the ropewalk parcel, and his land was 

ultimately developed into the lots later known as 27, 23, and 21 Belknap (52, 56, and 58 Joy 

Street). It is unclear whether he built upon this lot. On 3 May 1799 he sold part of the land 

to Green Pearce who, though listed in the 1813 city directory as of African descent, was 

probably not a man of color.26

Following Locker and Fayerweather was Caesar Wendall, who was a free man of color but 

called a “servant laborer” of John Wendell. On 24 January 1771 he bought land on the west 

side of Belknap Street from the heirs of James Bowdoin, but he died in March 1780. Caesar 

Wendall’s will, probated 30 June that year, left all of his estate to “unto my Worthy and 

Honored Friend Jack Austin of said Boston Shopkeeper.” Austin and his wife Sylvia, who 

were free people of color, sold the northern half of their property (later 17 Belknap / 64 

Joy) to the African American laborer Prince Watts on 23 June 1785. Two years later 

Austin, then living in Charlestown, sold the southern half of his land (later 19 Belknap /62 

Joy) to the black boatbuilder Boston Smith. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 28
In May 1787 Boston Smith sold the west half of 19 Belknap to Cromwell Barnes, a black 

perukemaker (wigmaker), and the east half to Brittain Balch, also a man of color who 

worked as a hatter. Six years later Balch deeded his half to Barnes, and by 1794 it appears 

that Barnes had built a double house on the lot: tax records show that by 1798 he shared 

this house with Scipio Dalton, father of African American community leader Thomas 

Dalton, and both were living next door to Prince Watts, who owned the lot immediately to 

the north (17 Belknap).27

Boston Smith also received Tobias Locker’s fifty-nine-foot parcel through Locker’s will 

after the death of Locker’s wife Margaret between 1783 and 1789.28 In 1789 Smith sold the 

northern half of Tobias Locker’s land, which included the northern half of a wooden house 

fronting on Belknap Street, to Samuel Bean. Rosebrock stated that Bean was taxed at this 

location by 1790 and that the assessor described him in that year as “black and old.”29

Boston Smith held on to the southerly half of the house. The 1810 census shows that 

Samuel Bean shared this house with Peter Smith, and deeds indicate that Smith owned the 

house, which bordered southerly on Smith Place and easterly on Belknap Street. 

On 17 April 1793 Boston Smith sold a strip of land twelve by eighty feet along the southern 

edge what had been Locker’s land to Hamlet Earle, who in 1798 was a servant to Herman 

Brimmer. In October that year Earle sold an undivided half of this strip to Cuff Buffum. At 

some undetermined point after that sale, Boston Smith laid out Smith Place along the 

southerly side of what had been Tobias Locker’s house with a jog around the land he had 

sold to Earle; the lane then went down the center of his lot at 15 Belknap to the ropewalk, 

which in 1793 was still a ropewalk.30

Michael Terranova’s research has established that the ropewalk was dismantled between 11 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 29
June 1797 and 10 March 1798, and on 1 March 1799 the housewright Theodore Phinney 

came into possession of a two-hundred-foot length of that ropewalk land leading north 

from the present-day site of Smith Court and divided it into lots. Soon afterward, on 30 

March 1799, Phinney sold the first two lots on the now-demolished ropewalk to three 

members of the African Society, formed by men of color in Boston just three years earlier 

“for the mutual benefit of each other, which may from time to time offer; behaving 

ourselves at the same time as true and faithful Citizens of the Commonwealth in which we 

live.”31 Phinney sold two lots, one to Hannibal Allen and Peter Fortune Bailey jointly, and 

the second to Scipio Dalton. Allen and Bailey immediately sold the northern half of their 

lot to George Holmes (then spelled Homes). 

On 10 August 1799 Phinney sold the first of two lots on which 7 Smith Court now stands to 

the black mariner Peter Guss (or Gust). Two weeks later, on 24 August, Phinney sold the 

lot between that of Holmes and Dalton to Hannibal Allen, Peter Fortune Bailey, and Peter 

Branch, also a member of the African Soicety, “in company of the Sons of the African 

Society.” Another two weeks later, on 7 September 1799, Phinney sold a second of two lots 

on Smith Court (now 5 Smith Court) to Timothy Phillips and Peter Mitchell, both listed as

of African descent (Phillips in the 1790 federal census, Mitchell in the 1813 city directory 

and in a series of marriage intentions in Boston town records). The last lot, on which 7A 

Smith Court now stands, Phinney sold with a house already on it to the New Bedford black 

mariner Richard Johnson and the hairdresser David Bartlett on 6 January 1800. It follows 

from deed research that the house at 7A must have been built between 1 March 1799 and 6 

January 1800.32 

Thus, as Allen Chamberlain pointed out nearly eighty years ago, before the south slope of 

Beacon Hill was laid out into house lots an African American neighborhood had already 

emerged on the west side of Belknap Street. The 1787 decision to build the new 

Massachusetts State House on Beacon Street gave birth to the Mount Vernon Proprietors, 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 30
the group of real estate speculators that laid out and developed Beacon Hill south of 

Pinckney Street in 1795. But first Mount Vernon needed to be leveled, its top shorn off and 

dumped as fill in the Charles River to create Charles Street. The 1798 Federal Dwellings 

Tax showed George Holmes, Peter Jessamine, Cromwell Barnes, Lewis Sylvester, Cato 

Hancock, Prince Watts, Joel Holden, Cuff Buffum, Hamlet Earl, Boston Faddy, Boston 

Smith, Peter Gust, Peter Virginia, Oliver Nash, Abel Barbadoes, John Boyce, Thomas 

Jarvis, Samuel Bean, Mrs. Bostille, and Scipio Dalton all living on the north slope of 

Beacon Hill before the filling process was completed on the south side by 1805. This fact 

should lay to rest the notion that the African American community on the north slope 

“developed as servant quarters for blacks employed by wealthy Beacon Hill families,” for it 

preceded the lion’s share of development of the affluent part of Beacon Hill, considering 

the intervening embargoes and War of 1812, by more than two decades.33

Very little is known about some of these early residents, but records exist about others. 

Hannibal Allen, Peter Fortune Bailey, Peter Branch, Scipio Dalton, and Hamlet Earl were 

among the forty-four members of the African Society. On 6 March 1775 Boston Smith and 

Cuff Buffum became charter members of Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted 

Masons, African Lodge #1. On 4 January 1787, Samuel Bean, Boston Smith, and Cuff 

Buffum were among the seventy-three “African blacks” who signed and sent a petition to 

the Massachusetts General Court asking financial assistance for return to Africa on the 

grounds that, as they wrote, “we yet find ourselves, in many respects, in very disagreeable 

and disadvantageous circumstances, most of which must attend us, so long as we and our 

children live in America.” The state House of Representatives accepted the petition but 

left it to wither and die in committee. Smith had bought his Belknap Street land before 

putting his name to the petition; Bean and Buffum bought property afterward.34

As historians Sidney and Emma Kaplan pointed out, the 1787 petition was not the first 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 31
formal request submitted by Boston’s African Americans for financial assistance to return 

to Africa. In 1773 four then-enslaved Bostonians, whom the Kaplans did not identify, 

“organized a movement to persuade the General Court to legislate for the ‘Africans . . . one 

day in a week to work for themselves’ in order to earn enough to buy freedom and ‘leave 

the province . . . as soon as we can from our joynt labours procure money to transport 

ourselves to some part of the coast of Africa, where we propose a settlement.’”35 

Efforts originating within the African American community itself to leave the United States 

and resettle in Africa culminated in Paul Cuffe’s 1815 voyage to Sierra Leone in the 

Traveller. Cuffe, a man of African and Native American descent from Westport, 

Massachusetts, was a Quaker and a committed abolitionist who participated in a broad 

trans-Atlantic network of like-minded Friends. His business and philosophical connections 

with such English Quakers as William Allen helped establish the financial and political 

backing he needed to found a settlement in Sierra Leone, which he envisioned as an 

agricultural colony producing free-labor staples that would undercut the products of the 

American South. 

In June 1812 Cuffe began to correspond with Boston’s Prince Saunders, Robert Roberts 

(site 3), and Perry Locke about his Sierra Leone plan. At that point, Cuffe hoped to leave 

within months, and he wrote that he would shortly come to Boston to explain his plan to 

the city’s black community and enlist its support, as well as prospective settlers. On 14 July 

1812 Cuffe addressed Boston’s African Sierra Leone Benevolent Society, but it was evident

to him in June that war would interfere with his plans: Cuffe’s resettlement voyage did not 

occur until 1815.36

In 1812, Saunders was probably the instructor of the school for children of color in the 

basement of the African Meeting House (site 11).37 All that is known about Perry Locke is 

that he was listed in the 1813 city directory—the first to list Boston’s black residents, as 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 32
“Africans,” separately after the listing of white residents—living on Warren Street. When 

Cuffe did leave on the Traveller, accompanying him were Locke, his wife, and four children; 

Samuel Hewes, his wife, and four children; Thomas Jarvis, his wife, and five children; and 

Peter Wilcox, his wife, and five children. Five other families, apparently not Bostonians, 

traveled with Cuffe to Sierra Leone.38

Of these four emigrant Boston families, three lived close to each other in the Belknap 

Street neighborhood. Jarvis ran a boardinghouse with James Bromfield (or Broomfield) in 

1810 in the rear of houses later known as 21 and 23 Belknap Street; he purchased the 

property from black laborer Joel Holden on 14 June 1798. It was, Rosebrock has stated, 

“an oddly shaped wood tenement, 16' wide on the north and 15' wide on the south, 30' 

deep. It was known to have been standing in 1798, when Thomas Jarvis owned it. Jarvis 

appears on the 1810 census with Jess [sic] Broomfield as joint head of household of 15 

black people, all of whom were presumably living with them in this house.”39 In the 1813 

Boston directory, a section after the listing of streets and wharves titled “Residents in 

Streets not Numbered,” lists Belknap Street. Here several well-known people of color—the 

Rev. Thomas Paul and Peter Jessamy—were listed separately, but in three instances 

unnamed “blacks” were shown collectively, once on the east side of the street and twice on 

the west, the second time after Jessamy’s listing. That second listing must embrace Jarvis 

and Bromfield’s boardinghouse. 

Peter Wilcox was an early occupant of Smith Court; what is known of his life up to 1815 is 

told under site 7. Samuel Hewes, also a nearby resident with eight persons in his household 

by 1810 (perhaps two of them boarders), lived at the end of Holmes Alley and sold his land 

to Nancy Princess in 1815. Hewes died in Sierra Leone before 13 July 1816, as this letter 

from Locke to his father (possibly Scipio Locke) states: 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 33
I embrace this opportunity to inform thee that I have been very Sick indeed and my 

family also But thanks be to God our Heavenly Father for his loving kindness 

toward us we are on the mending Hand thanks be to God for mercy Recevd from his 

Hands. I hope these few lines will find the [sic] and thy family Enjoying perfect 

health Samuel Hewes have Deceased also Thomas Davies have lost his wife and 

Least Child also Davis is very low himself. All of us have been sick and is to 

Gether.40

Prince Saunders had considered but ultimately decided against emigrating with Cuffe. In 

1817 the Massachusetts Baptist Society sent Saunders and the Rev. Thomas Paul to Haiti, 

where Jean Pierre Boyer, soon to be president of the island nation, urged Paul to return to 

the United States to encourage the emigration of people of color there. Paul returned to 

Boston after six months, but Saunders remained until late 1817 or early 1818.41

According to David Walker biographer Peter P. Hinks, Paul traveled to Haiti again in July 

1824 and in that year helped several Boston families prepare to emigrate there, but the 

plan’s failure turned him against the idea of colonization; he afterward became a staunch 

supporter of the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal.

42 Deeds show that 

black physician Peter Jessamine, who owned property at the rear of 21-23 Belknap Street 

on the same passage as Thomas Jarvis, left for Haiti in 1821.43

By the mid-1820s most African Americans had turned against colonization largely because 

of the founding of the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 by whites (though it 

had some initial support among African Americans) to resettle black Americans in Liberia. 

Most found specious the society’s assertion that African resettlement would achieve true 

freedom for African Americans by averting the prejudice they confronted in the United 

States. Maria W. Stewart proclaimed as much in a lecture at the African Masonic Hall, 

then at 28 Cambridge Street, on 27 February 1833: 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 34
The unfriendly whites first drove the native American from his much loved home. 

Then they stole our fathers from their peaceful and quiet dwellings, and brought 

them hither and made bond men and bond women of them and their little ones: 

they have obliged our brethren to labor, kept them in utter ignorance, nourished 

them in vice and raised them in degradation; and now that we have enriched their 

soil, and filled their coffers, they say that we are not capable of becoming like white 

men, and that we never can rise to respectability in this country. They would drive us 

to a strange land. But before I go, the bayonet shall pierce me through.44

Based on secondary sources alone, only one other voluntary emigration of a group of 

African American Bostonians is known to have occurred before the Civil War. Daniels, 

based on Booker T. Washington’s Story of the Negro, stated that fifteen Boston families 

settled at Biddulph, a “refugee colony” near Little York, Canada, after the passage of the 

1850 Fugitive Slave Act.45 Who they were is not yet known. There were individual 

emigrations: James G. Barbadoes, one of the most politically active of all black Bostonians 

and initially strongly opposed to colonization, emigrated with his family to Jamaica in 1840. 

According to James and Lois Horton, Barbadoes’s intention was to begin a silk farm (and 

presumably a silk industry) on the island, but he and two of his daughters died there within 

a year of their settlement. His second wife, Rebecca Brint Barbadoes, returned to Boston, 

where she died at her West End home at 42 Grove Street on 31 March 1874.46 

Like Rebecca Barbadoes, many members of the Barbadoes family lived most or all of their 

lives in Boston’s West End. Abel Barbadoes, the son of Quawk and Kate Barbadoes, was 

born in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1751 and married Chloe Holloway of Maine at 

Boston’s First Baptist Church in 1782. The surname may have derived from Quawk 

Barbadoes’s ancestral origin; place surnames were not uncommon among enslaved 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 35
people.47 In 1796 he bought a lot in the rear of 19 Belknap Street from Cromwell Barnes, 

just north of Peter Jessamine’s and south of Prince Watts’s land. 

Abel Barbadoes remained in a dwelling at the rear of 19 Belknap between 1798 and 1803, 

and his widow Chloe lived at the same location between 1823 and 1840. Their son Isaac, 

who worked as a tailor most of his life, lived in a house adjoining his parents’ house 

numbered 21 Belknap in 1836-37 and and at the rear 19 Belknap, in the house next to his 

mother’s property in 1839-41. A year after his mother’s death in 1843, he lived first at 7 

Belknap Street, near Cambridge Street, and then at 5 Smith Court in the mid-1840s; in 

1850 he spent some part of the year in the basement apartment of the African Meeting 

House. For most of the rest of his life he lived at the rear of 9 Belknap Street, or 2 Belknap 

Court.48 Abel and Chloe Barbadoes’s daughter Clarissa married African American 

clothing dealer Coffin Pitts and lived across Belknap Street from the house in which she 

grew up. Their son James G. Barbadoes told the Liberator in 1834 that his brother Robert, 

born about 1799, had been “taken prisoner in New Orleans, La., in 1816 under suspicion of 

being an escaped slave. He was incarcerated for five months before his release could be 

effected by his father and the governor of Massachusetts, who wrote letters offering proof 

of his status as a free black.”49 

Catherine Barbadoes, born about 1802 and about five years older than Isaac, never married 

and was living at 27 and 28 Belknap Street in 1847 and 1848. She worked as a dressmaker. 

By 1860 she lived at 1 Smith Court, and the 1873 city directory lists her as a janitor at the 

Abiel Smith School and living still at 1 Smith Court.50 Catherine Barbadoes applied for 

admission to the Home for Aged Colored Women on Myrtle Street (site 14) in September 

1878, when she was seventy-six years old. The home’s records noted at that time that 

Barbadoes was “old & infirm, cannot even take care of her own room now. Mrs. Smith & 

Miss Carter speak well of her. She has been helped by the city, but is so poorly now that she 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 36
needs someone to take care of her.” She was admitted to the home on 1 October that year, 

and she died there on the first of January 1888. After the home moved to 22 Hancock 

Street, where it shared the double house where Charles Sumner (site 26) once lived, 

Rebecca Barbadoes (the daughter of James G. and Rebecca Brint Barbadoes, born in

1833) became a resident, from 1916 until about 1921.51

Many other early residents in addition to Abel Barbadoes spent decades if not their lives in 

the West End. Hamlet Earl lived in Boston from at least 1787 to 1833, always listed on 

Belknap Street in city directories and tax records. George Holmes, for whom Holmes Alley 

was named in 1822, remained in Boston, as did his son George B. By 1830 George 

Washington was living on Smith Court and working as a bootblack on Water Street. He 

remained at 5 Smith Court until he died in 1871, and three of his children remained in the 

house, sometimes working from it, until the early 1890s. 

Such examples as these may be replicated many times over to establish the point that there 

was a stable community of African American people in the neighborhood BOAF 

interprets. The degree of its stability, however, is difficult to get a firm handle on in 

statistical terms. As is the case with African American and other antebellum minority 

communities generally, a certain official insensibility makes all statistical measures suspect 

in the extreme, from the highly amorphous listing of “blacks” on unnumbered Belknap 

Street in the 1813 city directory to the listing of women as “Mrs. Tucker” or “Mrs. Read” in 

the 1850 census. In any given year, assessors’ records may tally very poorly with census 

records and city directories, which heightens concern about the accuracy of official records. 

Private accounts, such as the 1852-57 physician’s account book of John V. DeGrasse, also 

make clear that many people of color living in the West End, even at times when state or 

federal census takers were working, were not recorded.52

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 37
However, the statistics do provide the only overall view of the nature and growth of the 

population that does exist, and for that they have value. According to state and federal 

census figures, the population of African descent in Boston increased from 766 persons to 

2,112 between 1790 and 1850—not extraordinary growth—and though the number of 

African American persons more than doubled between 1790 and 1800 the rate of 

population growth slowed steadily with every decade. Between 1840 and 1850 the number 

of African Americans in Boston rose from 1,988 persons to 2,102, a rate of increase of 5.7 

percent.53 The growth in that decade may mask a considerable outmigration to Canada and 

other places that a thorough examination of the 1855 census, and correlation of it with the 

censuses of 1850 and 1860, may help to isolate. By 1860 the African American population 

of Boston was 2,261, of which 1,395, or about 62 percent, lived “in and around” the sixth 

ward.54

The 1850 census is the first enumeration to list every resident by name, as well as to list the 

places of birth that these residents gave to the census enumerator. Thus it provides the first 

opportunity to examine where African American residents of ward 6 were, or in some cases 

perhaps claimed they were, born.55 Officially the black population of ward 6, according to 

the 1850 city directory, was 1,219; our count from the 1850 federal census was 1,224. Of 

that total, 594 persons, or nearly half, stated that they were born in Massachusetts, and fully 

62.5 percent gave birthplaces above the Mason-Dixon Line. Another 191 persons, or 15.6 

percent, told the enumerator that they were born in the South, 155 of them in the border 

states of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware or in the District of Columbia; the remaining 36 

were born in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Thirty people of color were 

born outside North America—one in Africa, ten in the West Indies, one in India, seven in 

Spain (which needs to be investigated), and the rest in Ireland, England, and France. 

Eighty-two people of color, 6.7 percent of the total black population of ward 6, were born 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 38
in either Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, a migration that also needs to be researched. Just 

as colorblind rural-to-urban migration occurred before the Civil War, a Downeast 

migration affected Boston, and perhaps black Boston in particular, in these decades as well 

as after the war. It is not as yet clear when this migration began, but Civil War pension files 

and the Home for Aged Colored Women records Sarah Shoenfeld transcribed have begun 

to flesh out the stories of some of these immigrants.56 The kin and friendship ties between 

families in the Canadian maritime provinces and Boston, possibly reaching back to the 

removal of Loyalists from Boston during the Revolution, may partially explain this 

emigration and the continuing tie between the places of which Boston’s abolitionists made 

such frequent use.57

Finally, in 109 instances in the 1850 census the enumerator wrote “unknown” in the place 

of birth column and left that column blank in an additional forty. What the difference was 

between these categories is not exactly known, but the authors presume that respondents in 

the first case actually told the enumerator that they did not know where they were born, 

while in the latter another person in the household claimed not to know the birthplace of 

someone for whom they were responding. Together these cases are 12.0 percent of the 

total 1,224 African Americans listed as residents of the sixth ward. The 109 presumed to 

have answered “unknown”—there are documented instances, the fugitive and 

Congregational minister Samuel Ringgold Ward having been one of them, of persons not 

knowing when and where they were born—may have answered candidly or may 

intentionally have concealed their place of birth; some may have been fugitive slaves. 

In ethnic terms, even though nearly six of every ten African Americans in Boston lived in 

the sixth ward (58.2 percent) in 1850, the sixth ward itself was in no sense overwhelmingly 

of African descent. At midcentury it was 16.2 Irish, 13.7 percent African American, and 5.3 

percent other foreign-born. There were clear districts that were largely African American, 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 39
but Irish-born people did live within those districts. Among other examples, William 

Thompson, an African American trader born in Pennsylvania, shared his West Cedar 

Street house with a large family born in Ireland; next door John Smith, a black tailor born 

in Massachusetts, shared his house with an Irish-born couple. The African American

hairdresser John F. Smith, born in Virginia, lived on Cambridge Street with the Irish-born 

domestic Sarah Johnson, age nineteen. Native-born whites and a German-born shoemaker 

and his family also lived amid African American people in the West End. 

The historic structures that follow are listed so that the earliest extant structures associated 

with the north slope’s African American community appear first. The list also interweaves 

existing BOAF sites with proposed ones to give readers an understanding of how a tour, or 

tours, might cohere in both geographical and thematic terms. The only anomaly is the 

Charles Sumner House (site 26), listed last; conceptually it belongs at the end of a tour, but 

geographically it is near the beginning. 

This list is based on the authors’ research as well as on these assumptions:58

1. Existing structures, as opposed to sites of demolished ones, are preferred for inclusion 

provided their historical associations relate to BOAF’s themes and interests. 

2. Sites of former structures should be included if their historical associations are of 

overwhelming significance to BOAF’s themes and interests. 

3. Structures and sites of former structures are always preferred over monuments; 

monuments may be included if they have been erected on significant sites or if the history 

of their construction relates to BOAF’s themes and interests. 

4. Because of the nature of BOAF’s mission, sites and structures associated with people of 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 40
color are preferred for inclusion over sites and structures associated with white persons. 

5. Clear philosophical, psychological, and behavioral differences separate committed 

abolitionists from antislavery supporters, but what those differences were in historical 

terms depends upon who defines them. This list generally does not consider sites associated 

with antislavery supporters worth including in BOAF, though the sites themselves may be 

useful springboards in any interpretive program that tries to clarify the complexities of 

antislavery and abolitionism for the general public. 

6. No sites are included that are not within the north slope of Beacon Hill. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 41
Historic Resources

Key:

Existing BOAF Structures 

Suggested Additions

DOC=date of construction 

SITE 1 • Site of David Walker House

Address: 81 Joy (originally 8, then 4 Belknap)59

DOC: August 1825 [original three-and-one-half-story structure with side gable roof] 

probably after 1902 [extant five-story structure] 

 

History: From the spring of 1827 to early 1829 African American activist David Walker 

lived in a brick dwelling on this site. Here he worked with other men of color to support 

Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper published in the United States, 

and may have written parts of his Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World. After 

Walker left the dwelling on this site, Maria Stewart, one of his foremost disciples and one 

of the earliest woman orators, lived here with her husband James, and after them the 

fugitive Leonard Black and the Baptist minister George H. Black occupied the house. 

Tax records from the spring of 1827 establish that Walker then lived in this brick dwelling, 

owned at that time by William Humphrey. This structure was the only property Humphrey 

owned on Belknap Street. Humphrey himself at that time lived at 9 Hancock, which was 

then one of numerous lots running across this block that had frontage on both Belknap and 

Hancock Streets.60 Numbers 4 through 20 Belknap (today 65 through 81 Joy) are on the 

west side of 9 through 23 Hancock Street, a row of eight houses build in 1807-8 on land that 

had been occupied by a large distillery in the eighteenth century. Sold at auction on 6 

November 1806, the distillery was advertised at the time of its sale as “the largest in the 

United States. The land measures 140 feet on Hancock Street and 140 feet on Belnap [sic] 

Street, and 130 feet from street to street, nearly the whole of which is covered by the Distil 

house.”61 

Judging by the original brick wall still preserved in the north elevation of the current 

structure at 81 Joy Street, the dwelling in which Walker lived had a side gable roof, similar 

to extant buildings at 73 and 71 Joy Street. The construction date for the house in which 

Walker came to live by the spring of 1827 is ascertained from deeds and tax records. 

Wording in one 30 August 1825 deed for the larger property of which 4 Belknap was part62

implies that a second dwelling house (that is, the one on Belknap Street) had been 

completed in the time since the previous deed for the same property, dated 8 June 1825. A 

notation made in city tax records earlier in that same year refers to an “unfinished house.” 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 42
The real estate valuation in spring of 1825 of the Belknap Street side of that property was 

six hundred dollars, a rate typical for a vacant lot or a small wooden dwelling. In 1826, 

however, the Belknap Street property was taxed at $1,800, a rate comparable to that for a 

multistory brick dwelling.63 

Walker’s importance to African American politics and culture in the decade before the 

Liberator was founded is impossible to overstate. His overriding interest was to use such 

publications as Freedom’s Journal and his own Walker’s Appeal, as well as such 

organizations as the Massachusetts General Colored Association, “to unite the colored 

population, so far, through the United States of America, as may be practicable and 

expedient; forming societies, opening, extending, and keeping up correspondences, and not 

withholding any thing which may have the least tendency to meliorate our miserable 

condition.”64

Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, by 1825 Walker had settled in Boston, and by early 

1826 he was living in a rented room on Southac Street. Tax records from spring 1826 locate 

him—with Coffin Pitts, soon to be his neighbor on Belknap Street—in a boardinghouse run 

by Samuel Guild on Southac Street between Grove and West Cedar (then part of Southac) 

Streets, close to the home and soap works of Primus Hall and in the same block later 

occupied by Lewis Hayden, Samuel Snowden, John Sweat Rock, and many others 

described in this study (see sites 19 & 20).65 By the following spring Walker and Pitts both 

had moved to Belknap Street. 

As Hinks has noted, also living on the east side of Walker’s Belknap Street block in 1827 

were fellow Prince Hall Masons John B. Pero and George B. Holmes, both of them 

hairdressers. Next door were Frederick Brimsley and Pitts, who were both, like Walker, 

members of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, founded just the year before, 

in 1826. Again like Walker, all of these men had shops near the waterfront, Pero in Dock 

Square and the rest just west of that square, on Brattle Street. Across the street from 

Walker’s house were Prince Hall Masons John Courreaux, William Vassall, William 

Brown, and the Methodist minister Samuel Snowden (see site 20). Courreaux was a 

mariner, while Vassall and Brown were waiters, or “tenders.” 

Four weeks before the 16 March 1827 inaugural issue of Freedom’s Journal (1827-29), the 

first newspaper in the United States owned and operated by African Americans, Walker 

held a meeting at his Belknap Street home to consider “giving aid and support” to the 

publication. John T. Hilton (site 2), the Reverend Thomas Paul (sites 11 and 21), either 

William or John Brown, and his neighbor George B. Holmes (site 2) all attended and 

endorsed the newspaper’s creation. It is possible that Walker wrote parts of Walker’s 

Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in 

Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. Written in Boston, in 

the State of Massachusetts, Sept. 28th, 1829 (Boston, 1829) at this Belknap Street house, but 

by the spring of 1829 he had moved to Bridge (now North Anderson) Street, on the north 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 43
side of Cambridge Street. 

Living in this house with Walker in 1828 was the hairdresser Cornelius A. De Randamie, 

like Walker a member of Prince Hall Masons and among the leaders of the September 

1828 reception for Prince Abduhl Rahhaman, an African prince who had been enslaved. In 

1829, after Walker moved to Bridge Street, tax records indicate that James W. Stewart was 

living at the 4 Belknap Street house. Stewart was the husband of Maria W. Stewart, the 

famed African American orator and a great admirer of David Walker. It would not be at all 

surprising if James Stewart somehow played a role in distributing the first edition, issued in 

September 1829, of Walker’s Appeal in the South. He was listed in tax records as a colored 

“shipper of sailors,” and according to Garrison biographer Henry Mayer one of the ways 

Walker smuggled the pamphlet into the southern states was by having the pamphlet 

stitched “into the linings of jackets he sold to black sailors.” James W. Stewart died 17 

December that year.66

Living at this same address a little more than a decade later were George H. Black and 

Leonard Black, both of whom are discussed in the latter’s Life and Sufferings of Leonard 

Black, A Fugitive from Slavery. Written by Himself (1847). Black, born about sixty miles south 

of Baltimore in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, escaped slavery in 1837. Black, possessed 

of very little geographical sense of the North, set out in search of his brothers, one of them 

named George, who had escaped earlier to, he thought, Boston or Canada. Black somehow 

made his way through New Jersey and took a ferry into New York City. 

When I landed, I inquired of a boy whether there was any boat that run to the State 

of Boston. I was so ignorant I knew not whether Boston was a State or city. In fact, I 

scarcely knew there was such a place. Slavery is as ill adapted for obtaining this kind 

of knowledge as all other kinds. He informed me the boat went to Providence, and 

showed me the way to the boat. I purchased a bosom and dickey, went on board of 

the boat, and stowed myself away among the bales of cotton.67

Once in Providence, Black learned Boston was forty miles distant, and so he walked 

alongside the rail tracks to the city. When he reached Boston, he somehow managed to find 

Sarah Taylor, a woman of color and the wife of fugitive assistant John R. Taylor, whose 

origins are obscure: he listed himself in the 1850 federal census as having been born in 

“America” in 1790, but in 1855 he and his wife Sarah stated their place of birth as Virginia. 

That census lists the couple’s sons as Francis, born about 1821 in Virginia, and George, 

born about 1835 in Massachusetts; the first tax and census listings for Taylor appear in 

1836, so he was probably candid with the 1855 census enumerator. 

At the time Black came to Boston, probably about 1837 or 1838, city directories and tax 

records show that Taylor was running a boardinghouse at 12 Belknap Street (site 2; see also 

sites 17 & 20).68 Black’s account is the first documented instance this study came across of 

Taylor’s aid to fugitives. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 44
I reached Boston at noon on Monday, and inquired for my brothers; but nobody 

knew anything about them. Finally, I met with a colored lady by the name of Sarah 

Taylor, the wife of John R. Taylor. I asked her if she knew any thing about my 

brothers. She said a George Black had passed through Boston, and lived in 

Portland. She said, “Come home with me, for I perceive you have been a slave.” I 

went and boarded with her for $3 a week. I got a gentleman to write to Portland to 

Mr. George Black, the man I thought was my brother. He supposed I was one of his 

brothers, he having three brothers in the West Indies. He invited me to come to 

Portland, and offered to pay my fare. I was very ragged and dirty. Mrs. Taylor 

wrapped me up in Mr. Taylor’s cloak, and sent me to Portland. Mr. Black sent down 

his man to the steamboat to get my trunk; but instead of having a trunk, I had 

scarcely any clothes to my back.69

Upon meeting George H. Black of Portland, Leonard Black saw that they were not 

brothers, but he stayed in Portland with the Black family. George Black sent Leonard to 

school and then to Bridgeton, Maine, to earn money as a farmhand. In November 1838 

George H. Black moved to Boston “to be settled over the Belknap-street Church” (site 11), 

and by 1839 he was living at 4/8 Belknap Street. Leonard Black, in love with one of the 

Black daughters, moved in with the family in Boston by 1839. “I married Mr. Black’s 

daughter, though young and poor; and I am still poor. I had four children, one of whom is 

deceased. I lived at service in Boston. Sometimes I worked on the wharves.”70 The 1841 

city directory shows George H. Black as a minister at “8 Belknap near Cambridge” Street 

and Leonard Black as a clothes cleaner working at 46 Congress Street; in 1842 directory 

and tax records show the widow of George H. Black living in the house. 

Leonard Black stayed in Boston for five years, yet in his narrative he admitted to having 

been “in an unsettled state, being under the impression that I should preach the Gospel.” 

He ultimately determined that “Boston was not the place for me, for its vanities and 

maxims were not suited to my disposition.” He moved to Providence, New Bedford, and 

ultimately to Nantucket, where he wrote his narrative, published in New Bedford in 1847.71

By 1849 no people of color were listed as living at 8 Belknap. 

SITE 2 • John T. Hilton House

Other name: George B. Holmes/Anthony F. Clark House 

Address: 73-75 Joy Street (formerly 12 Belknap) 

DOC: 1825-26 

History: Twelve Belknap Street is significant for several reasons. It is the earliest extant 

dwelling associated with people of color on Joy Street. It has a long history of nineteenthcentury African American ownership. And the cluster of buildings 12 Belknap forms with 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 45
14 and 16 Belknap across the side alley is an immensely important survival that represents 

the brick structures that once lined the east side of Belknap when the street when the 

northern portion of the street was an African American neighborhood. When much of Joy 

Street was rebuilt about 1900, this building group somehow remained. 

Boston tax records in the spring of 1825 indicate that this property was then a vacant lot 

behind Daniel D. Rogers’s house at 15 Hancock. The house at 12 Belknap was built 

sometime after George B. Holmes bought the property from Rogers’s son, Henry 

Broomfield Rogers, on 17 August 1825 and before the spring of 1826, by which time the 

tax records indicate that Holmes occupied a completed house.72 This dwelling was originally 

built as a two-and-one-half-story building, later raised an additional story. That added story 

is resting on top of the walls of the neighboring building at 77 Joy Street (then a brick stable 

belonging to 13 Hancock Street). By 1826, the property was valued at $1,800. 

George B. Holmes, identified as a “hairdresser and musician” in the Boston directories, 

was the son of the African American laborer George Homes, presumed to be the man for 

whom Holmes Alley was named. City directories from 1810 to 1822 list laborer George 

Holmes (spelled “Homes” until 1821) variously at May’s Court, Belknap Street, and Homes 

Alley. Terranova’s deed and tax research has established that all of these addresses really 

are the same location—the frame dwelling Holmes had built in 1799-1800 on Holmes Alley 

between the lots Hannibal Allen and Peter Fortune Bailey owned jointly to the south and 

the African Society owned to the north. On 26 February 1823 George Holmes sold this 

wooden house to his son George B. Holmes and may have died in the following year.73 

Tax records document that George B. Holmes was still living at his parents’ home on 

Holmes Alley in the spring of 1823, 1824, and 1825 but moved into his new brick house at 

12 Belknap Street when it was completed, probably late in 1825. Taxes for the spring of 

1826 and 1827 show his mother (Phebe Holmes in the 1826 city directory) as the occupant 

of the house on Holmes Alley. 

George B. Holmes was a member of the Prince Hall Masons and attended the February 

1827 meeting at David Walker’s 4/8 Belknap Street home to determine how to support 

Freedom’s Journal.

74 In 1828, the African American barber Lucius Farewell boarded there, 

perhaps apprenticing with Holmes; in 1829 Joseph Barbadoes, also a barber and possibly 

the son of Abel Barbadoes Jr., boarded at Holmes’s house at 12 Belknap Street. 

By 1830 George B. Holmes had died, and his widow Hosah (or Hosea) continued to own 

the dwelling. In that year John Telemachus Hilton (1801-64), black anticolonizationist, 

abolitionist, and integrationist, took up residence at 12 Belknap Street, but only through 

1831. Hilton, who moved with his family to Cambridge by 1850 in part to protest the 

continuing segregation of Boston schools, lived at no one Boston address for long; tax 

records indicate that he stayed longest at 18 Myrtle Street, at that street’s intersection with 

Belknap Street, from 1839 to 1842.75

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 46
In 1830 Hilton, who claimed a Pennsylvania birthplace, worked as a hairdresser on Howard

Street, soon to become the heart of Scollay Square. Hilton, whose presence in Boston is 

first documented in 1825, the time of his marriage to Lavina F. Ames, was one of the 

founders of the Massachusetts General Colored Association in 1826 and was elected Grand 

Master of the Prince Hall Masons in 1827. Hilton was at the forefront of every political 

action taken by Boston’s African American community from these stirrings through the 

Civil War. In 1855, at a testimonial held to honor William C. Nell’s long effort to integrate 

Boston’s schools, William Lloyd Garrison made note of the role Hilton had played. Hilton, 

Garrison declared, “had never been found wanting in intelligent discrimination as to the 

best course to be pursued in the Anti-Slavery movement, and . . . had ever been ready to do 

his utmost in behalf of the cause, without compromise or fear. God grant, (said Mr. G.,) 

that you, my old and cherished friend and supporter, may live to see, with your own eyes, 

the day of jubilee! And may we all be permitted to join in that glorious celebration! Be 

assured, we will have freedom yet; we will have free soil and free institutions yet.”76

After the death of her first husband, Hosah Holmes married Charles V. Caples, an African 

American trader, perhaps in 1831 or 1832. In 1833 she transferred 12 Belknap to Caples in 

two deeds, one executed after her death.77 Charles V. Caples, who was present at 

Garrison’s 1833 farewell address, transferred the property in July 1836 to the hairdresser 

Anthony F. Clark. 

Anthony F. Clark was probably one of at least four sons of Peter and Mitty Clark of 

Hubbardston, Massachusetts. The clothes dealer Jonas W. Clark was his older brother. 

Jonas W. Clark was born in Hubbardston 17 June 1799, and Anthony F. Clark was born 

there 16 July 1813. Published Hubbardston vital records do not list race, but the 1800 

federal census for the town lists the family of Peter Clark under “all other free persons,” 

the category under which people of color then fell in the Massachusetts census.78

By 1841 Anthony F. Clark was in partnership at 14 School Street with George Putnam 

(which he and others often, though not invariably, spelled Putman), his next-door neighbor. 

Clark, who told 1850 census enumerators that he was born in Massachusetts about 1808, 

had been one of the founders of a Boston African-American Temperance Society in April 

1833, along with Hilton and eight other men of color.79 

Though Anthony F. Clark owned the house, he did not live in it until 1839. In 1837 and 

1838 John R. Taylor (sites 17 & 20) used it as a boarding house, one of several he ran in the 

West End, and it was here that the fugitive Leonard Black apparently stayed before leaving 

for Portland in search of his brother (site 1). Anthony Clark lived at 12 Belknap from 1839 

to about 1850 when, like John T. Hilton and many other of the West End’s most active 

people of color, he moved to Cambridge. During his time on Belknap Street Clark shared 

the house with the black waiter James Johnson, the mariner John M. Bell, and the Baptist 

clergyman John T. Raymond, who had moved to Boston in the early 1840s to become 

pastor of the First Independent Baptist Church after the schism in the Smith Court 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 47
congregation (site 11). Raymond too moved to Cambridge, in 1848. 

After Clark left Boston Isaac Caldwell, a man of color, ran 12 Belknap as a boardinghouse, 

and in 1849 Clark sold the property to his brother Jonas W. Clark, whose clothing shop was 

on Brattle Street. Living in Boston by 1833, Jonas W. Clark appears to have rented 12 

Belknap Street. From 1833 through 1855 he lived at 86 May Street, near West Cedar 

Street, and by 1855-56 he had moved to 20 Grove Street.80 Tax records need to be 

researched to determine who rented the property during his ownership. Jonas W. Clark was 

an active fugitive assistant. With fellow Brattle Street clothing dealers Coffin Pitts (site 5) 

and John P. Coburn (sites 15 & 17) Clark posted the bail required to free colleague and 

neighbor James Scott (site 6) from jail after his arrest on the charge of having assisted in 

the February 1851 rescue of fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins in Boston.81 The records of the 

Boston Vigilance Committee contain two entries for Clark in 1857 for assisting fugitives, 

two in January and one bound for Canada in April.82

On 8 December 1875 Jonas W. Clark’s widow Frances transferred 12 Belknap, then 73 Joy

Street, for $900 to the couple’s daughter Frances J. Weedman, also a widow. On the same 

day the two women and the Clarks’ son, Jonas W. V. Clark, sold the property for $3,200 to 

Benjamin T. Rounds. The property remained in the Rounds family until 1921. 

SITE 3 • Robert Roberts House

Other name: Peter Lew Freeman House 

Address: 71 Joy Street (formerly 14 Belknap) 

DOC: 1840-41 

History: Seventy-one Joy is significant for its association with the family of Robert Roberts, 

important not only in his own life but in his family history. 

The lot on which this dwelling sits, and the side alley just south of it, are centrally located in 

the block of eight house lots created from the distillery in 1807. Unlike the seven Belknap 

Street addresses that were originally part of larger lots on Hancock Street, 14 Belknap 

began as a separate lot, and deeds indicate that a building was constructed on this site in 

1809. The structure was valued at four hundred dollars in 1822, a rate then consistent with 

the valuation for a wooden dwelling. The 1814 J. G. Hales map of Boston83 shows three 

freestanding wooden buildings at the approximate locations of 4-18 Belknap Street, and of 

those three, perhaps the middle one, Terranova has concluded, was almost certainly the 

original building on the lot at 14 Belknap. 

In 1822 and 1823 Hosea Foy, “blackman,” was listed as a tenant here. Foy was enumerated 

in the 1820 federal census on Holmes Alley with three people in his household and in the 

1823 Boston directory as a shoeblack living on yet-unnumbered Belknap street. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 48
In 1823 John Harris, a black laborer living on Peck Lane in the North End, purchased 14 

Belknap from Samuel Austin Jr. In the same year Harris sold one undivided half of the 

property to Harriet Roberts, “single woman” and daughter of Robert Roberts.84 In 1824 

Harriet Roberts sold her half-share to her father. At Harris’s death in 1829, he left his half 

of 14 Belknap to Roberts’ son and Harris’s namesake, John Harris Roberts, born in 1820. 

During this time, Uriah Lewis and several other African American laborers lived in the 

house; so did black activist and minister Hosea Easton, whose brother-in-law was Robert 

Roberts. 

The Easton family had farflung and important connections from Boston through 

southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. James Easton, who had served under 

George Washington in the Revolutionary War, began a forge and nail factory in

Bridgewater that was a prominent supplier of ironwork for two decades. His sons Hosea 

and Joshua were founding members of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, 

and his daughter Sarah was Robert Roberts’s second wife. Roberts’s first wife, Dorothy 

Hall, was the eldest child of Jude and Rhoda Paul Hall of Exeter, New Hampshire. Jude 

Hall had served in nearly every prominent Revolutionary engagement from Bunker Hill to 

Valley Forge as well as in later campaigns; his wife Rhoda was probably a member of the 

large free black Paul family, also of Exeter, of which the Rev. Thomas Paul was a member. 

Much research remains to be done on the Roberts-Paul connection.85

The building contract reveals that the brick dwelling now on the lot, built in 1840-41, was, 

like 12, 16, and 18 Belknap, initially a two-story house later raised to three stories.

86

According to Terranova, Robert Roberts paid the builders Pratt and McKinney nine 

hundred dollars to build the new house. On 18 November 1841 his son, John Harris 

Roberts, according to the deed unmarried and working as a mariner, conveyed his half to 

his father. Robert Roberts then owned the entire lot. Seventy-one Joy Street remained in 

African American ownership until 1878. 

Robert Roberts, whose date of birth is unknown but set tentatively about 1780, was in New

England by 1805 when he married Dorothy Hall in Exeter, New Hampshire. He was in 

Boston by 1812, for he was among those with whom Paul Cuffe corresponded about his 

plans for Sierra Leone.87 Documents related to the divorce of a later wife present his 

statement that he was born in Charleston, South Carolina.88 City directories from 1816 

through the late 1850s list Roberts at 9 and sometimes 8 Second Street near Barton’s Point

in the West End; he owned both dwellings. This area, the northwest section of the fifth 

ward, near the Craigie or Canal Bridge since supplanted by the Charles River dam, was the 

longtime home of the barber and musician Peter Howard, and in 1830 black activist and 

hairdresser James G. Barbadoes shared Roberts’s 9 Second Street home. 

In 1820s city directories Roberts’s occupation is most commonly shown as a stevedore, 

though he is sometimes listed as a laborer. However, he worked as a house servant before 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 49
he purchased 14 Belknap. In that decade Roberts served as butler to industrialist Kirk 

Boott, merchant and financier Nathan Appleton, and, between 1825 and 1827, Christopher 

Gore (1758-1827), former governor of Massachusetts (1809-10) and representative to both 

the state Senate (1806) and the U.S. Senate (1813-16). Roberts worked during the summer 

at Gore Place in Waltham and at the elderly statesman’s Boston home on Cambridge 

Street in winter. While working for Gore Roberts wrote The House Servant’s Directory; or, A 

Monitor for Private Families, etc., believed to be one of the first books written by an African 

American to be issued by a commercial press; Gore wrote the preface for the first 1827 

edition.89 According to historian Graham Russell Hodges, The House Servant’s Directory

“became the standard for household management for decades afterward”; it went through 

three editions in the next decade.90

After Gore’s death, Roberts was an active anticolonizationist, was one of four black 

Bostonians to serve on the provisional committee at the first national convention of free 

people of color in Philadelphia in June 1831, and represented the First Independent 

Baptist Church at Boston Baptist Association meetings.91 By 1847 he listed his occupation 

as stevedore, and he is so listed when he sold the property in 1859. 

According to the 1820 census Robert Roberts was the head of a household of seven 

persons—himself, presumably his wife, Sarah Easton (about 1789-1837), both of them 

between the ages of twenty-six and forty-five; three males younger than fourteen, and two 

females younger than fourteen. Among those three males was his son Benjamin F. Roberts, 

first listed in the 1836 Boston directory as a shoemaker living at his father’s house at 9 

Second Street. Very shortly afterward Benjamin Roberts turned to printing: in 1838 he 

became the first man of color in Boston to publish an newspaper for the city’s African 

Americans, Though the journal, the Anti-Slavery Herald, was short-lived, Roberts continued 

as a printer. He appears shortly afterward to have moved to Lynn, the shoe manufacturing 

center of the nation as well as a hotbed of antislavery activity, and there he published the 

city’s first directory in 1841.92 

Benjamin Roberts returned to Boston by 1847 and was living at 3 Andover Street in the 

West End. Two years later he filed suit on behalf of his six-year-old daughter Sarah’s right 

to attend the school nearest her home, a landmark case that indirectly ended in the 

integration of Boston’s school system in 1855. In 1853 Benjamin Roberts also published 

another newspaper for Boston’s black community, The Self-Elevator, but it too could not 

sustain itself for long; as they had from the start, the city’s people of color remained the 

backbone of the subscription list of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, and it was 

undoubtedly difficult to establish a second newspaper among them. 

For Robert Roberts 14 Belknap, as well as other West End dwellings he owned, were 

income properties. In 1847, three people of color—the mariner Thomas George, the 

dressmaker Matilda George, and the porter Peter Lew Freeman—were living at 14 

Belknap. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 50
Freeman, born in Dracut in 1816, was the grandson of Barzillai Lew, a veteran of both the 

French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars.93 On 6 September 1859 Roberts sold 14 

Belknap to Freeman, termed a “gentleman” in the deed, for $1,800. By 1863 two of 

Freeman’s younger brothers, Barzillai and Osmore, were living in the Joy Street house with 

him. Barzillai worked most of his life as a janitor, while Osmore was a porter for more than 

twenty years at 42 Court Street. In the 1865 state census Peter Freeman, working as a 

porter at 30 Court Street, is listed at the property with his brother Barzillai; Osmore and his 

third wife were not living with them and appear never again to have lived at 71 Joy. In 1866, 

on 23 January, Peter Freeman sold the property to John P. Coburn, and on 9 October 1866 

he died of apoplexy.94 In August 1878 Wendell T. Coburn, John Coburn’s adopted son, sold 

the property for $2,400 to William J. Rounds. 

SITE 4 • George Putnam House

Other name: Robert Johnson House 

Address: 69 Joy Street (formerly 16 Belknap) 

DOC: 1826-27 

History: Sixty-nine Joy Street is one of three surviving dwellings on Joy Street built for 

members of Boston’s antebellum African American community as well as the home for 

decades of the fugitive slave Robert Johnson and his family. 

The first owner of this property was the African American hairdresser George Putnam 

(sometimes Putman), who purchased what had been part of the 19 Hancock Street lot from 

Henry Broomfield Rogers in July 1826 for $439. City tax assessors in the spring of 1825 and 

1826 described the Belknap Street side of 19 Hancock as “a lot of land and shed.” Deeds 

reveal that this shed was a wooden outbuilding or ell of 19 Hancock that faced the lot of 16 

Belknap across the fifteen-foot passageway that runs north-south at the rear of the side 

alley between 14 and 16 Belknap Street. According to Michael Terranova, the property was 

conveyed to Putnam in two deeds, on 11 July 1826 and 26 March 1828, the latter including 

the release of dower rights from Mrs. Henry Broomfield Rogers. By spring 1827 the 

assessment had increased to $1,400, indicating that the small, two-bay brick house now on 

the lot had been built for George Putnam. Like 12 and 14 Belknap Street, 16 Belknap was 

originally a two-and-one-half-story structure, as the outline in its north elevation makes 

evident. The existing garret was enlarged to create a third story. 

Putnam kept his “dressing room” at 211 Washington Street until mid-March of 1832, when 

he announced in the Liberator its removal to 2 Bromfield Street. His shop remained at that 

location until 1837, when, in partnership with Anthony F. Clark, he relocated to larger 

quarters at 14 School Street. Clark lived at 16 Belknap with Putnam in 1836 and became 

Putnam’s neighbor across the passageway in 1839.95 By 1847, about the time Putnam and 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 51
his family moved out of the city to Salem, Putnam moved his shop to 150 Court Street. 

Putnam was an avid Garrisonian abolitionist, and 16 Belknap is most significant in these 

years for the meetings held within it to support William Lloyd Garrison’s work. On 28 

October 1831 Primus Hall, Thomas Cole (see site 20), John T. Hilton (site 2), and possibly 

others convened at Putnam’s home to discuss the recommendation of the first nationwide 

convention of free colored people that a college “for the descendants of Africa” be 

established in the United States.” Eighteen months later, he and sixteen other men of 

color from Boston and nearby towns met for a “farewell interview” with William Lloyd 

Garrison at 16 Belknap Street just before the Liberator editor left for England on a tour to 

raise funds for this college.96 In Putnam’s view, as well as Maria Stewart’s, the college was 

one viable way to counter the campaign of the American Colonization Society. “We regard 

the Colonization Society in the same light in which lambs regard wolves,” he declared in a 

March 1833 speech at the African meetinghouse in support of Garrison’s projected fundraising trip; he pledged that Boston’s African American community would itself raise 

money to create “in this country, instead of Africa, a High School on the Manual Labor 

System, for the education of colored youth.”97 Though they left the city before the Roberts 

case of 1849, Putnam and his wife Jane were active from an early point in the effort to 

integrate Boston schools; Jane Putnam and other women of color had formed a 

temperance society in the early 1830s as well.98 

By September 1850 the Putnam family had moved to Salem, Massachusetts, and on 6 June 

1853 George Putnam sold 16 Belknap to Robert Johnson, listed in this deed and two others 

that year as a trader. Johnson first appears in Boston city directories in 1836 as the 

proprietor of a clothes cleaning store at 5 Brattle Street, though in subsequent directories 

through 1860 he was consistently listed as a waiter. By the time he purchased 16 Belknap 

from Putnam, he had perhaps come to think of himself principally as a trader; his second 

wife Evelina stated that he was “at one time engaged in clothes cleaning and repairing on 

Brattle Street” and later “entered the catering business.”99 

In Black Bostonians, James and Lois Horton state that Robert Johnson was a fugitive slave 

who fled from Boston to St. John’s, New Brunswick in 1858,100 but this identification seems 

to have resulted from a misreading of Francis Jackson’s Boston Vigilance Committee 

records. Jackson’s records at New-York Historical Society identify Thomas Jones as the 

fugitive sent to St. John’s in 1858, not the “R. Johnson” written below Jones’s name. 

Jackson’s Vigilance Committee account of 3 May 1858, in the Bostonian Society 

collections, reads, “E F Eddy for Thos Jones a fugitive from Prince William Co. Virginia / 4 

pr shirts & 2 pr draws 5./R. Johnson for board 1.50/passage to St Johns N B 5. spending 

money 3.” Judging from Jackson’s language throughout his records, this entry seems to 

indicate either that R. Johnson—not necessarily the Robert Johnson of 16 Belknap 

Street—was paid $1.50 for boarding Thomas Jones or that E. F. Eddy was paid $1.50 for 

boarding R. Johnson. In June 1860 Eddy was reimbursed “for clothes for Frederick 

Hargrove and Edwd Sullivan from Kentucky Fugitives,” which suggests that Eddy was 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 52
probably a clothes dealer and that R. Johnson had boarded Thomas Jones. In any event, it 

seems clear that Thomas Jones, not R. Johnson, was sent to St. John’s: Jackson’s New-York 

Historical Society account shows no destination across from R. Johnson’s name.101 

However, another account identifies Robert Johnson as a fugitive on different grounds. In 

an account told to her by her mother, Evelina Bell Johnson (1829-91), Johnson’s second 

wife, Addie Johnson Trusty stated that Robert Johnson was “born of slave parents” and 

escaped from Richmond, Virginia, in 1829 after having worked there as a house servant 

and coachman.102 Trusty’s mother did not describe the manner of Johnson’s escape, but 

she did state that he was literate and “made his way to Boston.” By 1834 he married 

Clarissa West (deeds do identify a Clarissa as Johnson’s wife before 1863), and from 1836 

to 1850 the couple and their young family were living on the other side of the Belknap 

Street, north of Smith Court, at the address later numbered 27 Belknap Street. Three years 

later Johnson purchased 16 Belknap, where he and his heirs remained for the next halfcentury. 

Clarissa Johnson died at the 16 Belknap Street house on 19 July 1863, and on 3 May 1866 

Johnson remarried Evelina Bell, the daughter of widow Prudence Nelson Bell. According 

to Evelina Bell Johnson, Prudence Bell had moved from Washington, D.C., in 1841 to 

Weymouth (incidentally, the hometown of the abolitionist Weston sisters) and had been an 

active fugitive slave assistant there. She ultimately moved into the West End of Boston, 

where she died in 1864. 

Most of the details of Mrs. Johnson’s story tally well with documents and provide 

information not yet discovered in other sources, and with one exception they agree as well 

with a set of letters between John Albion Andrew (site 22), governor of Massachusetts 

between 1861 and 1866, and Charles Sumner (site 26), then serving in the United States 

Senate. These letters, written between 1852 and 1855, detail Andrew’s extended efforts to 

negotiate the purchase of the freedom of the family of one Seth Botts (who had taken the 

name Henry Williams in Boston and was working at Cornhill Coffee House, the same place 

Shadrach Minkins had worked in 1851). Botts’ mother-in-law was “Prue Bell,” his wife was

Elizabeth Bell, and his sister-in-law was Evelina Bell, who became Robert Johnson’s second 

wife in 1866. These letters document that Prudence Nelson Bell and her daughter Evelina 

were not in Boston until after March 1855.103

Earlier, Robert Johnson was a member of the African Baptist Church and a delegate from 

that church to the Boston Baptist Association in 1845. Ultimately he became a member of 

the Twelfth Baptist Church congregation on Southac Street (site 18). “His greatest activity 

was in church circles,” his wife Evelina recalled, “and for many years until his death, he was 

a deacon in the Twelfth Baptist Church on Phillips Street, often filling the pulpit of the 

pastor, Reverend Leonard Grimes.”104 Johnson was vice president of the 17 December 

1855 testimonial to William C . Nell, held at the Twelfth Baptist Church to honor Nell’s 

role in integrating the Boston public school system. Citing the Liberator, the Hortons note 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 53
that in 1852 Johnson “encouraged blacks to pay taxes, as he was doing for the first time in 

many years, in order that they might vote for Free Soil candidates.”105 Johnson and many 

other men of color deviated from Garrison’s apolitical course yet were Garrisonians in

most other respects; Evelina Bell Johnson stated that her husband once protected the 

editor. 

Robert Johnson with two others, Scott being one, the other name has escaped my 

memory, participated in liberating William Lloyd Garrison from the mob which 

threatened him and from that time on, he was always on the alert to give his services 

to those in distress.106

In 1860 both Johnson and his son, Robert Jr., were living at 16 Belknap. On 16 February 

1863 Robert Johnson Jr. presided over a meeting at the African Meeting House to recruit 

members for the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. As 

paraphrased by Luis F. Emilio in A Brave Black Regiment, “He thought that another year 

would show the importance of having the black man in arms, and pleaded with his hearers, 

by the love they bore their country, not to deter by word or deed any person from entering 

the service.”107

Robert Johnson Jr., then twenty-nine years old, married, and working as a clerk, enlisted as 

a private on 1 June that year and was mustered into Company F of the Fifty-fifth Regiment

fifteen days later. On 12 November 1863 he was captured on North Edisto Island at Botany 

Bay, South Carolina. Imprisoned at Charleston Jail with about fifty other African American

troops, some of them having been captured at Fort Wagner, Johnson composed both a 

verse and a letter, the latter published in the Liberator on 7 October 1864. He reported to 

Liberator readers that most of the Union troops in Charleston Jail with him had “hardly 

enough clothing to cover them” and received a pint of meal a day for food. Still they 

considered their treatment “not very harsh” relative to what they expected to receive. In 

the letter he stated that he discerned among his Confederate jailors “a disposition to 

release all free men, and as we come under that head, we hope a movement in that 

direction will soon be made.” Johnson, by then a sergeant, was in fact removed from 

Charleston and taken to Florence, South Carolina, but he died a prisoner of war on 12 

February 1865.108 

According to Evelina Johnson, Robert Johnson had three other sons by his first wife—

Henry West, Frederick, and William, all of whom enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1858 and 

1859. Nothing is yet known of Frederick; William moved to Missouri after the war. After 

his discharge, Henry W. Johnson enlisted in his brother’s regiment, the Fifty-fifth, on 28 

May 1863 as a sergeant, and served until 29 August 1865. His stepmother stated that he was 

first commander of Post 134 of the Grand Army of the Republic. Several Henry W. 

Johnsons appear in Boston directories after the Civil War, but without detailed research it 

is impossible to identify which if any were the same man.109

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 54
Robert Johnson Sr. remained at 69 Joy Street until his death on 8 December 1880; in his 

latter years he was listed in directories as a caterer. His widow Evelina, according to her 

daughter Adeline Trusty, died at the family home in February 1891, though Boston 

directories list her at 69 Joy Street through 1893. The house remained in the Johnson 

family until 1904. 

SITE 5 • Site of Coffin Pitts House

Other name: Rebecca Lee Crumpler House 

Address: 67 Joy Street (formerly 18 Belknap) 

DOC: about 1900 (1898-1908) 

History: Built for the owner of 21 Hancock Street, the dwelling on this site has been 

occupied by people of color from at least as early as 1821. The dwelling on this site housed 

one of the north slope’s leading political activists as well as famed fugitive Anthony Burns, 

whose 1854 rendition scandalized even moderate abolitionists and was the bitterest pill for 

the radical segment of movement.

Preserved in the north wall of the structure currently standing on this site can be seen the 

original wall of the three-and-one-half story, side-gable building that stood here when it 

was known as 18 Belknap Street and Coffin Pitts, one of most prominent members of the 

Boston’s antebellum African American community, owned it. Pitts raised the extra story on 

the house in 1843.110 

In 1821 and 1822, the earliest tax year examined for this property, William Vassall, a dealer 

in “old cloaths,” is shown as the occupant of this dwelling, valued at $1,000. Federal 

censuses show Vassall on Belknap Street in both 1810 and 1820, but whether he was living 

on this lot in these earlier years has not been established. City directories and tax records 

list Vassall at other locations on Belknap Street through 1844. From 1813 to 1816 his 

clothes shop was at 29 Ann Street, the alignment of which seems roughly to skirt the north 

side of the Quincy Market complex, and on School Street in 1823. After 1823 Vassall’s 

occupation in city directories is listed as “tender,” which may mean that he was working as 

a waiter or as a helper in a store. 

Vassall’s origins are not known, though it is tempting to speculate that he and other men of 

color with the same surname—Cyrus, Darby (sometimes Derby), and James—were all once 

slaves of the Loyalist Vassall family of Cambridge and Boston whose estates were 

confiscated at the time of the American Revolution.111 Whether the slaves that were part of 

these estates were sold, manumitted, or permitted to leave the country with the Loyalist 

families they served has not been determined. Yet it seems significant that in 1808 William 

Vassall was married, and in 1806 and 1809 two of Cyrus Vassall’s children were baptised, in 

Trinity Church, built in 1733 across Summer Street from Leonard Vassall’s estate; Leonard

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 55
Vassall himself was on the building committee. Two of Darby Vassall’s oldest 

children were baptised at King’s Chapel in 1804, which also suggests ties to a Loyalist 

family.112

Cyrus and Darby Vassall were among the forty-four original members of the African 

Society, formed in 1796 “for the mutual benefit of each other, which may from time to time 

offer; behaving ourselves at the same time as true and faithful Citizens of the 

Commonwealth in which we live.”113

Throughout this period 18 Belknap was owned by Charles Barrett, who owned the parent 

lot at 21 Hancock Street. Barrett used the house that stood on the rear, or Belknap Street, 

side, built sometime between 1807 and 1822, as rental property, and tax records document 

that most of the tenants were African American. The chief occupant of 18 Belknap from 

1823 until 1835 was Lewis York, an African American waiter about whom little is known. It 

may have been his widow who in 1869 stayed briefly at the Home for Aged Colored 

Women.114 In 1832 the bootblack Caesar Gardner lived here as well, though the next year 

the city directory shows him at 9 Second Street, Robert Roberts’s home. 

On 12 March 1835 Barrett sold 18 Belknap to Coffin Pitts, “clothesman,” for $1,500. At 

that time, according to a 26 February 1835 plan by surveyor Alexander Wadsworth, a brick 

house just shy of eighteen by twenty-five feet stood on the property.115 Pitts had come to 

Boston from Norfolk, Virginia, by 1812, for in that year he and two other members of the 

African Meeting House represented that congregation at a meeting of the Boston Baptist 

Association. In 1817 he married Clarissa A. Barbadoes, a native of Lexington, 

Massachusetts, and the daughter of Abel and Chloe Holloway Barbadoes. In 1828 Pitts 

lived next door at 20 Belknap, a dwelling owned by whites but occupied continuously by 

African Americans from as early as 1822 through 1849.116 By 1830 Pitts had opened a 

clothes shop on Ann Street and was living on West Centre Street, but within six years he 

had settled into his longtime business address at 28 Brattle Street. Between 1847 and 1850 

Pitts and his family were sharing the house at 18 Belknap with the African American barber 

Benjamin P. Bassett, who soon moved to Smith Court. 

Coffin Pitts was a vocal opponent of colonization, an active member of the Massachusetts 

General Colored Association, and in the 1860s a Boston agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau 

who met ex-slaves as they arrived in Boston. He was also a deacon of the African Meeting 

House and later of the Twelfth Baptist Church, by the 1850s popularly known as the 

“Fugitive Slave’s Church.” It is in this connection that the site of 18 Belknap gains its 

greatest significance. 

On 4 March 1854, an escaped slave named Anthony Burns made his way to Boston from 

Richmond, Virginia, after having spent three week stowed away amid cargo in the hold of a 

vessel. After working at odd jobs for a time at Mattapan Iron Works in South Boston, 

Burns came to Twelfth Baptist Church and must have met Pitts. Pitts boarded Burns at 18 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 56
Belknap and gave him work in his clothing store. He can have lived here only a few months. 

On his way home from Pitts’s Brattle Street shop on the evening of 24 May, Burns was 

arrested as a fugitive slave, having made the mistake of writing his brother in Richmond 

and revealing his location to slaveholder Charles Suttle. Burns was arrested at the corner of 

Hanover and Court Streets and taken to the “court house,” presumably the Boston Court 

House on Court Street. There he was held for nine days while the city’s abolitionists 

awaited a decision on his status from federal commissioner Edward Greeley Loring, whose 

father Ellis Gray Loring had long been regarded as an abolitionist by whites and blacks 

alike.117 

Before the planned mass meeting at Faneuil Hall on the arrest, a group of abolitionists—

chief among them Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Martin Stowell of Worcester and 

Lewis Hayden of Boston (site 19)—agreed to assign men to keep watch on the courthouse 

to assure that Burns was not spirited away illegally. And a group of them, again including 

Hayden, agreed privately that should Loring rule Burns must be returned to his owner, as 

many people as possible “would crowd the streets when he was brought forth, and see to it 

that, in the melee which would inevitably follow, Burns made good his escape.” An even 

smaller group pledged among themselves “to engage in force and arms if needed the 

following night.” 

During the meeting at Faneuil Hall, Wendell Phillips had just quieted the urge of the 

crowd to storm the courthouse when “suddenly a man shouted from the entrance that a 

mob of negroes was in Court Square attempting to rescue Burns.” The entire meeting 

adjourned at once and rushed to the courthouse, while those who had earlier agreed to 

carry arms gathered revolvers, axes, and a large timber which they used to ram in a door on 

the west side of the courthouse. One federal officer was killed, and both civil and military 

officials called in troops that quelled the attack. 

Grimes, Pitts, and other members of the Twelfth Baptist raised $1,200, the price Burns’s 

owner had asked for him, but after a federal district attorney voided the sale Burns was 

remanded to Suttle. On 2 June 1854 Loring ruled that Suttle had a legitimate claim, and 

Anthony Burns was walked one-third of a mile—flanked by one thousand soldiers who 

threaded him through thousands of people and various emblems marking the tragedy of the 

event—from the courthouse to the vessel that was to return him to the South. Ultimately 

the members of Twelfth Baptist Church bought Anthony Burns’s freedom for $1,300 in 

1855. Burns returned to the North, studied at Oberlin Institute and other theological 

institutions, and became pastor of a fugitives’ church in St. Catherine’s, Ontario. He died in 

1862, at the eight of twenty-eight.118

Rebecca Lee Crumpler (1831-95), said to be the first African American woman to earn a 

medical degree from the New England Female Medical College, boarded at 18 Belknap 

Street in 1869. Five years after graduating, Crumpler returned to provide medical care for 

the North Slope community. This part of the house’s history remains to be researched.119

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 57
By 1868 the once famed fugitive slave orator and writer, William Wells Brown, had become

partners with Coffin Pitts in his clothing business at 24 Brattle Street, and when Pitts died 

in September 1871 his widow and third wife, Louisa Robinson Pitts, sustained the 

partnership at her husband’s stand. She also ran an employment office from the couple’s 

longtime 67 Joy Street home, no doubt an outgrowth of her husband’s work as a Boston 

agent for the Freedman’s Bureau. 

According to historian Elizabeth H. Pleck, both Coffin Pitts and Leonard Grimes (site 18) 

helped to place formerly enslaved Virginians in white New England families on behalf of 

the bureau between 1864 and 1868. The project, which Pleck has called the largest 

movement of African American labor into Boston, was initiated to relieve Virginia of its 

“press of population” by sending poor, unemployed, or potentially dependent ex-slaves to 

New England, a region believed both desperately in need of domestic help and sympathetic 

to the plight of the recently enslaved. With other agents Pitts sent names of families 

requesting help to the Freedman’s Bureau, which matched them to persons deemed worthy 

of the work. He, Grimes, and other former abolitionists of color met more than one 

thousand Virginians as they arrived at Boston’s wharves and took them both to the Howard 

Industrial School in Cambridge or to an unidentified “temporary home” on Joy Street 

where they were trained in domestic service and then placed in families.120

Louisa Pitts appears to have remained in the property until 1895. She remarried a James F. 

Gilmore, and on 7 May 1895 she sold the property to Charles C. Pitts and Tresa A. Taylor 

for $2,000 on the provision that she have life tenancy. On 1 February 1897 they transferred 

the property back to her for the same consideration, and on 26 February 1900 Louisa 

Gilmore transferred the property for no consideration to David Milton. 

The next three houses up the hill, or south, on Belknap Street were also occupied almost 

exclusively by African Americans in the years before the Civil War. 

The first, 65 Joy (formerly 20 Belknap), is the site of another dwelling owned between 1837 

and 1865 by African American mariner John Henry. Between 1821 and 1823 the African 

American tailor William G. Nell lived in the house on this property. Nell first appears in 

Boston directories in 1816, working in a shop on Union Street and living on Ridgeway 

Lane, two streets east of Belknap; accounts of his early life are contradictory and bear 

further examination.121 According to Dorothy Porter Wesley, on 5 April 1816 Nell, a tailor 

from Charleston, South Carolina, married Louisa Marshall in adjacent Brookline, and their 

son William Cooper Nell was born on 20 December the same year. The death record of 

their daughter Louisa Nell Gray states that her mother was from Shrewsbury, 

Massachusetts, while most other records speculate that she was from Brookline. By 1818, 

William G. Nell was listed as living on Belknap Street, perhaps in this house; in any event, 

it is probably safe to conclude that 65 Joy Street is the site of the boyhood home of William 

C. Nell. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 58
By 1824, however, the Nell family moved to 27 Belknap Street, north of Smith Court, and 

in 1826 they moved to Robert Roberts’s house on Second Street. In 1829 the family moved 

again, this time to Bridge Street, next door to David Walker. Nell had moved his tailor shop 

to Brattle Square by 1827, and like Walker he was a founding member of the Massachusetts 

General Colored Association. From 1824 to 1824 mariner William Brown and barber 

James G. Barbadoes, whose large family lived in numerous houses close by, lived at 20 

Belknap; Coffin Pitts also spent a year as a tenant here in 1827-28. By 1831 the mariner 

John Henry began to rent 20 Belknap, by 1835 he probably had purchased the property 

from Babcock, and his daughter, Rachel Only, owned the property until 1865.122

The second, at 59-61 Joy Street (formerly 28-30 Belknap through 1833 and 22-24 Belknap 

from 1833 to 1854) stood a double house occupied for many years by the barber John B. 

Pero. From 1822 through the 1850s the double house at 59-61 Joy Street was occupied 

almost solely by African Americans. From that year through 1829 the barber Lewis

Blanchard rented one house; from 1822 until 1825 the other was occupied by “Mrs. 

Welsh,” perhaps the mother of owner Walter Welsh. Her place was taken in 1825 by Pero, 

who remained at 22 Belknap until 1847. Pero’s origins are obscure, but it may be speculated 

that he or his father was once a slave who took a given slave name as a surname, as Paul 

Cuffe had done. 

In 1823 Blanchard’s barber shop was at the Town Dock, roughly where North Market is 

now, and by March 1831 Pero’s hairdressing shop was at numbers 2 and 3 “in rear of Dock 

Square, near the City Tavern,” in the same neighborhood as Blanchard’s. Pero advertised 

regularly and prominently in the Liberator to both the wholesale and retail trade. 

Throughout the early 1830s he carried a remarkable array of men’s toiletries—soaps; toilet 

waters, oils, and colognes; scissors, combs, and brushes for the hair, clothes, and teeth; his 

shop even offered wallets, playing cards, and dominoes. 

David Walker’s biographer, noting the proximity of Pero’s business to Walker’s in the 

Brattle Street/Dock Square area, has identified Pero as a “key colleague” of Walker. Pero 

is listed as a Prince Hall Mason in 1828, but otherwise his connections with Walker are not 

clear. Pero was among those assembled at Garrison’s 1833 farewell interview before he 

went to England to raise funds for a manual training school for colored youth, and a 

Martha Pero, probably his wife, was among eight women of color who were members of 

Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.123

Other residents of 22-24 Belknap were Frederick Brimsley or Brinsley, also a Brattle Street 

clothing dealer and viewed as a colleague of David Walker. Brinsley was a member of the 

Massachusetts General Colored Association and toastmaster at the group’s fifth 

anniversary dinner on 19 May 1831. He lived at 22-24 Belknap in 1831, when tax lists 

describe him as a “gentleman.”124 The mariner Joseph Silver lived at 24 Belknap in 1831-

32, and in 1841 the African-born bootblack Odcardo Minot was living in part of the house. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 59
Minot’s story is not yet known, but according to the 1850 census he was born in 1811 and 

married a woman born in Connecticut. His first appearance in Boston tax records and 

directories is 1841, when he was working at a bootblacking stand on Atkinson Street near 

Milk Street. Caesar Gardner had worked at this stand five years earlier.125 

The double house that stands on this lot today may date to about 1854, when Joshua 

Bennett, a prominent midcentury real estate developer on the north slope, bought the 

property. 

The third property, at 55 Joy Street (32-34 Belknap through 1833 and 26-28 Belknap from 

1833 to 1854), may principally be associated with Pompey and Martha Thurston. In 1822 

Thurston shared the double house with James Burr, who lived at 24 Belknap in 1832. In 

1823 the Thurston and Burr were in business together as shoeblacks on Elm Street. By 1827 

directories consistently listed Thurston as a waiter, while tax lists from 1824 show him as a 

hackman, coachman, laborer, and waiter. Thurston’s given name suggests a slave origin,126

although he gave his place of birth as Massachusetts and his date of birth as about 1790, 

when slavery was no longer permitted within the commonwealth. By 1850 Thurston and his 

wife Martha appear to have been living in a two-family house on Grove Street with Twelfth 

Baptist Church minister Leonard Grimes and his family. That affiliation may explain how 

Martha Thurston became the first matron of the Home for Aged Colored Women (site 14) 

in 1860; Grimes was one of the prime movers in creating the home. She held the post, 

which paid two hundred dollars a year, until her death in 1869. 

Between 1846 and 1850 Maria Bell, the widow of African American laborer William Bell, 

also lived at 28 Belknap Street; the family of Rufus Gilbert was in the other half of the 

house in 1850. Maria Bell, who claimed either a Washington, D.C., or Virginia birthplace 

to census enumerators, had been in Boston since at least 1838, when her first child was 

born; William Bell first appeared in city directories in 1827 and had died by 1846. In 1860 

Mrs. Bell was living at 80 Southac Street, and Boston Vigilance Committee records 

document that she was reimbursed for having boarded a fugitive identified only as “Mrs. 

Alexander” in August that year. In 1860 she shared 80 Southac Street with Clara Vaught, 

who, while living at an as-yet unidentified address, assisted numerous fugitives between 

December 1852 and March 1859. 

On 26 March 1878 Sidney Dorsey of Cambridge applied to the Home for Aged Colored 

Women at 27 Myrtle Street “for his mother in law, MARIA BELL. 67 yrs. old, who came 

from Washington many years ago with Mrs. Joseph Coolidge & lived with Mrs. Sargent 

many years. Is a member of Zion Church. North Russell St. Sidney Dorset [sic] lived 9 yrs. 

with Mrs. Wm. Tucker. He said Maria Bell was not contented with such fare as he could 

give her. Told him there was not room at present.” At some point after Dorsey’s visit, the 

home’s records document, Maria Bell herself “called & said she did not wish to come, but 

would like to have $4.00 a month to hire another room with.”127

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 60
SITE 6 • James Scott House 

Other name: William C. Nell House 

Address: 3 Smith Court 

 

DOC: 1799 

History: The significance of this house rests in its antiquity, the length of its occupancy by 

people of color, and its association with African American political activists. With the 

George Middleton/Lewis Glapion House on Pinckney Street (site 13) and its neighbors at 

5, 7, and 7A Smith Court, 3 Smith Court represent both an earlier style of frame dwelling 

that once characterized the north slope of Beacon Hill and a remarkable survival. Due to 

the number of fires in eighteenth-century Boston, the town meeting asked the General 

Court in 1803 to require that all buildings higher than ten feet be built of stone or brick and 

covered with slate, tile, or other fireproof material. In that year the city selectmen began to 

enforce a “brick only” construction rule. These dwellings on the north side of Smith Court 

have managed to remain unscathed over more than two hundred years on their original 

lots, vestiges of the sort of environment that provoked that rule.128

Smith Court’s origins arose from the purchase of the ropewalk property at a 1796 estate 

sale by Elizabeth Fennecy. In 1771 ropemaker Edward Carnes had purchased both the 

ropewalk and the adjacent property fronting Belknap Street from the heirs of Thomas 

Jenner, and Fennecy, having acquired the parcel at the late Carnes’s estate auction, had the 

ropewalk dismantled between 1797 and 1798. In March of the latter year she married 

Carnes’s son Edward, and in June, through her agent Jeduthan Wellington, she created 

house lots from the land that had belonged to the ropewalk. On the parcel fronting 

Belknap Street, house lots were assembled around a new passageway twenty feet wide, 

which by 1820 was called May’s Court and by 1848 Smith Court. 

The bricklayers William Lancaster and Benajah Brigham bought the first of the lots created 

from former ropewalk land in June 1798. This lot ran forty-seven feet along the north side 

of the new twenty-foot passageway to Belknap Street. In February 1799 Lancaster and 

Brigham purchased a second forty-seven-foot lot along the passageway adjoining their first 

lot so as to extend it eastward to the corner of Belknap Street. On the rear, or westernmost, 

fifty-nine feet of this lot, the bricklayers built the mixed brick-and-frame building that is 

today 3 Smith Court. Set back from the street, the wide but shallow building has 

clapboarding on its front and sides, while in the rear it is supported by a windowless brick 

wall—a construction style, Terranova notes, common to several north slope houses dating 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 61
before 1805, all of which are facing side alleys.129 Chamberlain’s research in city and federal 

tax records suggested that 3 Smith Court was most likely built between October 1798 and 

the spring of 1800. 

At some point before 1809, Lancaster and Brigham also built a house or houses on the 

easternmost thirty-five feet of the lot, with frontage on both Smith Court and Belknap 

Street. These properties were variously numbered 1 Smith Court and 25 (later 29) Belknap 

(48-50 Joy) Street; members of the Barbadoes family were often tenants of these units. The 

building or buildings at these addresses have since been replaced by a Renaissance Revival 

tenement built about 1900. 

In 1800 Lancaster and Brigham were together assessed for real estate here and occupied 

“the back end” of the house on their land. Two years later, in January, Brigham sold his 

half-interest in the property to Lancaster for $1,500, and Lancaster divided the lot into 

three parcels. In 1809 Lancaster sold the east end of 3 Smith Court, a parcel twenty-nine 

feet square, to the white trader Joseph Powars for $1,000, as well as the lot on the corner of 

Smith Court and Belknap Street with the building on it, measuring thirty-five by twentynine feet, for $800. Five years later Lancaster sold the middle section, thirty by twenty-nine 

feet, to Powars for $800. 

 

Powars and his family lived in the eastern half of 3 Smith Court until his death. Joseph 

Powars’ will, probated 17 July 1826, deeded “the easterly half of my dwelling house . . . in 

which I now live” to his wife, and stated that his single daughter, Joanna Austin Powars, 

was to inhabit the west half and to inherit the whole house at her mother’s decease. In 1831 

Joanna Powars married Joseph Stanford and moved from Smith Court, though she 

continued to own the property until 1865.130

When Joanna Stanford left Smith Court she began to rent the house to people of color. 

From 1830 to 1845 the bootblack and waiter George Washington (site 7) rented one side of 

the house and the barber Andrew Telford rented the other. Telford (sometimes shown in 

directory and census listings as Tilford), who told the census taker in 1850 that he was a 

native of Rhode Island, was in Boston by 4 September 1804, when he married Rachel 

Turner at the city’s Second Baptist Church. He was living on Belknap Street by 1810, in a 

household of five persons, and had a shop on Elm Street. By 1818 he had formed a 

partnership with the barber Peter Howard on Cambridge Street, which lasted only through 

1820. By 1836 his barbershop was listed on Mt. Vernon Street, on the fashionable side of 

Beacon Hill, and the tax records for the property in 1843 list Telford as a gentleman. In 

1833 Telford’s wife Rachel had placed a prominent advertisement for a steamboat 

excursion in the Liberator: 

MRS. TILFORD gives notice to her friends and acquaintances, that she intends having 

a Respectable Water Party on the eighth of August next, if the weather is fair—if not, 

the next fair day. The party will start from Long Wharf at 8 o’clock precisely. Price 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 62
$1.—Mrs. T. solicits the patronage of her friends, as every effort will be made to 

please and give general satisfaction. 

The Steam Boat Suffolk is engaged for the accommodation of those who may 

feel disposed to patronize her. A book will be kept open at her house from this date, 

to receive the names of those who may do her the favor to call and pay in advance, 

so as to enable her to make a just calculation for a sumptuous fare./ RACHEL

TILFORD, rear 29 Belknap Street.131

In a neighborhood of political activists, Andrew and Rachel Telford stand out for their 

evident inactivity on this score. Andrew Telford is not known to have been a member of the 

African Lodge, the Massachusetts General Colored Association, the New England 

Freedom Association, or either of the Boston Vigilance Committees, nor is his wife 

believed to have been associated with any of the women’s groups active in the city’s African 

American community. John Daniels, who wrote a 1914 history of the black community in 

Boston, called Peter Howard’s Cambridge Street barber shop an “early rendezvous” of 

those involved in planning ways to assist fugitive slaves en route to Canada, but because 

Daniels was frustratingly vague in the reference, it is impossible to know if Howard’s shop 

was active in this way when Telford was his partner.132 

Another long-term tenant at 3 Smith Court was James Scott, who rented part of the house 

from 1839 to 1865, when he purchased the house from Joanna Powars Stanford. He 

continued to live there until he died. Scott told state census takers in 1855 that he was born 

in Virginia, but very little else is known about his origins. Like Benjamin F. Roberts, Scott 

began his career in Boston as a shoemaker, the work he was doing when he first came to 

live at 3 Smith Court. By 1843 he had become a clothing dealer. One of his children was 

named Henry H. G. Scott, quite possibly named for African American political leader 

Henry Highland Garnet. 

On 19 February 1851 Scott was thrust into the center of Boston’s abolitionist forum when 

he was arrested at his shop on the charge of having spearheaded the rush on the courtroom 

where the fugitive Shadrach Minkins was being held. Minkins was arrested while working 

as a waiter at Cornhill Coffee House in Cornhill Court, close to the African American 

clothing dealers, hairdressers, and bootblacks working in Brattle Square, Brattle Street, and 

Dock Square. Minkins was taken directly to the Boston Court House in Court Square, only 

a few blocks southwest, and held while a crowd, largely African American, gathered almost 

spontaneously. Only two months had passed since agents of the claimants of William and 

Ellen Craft had attempted to return them to Georgia, and the city’s abolitionists remained 

extremely hostile to the efforts of federal officials to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act in the 

commonwealth.133

As state officials within the courtroom where Minkins was held debated their role in 

assisting the federal marshals who detained him there, the crowd assembled in the 

courthouse hallway and on the grounds grew increasingly restive. Finally, a smaller group 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 63
wearing oilskin jackets forced the courtroom door open and bore Minkins out bodily. 

Followed by an estimated two hundred people of color, they carried or led him to Bowdoin 

Square and down Cambridge Street, up Garden Street, and eastward to the foot of Southac 

Street, at which point the crowd apparently dispersed. Not until after Lewis Hayden’s death 

in 1889 was it learned that Hayden (site 19) and Robert Morris, Minkins’s attorney, had 

taken the fugitive to the attic of the home of Elizabeth Riley at 1 Southac Court (see site 

20). The widow of clothes dealer William Riley, she had lived at this address since 1841 and

was, with Susan Paul, Chloe Barbadoes, Martha Pero, and other women of color, a member 

of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s. Soon afterward Hayden removed 

Minkins, carried him by a roundabout route first to Cambridge and a day later, with John J. 

Smith (site 24) to Concord. From there Minkins made his way to Montreal. 

For some reason, perhaps the coincidence between his height and eyewitness accounts that 

identified two large men of color at the head, James Scott was charged with leading this 

charge on the courtroom. Jonas W. Clark, John P. Coburn (sites 15 & 17), and Coffin Pitts 

(site 5), all fellow clothing dealers, posted his bond, and Scott’s trial, the first of those 

accused of having aided Minkins’ rescue, took place in May 1851. Witnesses for the 

prosecution testified that Scott was among the men of color who had forced his way into 

the courtroom to take Minkins out; his defense, Richard Henry Dana Jr. and New 

Hampshire lawyer John Parker Hale, called witnesses who claimed he was in his shop at the 

time of the attack. 

Two jurors felt the evidence was insufficient to convict, and Scott was released. Whether he 

was among the crowd of Minkins’ rescuers or not, he is documented in Boston Vigilance 

Committee records to have assisted other fugitives. On 18 July 1856 he boarded the 

escaped slaves Henry Jackson and his wife and child at 3 Smith Court; in October 1857 he 

somehow assisted a fugitive named Henry North; and on 22 February 1860 he boarded the 

fugitives William West for ten days and Robert LeRoy for four days. 

From 1850 to 1857, the turbulent years in Scott’s life, he shared 3 Smith Court with William 

Cooper Nell, one of the best known of Boston’s African American political figures and 

authors. Nell was probably born on Ridgeway Street but had grown up on Belknap, May, 

and Bridge Streets.134 In 1829, when he was twelve and a student in the basement school of 

the African Meeting House, Boston mayor Harrison Gray Otis recognized him, Nancy 

Woodson, and Charles A. Battiste as the best scholars in the school. It was this incident, 

and the recognition that he should have received the city’s Franklin Medal but did not, that 

sparked Nell’s long fight to integrate Boston schools.135

Nell continued to be active at an early age. The Liberator noted in January 1832 that he 

presented “an original address on slavery” at the Boston Minors’ Exhibition second annual 

exhibition, and in October that year he was reported to be secretary of the Juvenile 

Garrison Independent Society, also called the Juvenile Colored Association of Boston, 

which was in large part a savings association for which his father served as treasurer. James 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 64
Horton states that Nell worked as an errand boy and apprentice for the Liberator and that, 

despite being an active member of the New England Freedom Association, founded in 1842 

by African Americans to assist fugitive slaves, he tended to urge people of color to dispense 

with “all separate action,” work through integrated institutions, and worship in integrated 

churches.136 While working with William Lloyd Garrison at the Liberator, Nell also

established an “employment registry” to assist people of color in finding jobs in Boston, a 

service he continued to provide in the 1850s as well.137

According to Dorothy Porter Wesley, Nell moved to Rochester, New York, by December 

1847 to become printer and publisher of Frederick Douglass’s North Star from its first 3 

December issue, and he assumed Douglass’s editorial duties when Douglass toured and 

lectured. Wesley has stated that Nell apparently split his time between Rochester and 

Boston in 1851 and 1852 and continued to work with Douglass on Frederick Douglass’ Paper

in those years. The 1850 Boston directory lists him on Smith Court in 1850, and tax records 

list him at 3 Smith Court in 1854; the 1855 state census also enumerates him among the 

occupants of James Scott’s 3 Smith Court dwelling.138 

Virtually as soon as he returned to Boston, Nell began writing his Services of Colored 

Americans, in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (Boston: Prentiss & Sawyer, 1851), the second 

edition of which was issued by Boston abolitionist publisher Robert F. Wallcut in 1852. He 

must immediately afterward have begun research on Colored Patriots of the American 

Revolution, which Wallcut published in 1855. 

Amid his research Nell supported himself as a “copyist,” worked incessantly on the effort to 

integrate city schools, and, second only to Lewis Hayden, was the most active man of color 

in assisting fugitive slaves. Between 3 January 1851 and August of 1859, the Boston 

Vigilance Committee reimbursed Nell on nineteen separate occasions for a range of 

services to thirty-three named escaped slaves and an unspecified number of unnamed 

“fugitives.” Sometimes he simply gave them cash, sometimes he bought clothing for them 

from various used clothing dealers, sometimes he boarded fugitives; on occasion he bought 

their fare to Canada or Portland, and at times the committee paid him for telegraphing an 

assistant at some other place to notify them of a safe arrival or an imminent departure. 

By 1855 Nell was the business agent for the Liberator and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery 

Society, and by 1857 he was boarding at the home of clothing dealer Jonas W. Clark at 20 

Grove Street. By 1863, largely through the efforts of Charles Sumner (site 26), Nell had 

secured a position as a federal postal clerk. Wesley has declared it “well established that 

Nell was the first colored citizen to become employed in the post office,” and in an 1873 

letter to William Lloyd Garrison Nell wrote, “I happened to be the First Colored Man 

employed about the United States Mail.”139

Nell worked at the post office until his death, but by 1873 he had moved from the West End 

to the South End. There he shared a home at 88 Kendall Street with his sister Louisa Nell 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 65
Gray (sites 14 & 17) and her husband Ira Smith Gray, who had married in the early 1840s. 

Gray, a caterer, appears to have been better, if unofficially, known as an associate in the 

gaming enterprises of another of his brothers-in-law, John P. Coburn (sites 15 & 17). 

William C. Nell died at 64 Kendall Street in 1874, and his sister Louisa and brother-in-law 

continued to live at that address through the late 1870s. 

After Nell left 3 Smith Court, James Scott remained there with Henry Weeden, then a 

waiter, the laborer Robert Jones, and the steamboat tender Benjamin Bengall. Weeden, an 

occupant since 1850, was then listed in tax records as a tailor. He had come to Boston about 

1839 from Rhode Island, two years after his brother Benjamin had moved there from 

Newport. They were sons of Ruth Charles and Mintus Weeden of Jamestown, Rhode 

Island, the latter of whom may have been a slave in the Weeden family; manumission 

papers at Rhode Island Historical Society document that one member of that family made 

arrangements for the manumission of ten enslaved people of color in 1775.140 The Weeden 

brothers and their cousin Christopher worked together as clothes cleaners in a shop at 10 

Franklin Avenue in Boston, and by 1852 Benjamin Weeden boarded at 3 Smith Court with 

Henry. 

Sometime between 1839 and 1842, Henry Weeden married Jane Telford, the daughter of 

Andrew, who was then living at 3 Smith Court. At about that time he became involved in 

abolitionism. He was a founding member of the New England Freedom Association, 

founded by people of color to assist and shelter fugitive slaves.141 With Samuel Snowden 

(see site 20), Joshua Bowen Smith, Lewis Hayden (site 19), and Nell, Weeden delivered 

remarks at a “levee” (a reception in honor of a particular person) on 31 July 1846, on the 

eve of the annual First of August West Indian Emancipation Celebration, to begin to 

discuss how to memorialize fugitive rescuer Charles Turner Torrey, who had died in 

Baltimore Jail in May.142 Weeden, like William G. Nell but unlike his son, was also in favor 

of creating an abolitionist organization composed entirely of people of color, but he was 

vice president of the committee who presented William Lloyd Garrison with a loving cup 

for his services to the African American community of Boston and was active in the effort 

to achieve integrated schools in the city.143

Weeden moved to Cambridge in 1853 but by 1865 had moved back to 2 Sears place, off 

Anderson Street, in Boston’s sixth ward; he continued to work as a clothes dresser on 

Franklin Street. His son Cornelius was living with him and had secured a job as a letter 

carrier, perhaps by dint of his military service. At the age of nineteen, Cornelius Weeden 

had enlisted on 10 July 1863 as a corporal in Company C of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts 

Volunteer Infantry; he was single at the time and working as a porter. Weeden fought at 

Fort Wagner and was discharged on 20 August 1865. In 1868 Cornelius Weeden married, 

and by 1874 he and his family moved to Hyde Park. By 1880 his father’s family followed, 

and after the death of Jane Telford Weeden, the widower Henry Weeden moved to 

Malden, where he died in 1895.144

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 66
James Scott continued to rent half of 3 Smith Court until, on 26 May 1865, he purchased 

the entire property from Joanna A. Stanford for $5,000. On 1 October 1874, with Boston 

attorney and abolitionist William Ingersoll Bowditch serving as witness to the transaction, 

Scott deeded the property in halves to his son Henry and to Thomas P. Taylor, a 

photographer specializing in stereopticon views, for $4,000. Henry Scott died shortly after 

the sale, and James Scott conveyed his son’s half-interest to Taylor. By that time Scott had 

discontinued his clothing business and had turned to junk dealing; by 1888 the city directory 

no longer listed an occupation for him, but he was still living at 3 Smith Court, where he 

had been for nearly sixty years. 

Thomas P. Taylor lived in the house, and in 1910, at the age of seventy-two, he married 

Carolyn Washington, descended from George Washington (site 7), who had lived at 3 

Smith Court in the 1830s and 1840s. The Taylor family lived in the house until 1924, when 

heir R. Adelaide Washington of Stoughton, the great-granddaughter of George 

Washington, sold it to Elinor K. B. Snow. 

SITE 7 • George Washington House 

Address: 5 Smith Court 

DOC: 1825-35145 

History: This property is associated with the African American bootblack and laborer 

George Washington, whose family occupied the house for more than six decades. Before 

the current structure was built on this site, Peter Wilcox, whose family was one of five from 

Boston to resettle in Sierra Leone with Paul Cuffe, owned the property. 

In March 1799 housewright Theodore Phinney acquired a large parcel of former ropewalk 

land from the estate of Elizabeth Fennecy Carnes and subdivided it into house lots which 

he sold exclusively to African Americans. Five Smith Court is one of seven lots created 

from Phinney’s parcel of ropewalk land.146

Phinney’s portion of the ropewalk land included forty-eight feet of frontage on Smith 

Court—the sites of 5 and 7 Smith Court—as well as a segment of the narrow ropewalk 

beginning with 7 Smith Court and extending two hundred feet to the north, which became 

five additional courts along Holmes Alley. In September of the same year Phinney resold 

the lot to Timothy Phillips, an African American laborer listed as a head of household in 

the 1790 federal census, and Peter Mitchell, listed among “Africans” in Boston’s 1813 

directory as living on Belknap Street.147

Whether a house existed on the lot at this time is unclear. In November 1802 Mitchell, 

listed in the deed as an assistant sugar boiler, conveyed to Peter Wilcox, laborer, his 

undivided half of the 5 Smith Court lot for $150. The following June Timothy Phillips’s heir 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 67
assigned his undivided half to Peter Wilcox for $40. 

These transactions are the earliest records of Peter Wilcox in Boston. On the day before 

Christmas 1804, he married Chloe Planting at Trinity Church. The couple’s three children, 

Eliza, Sarah, and Caroline, were baptized in that church between December 1805 and 

August 1809. By 1810 the federal census recorded his family of five on Belknap Street in a 

house they shared with the family of James Vassall, and by 1813 the city directory records 

Peter Wilcox on May’s Court. It seems likely, then, that a dwelling of some sort was on the 

5 Smith Court property by that time.148 

In 1815 Peter Wilcox sold his Smith Court property to Samuel D. Parker.149 Then he, his 

wife Chloe, and his five children promptly disappeared from Boston records, for they were 

one of four Boston families who left on the sloop Traveller with master mariner Paul Cuffe 

to resettle in Sierra Leone. On 13 March 1815 Cuffe, whose plan was to populate Sierra 

Leone with industrious, temperate African American families who would develop an 

economy to undercut the slave-driven economy of the American South, wrote Perry Locke 

of Boston to advise him that the “African Voyage” would not take place until October. He 

asked Locke, with whom he had been corresponding on the plan since 1812, to “call on all 

who may wish to go and get their names with a Certificate of their Character that I may 

endeavour to make provisions accordingly. Thou will furnish me with their names as soon 

as convenient.” Though Prince Saunders was actively interested in the proposal, it was 

probably Locke who lined up Wilcox, Samuel Hewes and Thomas Jarvis, whose families 

follow Locke’s on the Traveller’s 1815 passenger list. Wilcox, Hewes, and Jarvis were all 

close neighbors in the vicinity of Smith Court: from Wilcox’s house, Hewes’s was just 

around the corner and north down Holmes Alley, and Jarvis’s lay between two nearby 

passageways connecting to Holmes Alley and Belknap Street.150

Samuel D. Parker owned 5 Smith Court from 1815 to 1828. During that time he rented the 

house to people of color, sometimes defined in tax records simply as “blacks.” In 1828 

Parker sold the property to black clothing dealer John Williams, about whom very little is 

known. Williams mortgaged the property to Parker but was unable to make payments, and 

in 1849 Parker resold the property to George Washington, who had been living next door at 

3 Smith Court.151 

Washington, who stated he was born in Massachusetts in 1795 in the 1850 census, was 

working as a bootblack on Water Street by the time he was first listed in Boston directories 

in 1830. Where he spent his childhood and early adulthood is unknown. Like Andrew 

Telford, he is not known for his political activity, but Washington was a deacon in the First 

Independent Baptist Church. He and his first wife, Rachel, had ten children between 1832 

and 1848. By 1850 Washington was working as a waiter, and an Irish-born laborer named 

Patrick Barnes was boarding in his household. 

George Washington died in 1871, but 5 Smith Court remained in his family until after 1917. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 68
His son Benjamin F. Washington, born about 1841, was working as a waiter and living at 

home in 1868, but after his father’s death he had become a tailor and clothes cleaner on 

Franklin Avenue, near the shop where Benjamin Weeden and his son worked after the war 

(site 6). His sisters Caroline (born about 1843) and Lucy (born about 1844) were also living 

at home and running a “hair work” business from 5 Smith Court by 1873. By 1878 another 

of George Washington’s daughters, Rachel M., a music teacher, had moved back to 5 Smith 

Court. 

By the early 1880s Washington had moved his tailor shop to 713 Tremont Street and was 

still living in the family house; by 1888 he had opened a second tailor shop at 56 West 

Dedham Street and had set up an employment office at 5 Smith Court. In that year his son, 

Benjamin H. Washington, was a clerk in his Tremont Street shop and boarding at 5 Smith 

Court. Caroline Washington was then working as a dressmaker and living at 5 Smith Court, 

and by 1893, when her brother had moved to Stoughton, she carried on the employment 

office in his stead. By 1928 R. Adelaide Washington, a florist living and working in 

Stoughton and the granddaughter of Benjamin F. Washington, sold 5 Smith Court to 

Elinor K. B. Snow, who had purchased 3 Smith Court from her in 1924.152 

SITE 8 • Joseph Scarlett Tenant House 

Other name: Peter Guss House 

Address: 7 Smith Court 

DOC: 1802-11 

History: Seven Smith Court exemplifies a pattern as common to the north slope African 

American community as the stability exemplified by the family of George Washington at 5 

Smith Court—that of short-term tenancy and absentee ownership. The African American

chimneysweep Joseph Scarlett owned this dwelling for nearly fifty years, but he never lived

in it; a succession of African Americans rented the house, none of them for long. 

Seven Smith Court, as well as the Holmes Alley House (site 9) north of it and 2 Smith 

Court (site 10), which it faces, sit upon the twenty-four-foot-wide strip of land once 

occupied by the Belknap/Jenner/Carnes ropewalk. In August of 1799 Phinney sold the land 

on which the current structure stands, probably with no buildings on it, to the African 

American mariner Peter Guss who was living in 1798 on the north slope of Beacon Hill, 

probably at the corner of Butolph (Irving) and Southac Streets.153 In 1802 Guss sold the 

property to Peter Blaney, a white housewright, who immediately resold it to Lydia 

Tuckerman. On 5 October 1811 Tuckerman’s administrator sold the property, which by 

then had a dwelling house on it, to white merchant Elihu Bates for $570. 

Between 1822 and 1857 the Bates family rented 7 Smith Court to African Americans. As 

was the case with 5 Smith Court, few tenants stayed longer than three years. The single 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 69
possible exception was the laborer Phillip Johnson, who had been living on Smith Court 

since as early as 1813 and stayed until 1827. Little is known about the other tenants. In 

1835-36 Scipio Roby lived in the house; married in 1798 in Stoughton, he had lived for a 

time in the 1820s with Domingo Williams in the basement of the African Meeting House. 

Warner Hicks and Robert Osborn were mariners who lived in the house in the late 1830s 

and early 1840s. 

On 15 June 1857 Elihu Bates’s children sold 7 Smith Court to Joseph Scarlett, “chimney 

sweeper,” for $800. Scarlett was the son of John E. Scarlett, who had started his own 

Boston career as a chimneysweep in 1827 but had turned to the used clothing business on 

Brattle Street by 1830. At his death in 1844 he had been working as a grocer and living at 11 

South May Street, one of four pieces of property he owned.154 Joseph pursued his father’s 

interest in real estate with more vigor. In 1851 and 1852, while he was living with his mother 

at 11 South May Street, he purchased 2 Smith Court (site 10) from the children of William 

Henry and by 1853 had built the brick dwelling still standing on the lot. He was living in the 

house by the late 1850s and remained there through most of the 1860s. By the early 1870s, 

Scarlett had moved to Bunker Hill Avenue in Charlestown, worked briefly as a clothes 

dealer on Brattle Street (as his father also had) in the 1880s, and remained in Charlestown 

until his death in 1898. His probate record documents that he owned fifteen properties in 

Boston, Cambridge, and Charlestown valued collectively at $40,800 and carrying a total 

outstanding mortgage debt of $23,800. In his will he left bequests to the AME Zion 

Church, then on North Russell Street, and the Home for Aged Colored Women on Myrtle 

Street. On 5 November 1904 Scarlett’s estate sold 7 Smith Court to N. Thomas Merritt Jr., 

and two years later the property was sold to Rose Jacobovitz. 

SITE 9 • Holmes Alley House 

Address: 7A Smith Court 

DOC: 1799 

This structure is the only surviving dwelling of what was once a row of early frame houses 

that lined the eight-foot-wide Holmes Alley. 

According to Rosebrock, 7A Smith Court appears to have been one of the first buildings to 

have been built on the site of the ropewalk after it ceased to operate. On 6 January 1800 

Phinney sold the lot, with a house already on it, to the New Bedford mariner Richard 

Johnson and the hairdresser David Bartlett.155 Five days later the two partitioned the 

property by setting the northern half with the house off to Johnson and southern half off to 

Bartlett. In the same year Bartlett mortgaged his half to the attorney Charles Cushing, and 

in 1813 Johnson sold his half to the widow Eleanor Davis, who was probably white. In two 

transactions in1826 and 1833 the grocer David Beal, who had also done business at a shop 

at the corner of Belknap and Smith Court, bought the house and held it until 1844, when 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 70
the white carpenter Thomas F. Haskell acquired it from him. 

Both Eleanor Davis and David Beal rented 7A Smith Court to African Americans, and this 

property too seems to have been tenanted for the most part only by short-term occupants. 

The longest resident was George Bradford, a laborer, who lived here probably with his 

family from 1837 to 1843. He must have died or left the city shortly afterward, because the 

1850 census lists children with that surname—George, Abigail, Elisa, James, and 

Caroline—living with a “Mrs. Bradford” on Holmes Alley in the 1850 census and a “Mrs. 

Bradford” in tax lists living at 7 Smith Court between 1850 and 1854. Living at 7A Smith 

Court in 1850 is Stephen Maddox, who testified in one of the Anthony Burns trials in

1854.156

In 1858 Joseph E. Scarlett acquired the property and continued to own it and 7 Smith 

Court after he moved to Charlestown. On 20 May 1909 Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, 

guardian of Anna R. Moore, Scarlett’s niece, an insane person, and child of Jacob J. 

Moore, sold for $200 one undivided half-interest in 7A Smith Court under the will of 

Joseph Scarlett to Rosa Jacobovitz. On the same day another niece of Scarlett, Virginia J. 

Moore, transferred the other undivided half-interest in 7A Smith Court for an unknown 

consideration to Rose Jacobovitz.

SITE 10 • William Henry / Joseph Scarlett House 

Address: 2 Smith Court 

DOC: 1803 [original structure] 

1853 [extant structure] 

History: Archaeological excavations conducted between 1975 and 1986 on the grounds of 

the African Meeting House revealed significant architectural and artifact remains of the 

1803 house of African American tailor William Henry and his work on this adjacent 

property. At the time Henry purchased it, the two parcels of ropewalk land included a 

carpenter’s shop that, according to Terranova, was almost certainly the site of the school 

for African American children between 1805 and 1808 while the schoolroom space in the 

basement of the African Meeting House was being completed.157

In 1803 Henry, called a “habbitmaker” in deeds, purchased the property on which 2 Smith 

Court now stands in two transactions. Both parcels were sited upon the narrow strip of land 

where the Belknap/Jenner/Carnes ropewalk stood. Henry purchased the first lot, fronting 

sixteen feet on Smith Court, from the hairdresser Augustin Raillion. He acquired the 

second lot, which contained the carpenter’s shop in the rear of the first lot, from the 

housewright Perez Whiting. This second lot consisted of the next segment of the ropewalk 

immediately south of the front lot, as well as the eight-foot width remaining beside the 

front lot. Whiting had reserved this width as a passageway from Smith Court to his shop in 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 71
the rear of 2 Smith Court; it was in effect a southerly extension of Holmes Alley. 

Raillion, like Theodore Phinney, sold his land to African Americans, and it was on this land 

that the William Henry House, the African Meeting House, and ultimately the Abiel Smith 

School were built.158

According to tax records Henry was probably living in a house on this land by 1804. Henry’s 

1835-36 estate inventory includes a verbal description of the two “double tenements” built 

for Henry on the lot in 1803 as well as a pencil sketch that may illustrate one of the houses. 

“It is likely that the house shown on the early engraved views of the meeting house, a frame 

structure with a gable end on Smith Court, actually faced on Holmes Alley,” Rosebrock 

stated in 1979. “There was a second double house on the rear of the lot, set at right angles 

to the first mentioned house and separated from it by a yard that was used by the occupants

of all four tenements to dry clothing. There was also a privy in the yard.”159

The 1975-86 excavations revealed several foundation stones from the 1803 Henry house in 

situ adjacent to the stones forming the cellar under the present 1853 brick building 

currently at 2 Smith Court. Beth Bower has stated, “The stone foundation of the William 

Henry south tenement is a significant archaeological feature” and “a remnant of one of the 

oldest black-owned and -constructed buildings in Boston and Massachusetts.” During test 

excavations in 1975-78, Bower noted, 145 buttons dating to the first half of the 1800s were 

recovered and may relate to Henry’s early work as a tailor.160 Over the past three decades 

several historians and architectural historians have called for a physical examination of the

cellar and other parts of the existing house to determine if any part or parts of the 1803 

house remain. 

By 1818 listed as a hairdresser in city directories, William Henry and his family occupied 

half of one of the houses at 2 Smith Court from 1804 to 1828. In 1810 his household 

included four persons, and it had increased to five by 1820—his wife, Susannah E., and his 

three children, Francis, William Augustin, and Susannah Terese. In 1810 Henry Jacob (or 

Henry Jack) Revinason and his family, a household of four, lived on the other half of 2 

Smith Court. The two families were probably related: on 3 May 1808 H. J. Revinason had 

married Henrietta (or Harriet) Henry.161 Revinason was then a hairdresser working in a 

shop on the north side of the Town Dock; by 1818 both Henry and Revinason were working 

in the same trade on Elm Street, though not as partners and possibly not in the same 

location. 

By 1818 Revinason had moved north of Cambridge Street to Vine Street, and by 1822, tax 

lists show the two William Henry houses valued at $600, a typical assessment for a vacant 

lot or small wooden dwelling at the time. By 1827 the tax records note beside William 

Henry’s name, “H is poor & lame & not to be taxed with personal property.” In that year 

John W. Brown, a waiter, lived at 2 Smith Court, as did the barber Joseph Henry, whose 

relation if any to William Henry is unclear. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 72
Henry died in 1834, at which point the property was left to his minor children. His widow 

Susannah continued to live in the house and to let part of it to people of color, about most 

of whom little is yet known. The cook Stephen Farmer lived in the house from 1835 to 

1838, and the seaman Thomas Prior lived here from 1839 to 1845. Susannah Henry married

Prior by 1846. During this time the rear house apparently deteriorated and was taken 

down.162

In 1851 and 1852 the Henry children sold their interests in the property to Joseph E. 

Scarlett, who had yet to buy 7 and 7A Smith Court. Both Francis, who had moved to New 

York sometime before 1844, and William Augustin sold their undivided third shares of the 

property through other parties. On 21 August 1852, Susannah Henry, “singlewoman,” sold 

her undivided third to Scarlett. The “two-story core” of the current three-story brick 

rowhouse on the lot was built for Scarlett in 1853. Scarlett lived at 2 Smith Court from 1860 

through 1868. As late as 1884 2 Smith Court was a two-story dwelling, Rosebrock has 

noted, with lower stories than those of the house that stands on the lot currently.163

On 1 May 1878, Scarlett sold the property for $4,000 to William A. Prescott, who sold it in 

October of the same year to State Street attorney Samuel A. B. Abbott for just $2,500. 

Abbott, who lived in the Back Bay, bought it as an investment property.164 When Scarlett 

sold 2 Smith Court, it was a two-story building; after the sale, as Rosebrock noted, the 

brickwork indicates that the third story was added. Number 2A Smith Court, whose 

footprint roughly matches that of the wooden ell that had extended from 2 Smith Court in 

the mid-1800s, was built later as a separate three-story building, perhaps after 1884 when 

the third story of 2 Smith Court was built. In 1899, Abbott sold the property for no 

consideration to Mary Power, wife of Henry J. Power. 

SITE 11 • African Meeting House 

Other names: African Church, Belknap Street Church, First African Baptist Church, First 

Independent Baptist Church 

Address: Smith Court 

DOC: 1806 

History: As Beth Bower has pointed out, the African Meeting House is one of the few 

remaining freestanding buildings on Beacon Hill.165 In addition to that architectural

distinction, its historical significance is multifaceted. Unless new evidence emerges, it is 

probably the oldest extant African American church building in the United States.166 It was 

the first African Baptist church created north of the Mason Dixon Line.167 It was the first 

house of worship built for people of African descent in Boston. It was the largest meeting 

space owned and controlled by people of color in the city for much of the nineteenth 

century, and as such it provided room for a school at various critical points in the 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 73
community’s history as well as a place for meetings, celebrations, and lectures that were 

often formative events in its culture.

The African Meeting House has already been thoroughly examined in Beth Bower’s 

excellent 1986 summary of archaeological work, which is far more than an archaeological 

report, and Beth Pearson’s 1982 historic structure report. This section of this study will 

focus instead on the meetinghouse’s emergence in its neighborhood, the life of its first 

pastor, what is known about the tenants in its basement apartment, and what may be 

surmised about the schism that affected the church between 1828 and 1843. 

By the time Augustin Raillion sold the land for the church to a committee from the Rev. 

Samuel Stillman’s First Baptist Church in 1805, an African American neighborhood had 

already formed around its site. Houses were standing at what became 3 and 7 Smith Court;

George Holmes and several other men of color lived in small frame houses on Holmes 

Alley; and probably about twenty African American families were living on the west side of 

Belknap between the street and Holmes Alley in the neighborhood. 

Scipio Dalton, freed by Isaac Smith in 1783, was one of the forty-four founding members of 

the African Society in 1796 and had married Rosanna Haven in 1797. At the end of March 

1799 he had purchased a lot on Holmes Alley from Theodore Phinney, and in 1800 he 

traded his Holmes Alley lot for the west half of Cromwell Barnes’s double house (later 

identified as 19 Belknap and 60-62 Joy Street).168 With Thomas Paul, he may have been one 

of the “colored Baptists” whom William C. Nell described as having “obtained access to a 

small room in a low wooden building situated on the north corner of Belknap and Pickney 

[sic] streets . . . this was the same house once occupied by Colonel Middleton” (site 13).169

About a dozen men and women of African descent were members of the First Baptist 

Church of Boston and its offshoot, the Second Baptist Church (others were married and 

had their children baptized in the Anglican Trinity Church and King’s Chapel), and in July 

1805 Thomas Paul and Scipio Dalton sent a letter to these churches asking their assistance 

in establishing a church for the city’s black population. First Baptist Church minister 

Samuel Stillman attended the organizational meeting, as did other members of that church; 

historian George Levesque has noted that these delegates had been advised to “plainly 

dissuade” blacks from admitting white members “as they may ultimately become the 

majority and defeat the intention of their being an African Church.”170

The African Baptist Church was officially constituted on 8 August 1805 with twenty-four 

members, fifteen of whom were women. It is not yet clear whether all available sources 

have been consulted, but to date only the names of the male members—Scipio Dalton, 

Abraham Fairfield, James Broomfield, Charles Bailey, Richard Winslow, John Basset, 

Obediah Robbins, Thomas Paul, and Cato Gardner—have been identified.171 

Some months before this formal incorporation, the First Baptist Church had created a 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 74
committee composed of trustee Daniel Wild, a trader and former auctioneer; bakers 

William Bentley and Edward Stevens, housewright Ward Jackson, chocolate manufacturer 

John Wait, and merchant Mitchell Lincoln.172 On 23 March 1805, this committee purchased 

from Augustin Raillion a parcel of land forty-eight by fifty-nine feet square on the south 

side of Smith Court. The parcel, which had a building on it, was part of two larger lots 

Raillion had acquired from the Carnes estate and Henry Hill. The committee sold the 

building for $75 and spent $365 on timbers and window frames salvaged from the 1736 Old 

West Church at Cambridge and Lynde Streets, then being rebuilt.173

In July 1805 the congregation appointed Paul, Dalton, and Cato Gardner to raise funds to 

build the church. In his 1817 history of Boston, Charles Shaw described the effort: 

The year after this church was formed, they began to make exertions towards 

building them a place of worship. They chose a committee to make collections, 

among whom was Cato Gardiner, a native of Africa, who had long been one of Dr. 

Stillman’s respectable members. Cato was all alive in the business. By his 

importunity Dr. Stillman drew a subscription paper, which he circulated in different 

places, and obtained about 1500 dollars. Cato, notwithstanding his age, wished to 

have a house for their use, and that he should live to see it finished, which he did, 

and soon after died. Others of the church made collections to a considerable 

amount, and having received encouragements to go forward in their design, they 

chose a committee of white men to superintend the building, which was finished in 

1806. This committee consisted of Messrs. Daniel Wild, John Wait, William Bentley, 

Mitchell Lincoln, Ward Jackson, and Edward Stevens. Some of these gentlemen 

made large advances toward the house, which with the lot they hold in trust for the 

church, until the debts are discharged: then they are to give deed of it to the body 

for whom it was built. This house is built of brick forty feet by forty-eight, three 

stories high. The lower story is fitted up for a schoolroom for coloured children, and 

has been occupied for that purpose from the time it was finished. . . . The two upper 

stories are well finished with pews, pulpit, galleries, &c. The lot is small, and with 

the house cost 8,000 dollars. Debts of a considerable amount have been upon this 

establishment until lately; but by Mr. Paul’s collections they are now all 

discharged.174

No architectural plans have been located for the African Meeting House. Because of the 

similarity of its design to a plate showing a “Plan and Elevation for the Townhouse” in the 

Boston architect Asher Benjamin’s The American Builders Companion, published in 1806, 

Frederic Detwiller has suggested that Ward Jackson, the chief builder of the Meeting 

House, was inspired by Benjamin’s design and adapted this plan to the building.175

Although the building committee was able to secure $2,500 for the church, the 

congregation and the committee were compelled to ask the legislation for funds to 

complete construction. As Rosebrock has pointed out, this funding request required an 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 75
accounting of persons who worked on and supplied materials to the construction project 

and documents that both African American and white laborers contributed to it. This 

accounting lists, for example, that the white carpenter Amos Penniman worked on the 

African Meeting House. This research has not yet located this document, but according to 

Rosebrock’s research it does substantiate that Abel Barbadoes did masonry work on the 

building, as Chloe Thomas, then a resident of the Home for Aged Colored Women, told 

George Ruffin in 1883: 

I heard from the lips of some of our most honored fathers, Cato Gardner, Father 

Primus Hall, Hamlet Earl, Scipio Dalton, Peter G. Smith, G. H. Holmes, that 

George Holmes made the first hod to carry bricks and mortar that was ever used in 

Boston. He invented it for the purpose of carrying bricks and mortar to build our 

meeting house with as he was a mason and calculated to do his part to the best of his 

ability. And Boston Smith, father of P. G. Smith, with the rest of his devoted 

brothers, was anxious to do all in his power. As Boston Smith was a master builder, 

he led the carpentry department. . . . Abel Barbadoes, being a master mason also 

assisted. He was the father of Mrs. Catherine Barbadoes at 27 Myrtle Street.176

On 4 December 1806 Thomas Paul, then thirty-three years old, was formally installed as 

minister of the African Meeting House. By 1812, the first year of record-keeping by the 

new Boston Baptist Association, the church had seventy-four members; by 1818 

membership had risen to an even one hundred. Over this time Paul’s ministry was for the 

most part a settled one. In 1808 he was sent to New York City to help organize its African 

Baptist Society (later the Abyssinian Baptist Church). In 1815 the Massachusetts Baptist 

Society sent Paul and Prince Saunders, who had been teaching the school for children of 

color in the basement of church, to visit England. There, according to Boston historian 

Charles Shaw, both were “noticed by the friends of the abolition of slavery, with marked 

attention.” And in 1817 the two went to Haiti.177

Membership in the African Meeting House grew a good deal less rapidly in the next 

decade, from 100 persons in 1818 to 139 in 1828, and by that time discord had begun to 

affect the congregation. According to historian George Levesque, the records of the church 

and of the Boston Baptist Association are vague on the provocation, and church histories 

discuss the dissension only in euphemistic terms. Levesque has speculated that the schism 

beginning in 1828 and affecting the African Meeting House congregation through the early 

1840s related to the abolitionist views of Thomas Paul and those segments of the 

congregation drawn to or disaffected by those views. 

Levesque stated in 1994 that Paul had attended at least one of William Lloyd Garrison’s 

lectures before he founded the Liberator in 1831. Paul, Levesque further suggested, 

probably knew David Walker, and he theorized that their pastor’s associations with such 

men may have repelled part of the African Baptist congregation; abolitionism and 

antislavery were points of contention within the American Baptist Church as a whole over 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 76
in the 1830s and 1840s. 

That Thomas Paul knew David Walker was affirmed three years later by historian Peter P. 

Hinks, who revealed that Paul was one of the men of color who met at Walker’s home to 

determine means of supporting Freedom’s Journal and was, with Walker, one of the two 

Boston subscription agents for the newspaper. Hinks has argued that Paul was so actively in 

support of Freedom’s Journal in large measure because of the failure of the effort to resettle 

African Americans in Haiti. Paul’s daughter Susan was an active antislavery lecturer and a 

member of Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, which, if Levesque’s theory is correct, may 

also have offended the more moderate part of the church’s congregation. Another issue 

possibly rending the congregation is intimated by the escape narrative of African American 

mariner Moses Roper, who lived in Brookline and Boston briefly in late1835: 

During the first part of my abode in this city, I attended at the colored church in 

Bellnap street; and I hope I found both profit and pleasure in attending the means 

of divine grace. I now saw the wicked part I had taken in using so much deception in 

making my escape. After a time, I found slave-owners were in the habit of going to 

this colored chapel to look for runaway slaves. I became alarmed and afterwards 

attended the preaching of the Rev. Dr. Sharp.178

Given the fact that the Twelfth Baptist or “fugitive slaves’” church emerged from the 

eventual schism of the African Baptist Church congregation, such incidents as Roper 

described may have upset the order of the congregation of his and earlier times.

In 1828 the African Baptist Church reported to the Boston Baptist Association that Paul’s 

health was poor—he was in fact wasting away with tuberculosis—and reports of disruption 

in “that harmony and christian union which had so long and so happily existed between 

pastor and people” compelled the association to dispatch a council to the Smith Court 

church to investigate the situation in the fall of 1829. The council advised that Paul resign, 

which he did, and in 1830 the church, then being served intermittently by two white pastors, 

told the association that it had been “delivered from trials.” Yet it never had a stable 

minister from the time of Paul’s resignation until 1838. In an 1837 editorial, the newspaper 

New England Spectator noted poor attendance at the church and attempted to blame it on 

the antiSabbatarian influence of William Lloyd Garrison: “A recent visit to the church in

Belknap-street, the place where the venerated Paul was wont to proclaim Christ and him 

crucified to crowded auditories, discloses the alarming fact that its seats are almost 

deserted.” Garrison responded in the Liberator, 

Ever since Mr. Paul’s decease, the church and congregation have been torn with

faction and divisions[.] Pew-doors have been nailed up—members have gone to law 

with each other—rival parties have placed each other under the ban of 

excommunication—and, consequently, many have been driven away, not from 

public worship, but from that meeting-house. It is with great reluctance that I allude 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 77
to these unhappy bickerings; on which side lies the blame, I know not; nor do I know 

whether harmony or discord reigns at the present time in that society; but this 

simple statement solves the enigma, why the house is now comparatively empty.179

On 15 September 1838 the deacons of the African Baptist Church—the waiter and laborer 

Samuel Jasper, Coffin Pitts (site 5), Samuel Lewis, and Adam Lewis—filed a document 

with the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds changing the name of the congregation to the 

First Independent Baptist Church and Society. The document made note of “some troubles 

and disputes, lawsuits and controversies, now happily settled,” the outcome of which 

settlement was the reorganization of the church and congregation, each with its own set of 

trustees and each with the power to choose future ministers.180 

In November 1838 George H. Black of Portland, Maine (site 1), was appointed minister of 

the African Meeting House, and he stated in a letter to the Boston Baptist Association that 

the congregation had changed its name to the First Independent Baptist Church of People 

of Color “for the very good reason that the term African is ill applied to a church composed 

of American citizens.” The number of members increased from 89 to 158 between 1838 and 

1840, but tension within the church continued. Black and about forty members withdrew to 

a loft in an adjacent building on Smith Court (it is not clear which adjacent building), and 

both congregations claimed to be the legitimate church. In 1841 John T. Raymond became 

the minister of the congregation in the African Meeting House.181 Raymond, a native of 

Norfolk, Virginia, had left the South about 1831 and founded the Zion Baptist Church in 

New York City the next year. He was called to serve the African Baptist Church in Albany 

in 1840 before coming to Boston, and during the first year of his ministry the congregation 

added 113 new members. In 1842 George H. Black died, and the next year forty-six 

members were dismissed from the First Independent Baptist Church. These members, the 

ones who had left the church with Black, became the nucleus of Twelfth Baptist Church 

(site 18). 

 

John Raymond left the Smith Court congregation in 1843 for a post in Philadelphia, 

returned in 1845, and then resigned for good in 1848 because his eyesight had virtually 

failed. The congregation never had another stable minister until the beginning of the Civil 

War, but the building itself remained a focal point of the community. Its schoolroom was in 

regular use either as a children’s or adults’ school; in the fall of 1841 a high school for 

young African American women opened there.182 It was also in constant use as lecture and 

meeting space. Although it has not yet been verified, the New England Anti-Slavery Society

is believed to have been founded in the basement of the African Meeting House on 1 

January 1832.183 Scores of antislavery speakers—including British abolitionist George 

Thompson and Bostonian Wendell Phillips, both driven from other halls by nervous 

sponsors or hostile crowds—spoke from the pulpit here, having found it the only safe and 

receptive forum in the city. 

As Bower’s study has shown and tax records document, the basement apartment in the 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 78
African Meeting House was rented to people of color from 1822 to 1827, again in 1836, and

then more or less continually from 1841 to 1854. The waiter and caterer Domingo Williams 

lived there from 1822 to 1826, accompanied in 1824 by the laborer Scipio Roby. In 1841 

William Goddard was listed in the basement apartment. In 1830 Goddard had run a 

boardinghouse at 145 Ann Street and was listed in ward 4 with two in his Roebuck Alley 

household in the 1820 federal census.184 

Between 1842 and 1844 the apartment was occupied by Edward Skeene, listed as a laborer 

and a seaman in tax records. Believed to have come to Boston from Nova Scotia about 

1835, Skeene, his wife Adeline Fagins Low, and their four young children had been living in 

1841 at the corner of Southac and Butolph Streets. Although no death or probate record 

exists for him, Edward Skeene died by 27 October 1845, and his widow moved to May 

Street and began to take in washing. By 1856 she moved to 9 Southac Court, and there she 

is documented to have sheltered the fugitive slave Elizabeth White in 1857.185

In 1842 and 1842 the laborer and seaman Thomas Robbins, who in the 1840s lived on 

Garden and 9 West Cedar Street, occupied the meetinghouse’s apartment. Henry Weeden 

(site 6) lived there in 1846 and 1848; the tailor Isaac Barbadoes, who later lived at 1 Smith 

Court on the corner of Belknap Street, was a tenant there in 1850. In 1854 the laborer John 

Pride lived in the apartment. 

In 1897 the Baptist congregation left the African Meeting House, and in 1904 the 

Congregation Anshi Libavitz acquired the property, which in turn was acquired in 1972 by 

the Museum of Afro American History. 

SITE 12 • Abiel Smith School186 

Address: 46 Joy Street 

DOC: 1835 

History: The Abiel Smith School was one of the first public commissions of architect 

Richard Upjohn and the outgrowth of what may be the one of the first public schools for 

African American children in the country. 

The school stands on part of the ropewalk parcel fronting on Belknap Street that 

hairdresser Augustin Raillion acquired from the executors of Elizabeth Fennecy Carnes’s 

estate in 1803. In 1810, when he conveyed part of this lot to Nancy Collins and her children, 

Sarah and Ann Collins Raillion, it had a ten-foot building on it, probably the “long narrow 

structure” on the north part of the lot shown on the 1819 J. G. Hales street survey. 

Before the Smith School was built on this corner, African Americans rented dwelling space 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 79
both in the building on its site and in the building just south of it. Joseph Powars and later 

his heir Joanna Powars Stanford owned the building on the southwest corner of Belknap 

Street and Smith Court, where the schoolhouse now stands. In 1822-24 and 1826 tax 

records state that it was occupied by “blacks”; in 1831 the black laborer Uriah Lewis lived 

here. The building just south, owned by Nancy Collins, was “occ’d by blacks” between 1822 

and 1826.187

Before 1835, African American children had attended both segregated and integrated 

schools, to varying, but invariably disappointing, effect. In a letter to Ebenezer Hazard in 

1788, Massachusetts historian Jeremy Belknap stated that children of color were permitted 

to attend schools in Boston but that he knew of none who did. Yet just a year earlier Prince 

Hall and “a great number” of other people of color petitioned the state legislature because, 

even though they paid their equal share of taxes, they “now receive no benefit from the free 

schools in the town of Boston. . . . We, therefore, must fear for our rising offspring to see 

them in ignorance in a land of gospel light. . . and for no other reason can be given this they

are black.”188 

The petition was denied, and in 1795 Belknap continued to state that the city’s schools were 

open to every child: 

In this town, the committee, who superintend the free schools, have given in charge 

to the school-masters to receive and instruct black children as well as white; but I

have not heard of more than three or four who have taken advantage of this 

privilege; though the number of blacks in Boston probably exceeds one thousand. It 

is a very easy thing for the children of the poorest families here to acquire a 

common education, not only at publick, but even at private schools. The means are

supplied by the manufactories of wool-cards. Most of the labour is done by 

machinery; but the sticking of the wires in leather is done by hand, and is an 

employment for children. The school-mistresses take the materials for the 

manufactories, and in the intervals of reading, set the children to work; which, if 

they are diligent, pays for their schooling, and perhaps yields some little profit to the 

mistress. In this mode, the children of blacks, as well as whites, may be initiated in 

the first rudiments of learning, and at the same time acquire a habit of industry. No 

schools are set up by the community for the blacks exclusively; though sometimes 

they have had instructors of their own colour, and at their own expense.189

In 1798 and 1800 the Massachusetts legislature denied similar petitions from African 

Americans, and in that year Hall’s son Primus (1756-1842) had established a school for 

children of color in the basement of his home in what is now the rear half of the lot at 61-63 

West Cedar Street.190 It is said that he and other men of color raised funds for the school 

among black mariners in Boston. The first instructor was Elisha Sylvester, a Harvard 

student, and the parents of students paid Sylvester’s fee. The first term ended after three 

months due to a yellow fever epidemic, and the school did not reopen until 1801. It is 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 80
unclear where it was then located, but at some point after that date it moved to what had 

once been a carpenter’s shop on Smith Court, almost certainly the one that once stood 

behind 2 Smith Court (site 10).191 

According to Bower, many African American children were in classrooms with white 

children, for in 1808, when the schoolroom space in the African Meeting House was 

completed, their parents removed them from Boston public schools and started their own 

private school there. The building committee specifically asked the public to donate funds 

toward completing the schoolroom “for the education of the people of color of all 

denominations.”192 Abiel Smith, an affluent Boston merchant, was among those who 

contributed funds for moving the school and completing the school space. In 1812, the city 

of Boston officially recognized the school and began providing two hundred dollars a year 

toward its operating costs. 

Clearly, though, there was no primary school for children of color before 1822, for in June 

of that year African Americans living in the North End petitioned the Boston Primary 

School Committee for the establishment of one in that section. The committee expressed 

its interest “to undertake the control of such African Primary Schools as the General 

School Committee may give them authority to institute in this City.” The primary school 

committee further recommended the creation of two “African” primary schools, one in the 

North End and another in the West End, for children between the ages of four and seven 

years “and beyond that, if necessary, to qualify them to enter the regular African School in 

that quarter.”193

In 1815 Abiel Smith died, and his will left $4,000 of 3 percent stock “for the support of a 

school for African children.”194 The city used the interest income from his bequest to 

maintain the schoolroom at the African Meeting House, but continual complaints about 

overcrowding and deteriorating conditions ultimately moved the Boston School 

Commission to study the situation in 1833 and confirm the critique: 

The situation of the room is low and confined. It is hot and stifled in Summer and 

cold in Winter. But this is not the only or greatest objection to it. The obvious 

contrast between the accommodations of the coloured, and other children, both as 

to convenience and healthfulness seems to your committee to be the principal cause 

of this school being so thinly attended. The committee cannot but regard this 

distinction both as insidious and unjust. . . . If any distinction be made between 

them, and others, it ought to be in their favor, and not against them; for their 

parents are precluded by custom and prejudice from those lucrative employments 

which enable whites to be liberal and public spirited. When it is considered that 

during all the time that the coloured inhabitants have been paying their proportion 

of taxes towards the education of all the white children and youths in the City the

wonder will be that they did so much, not that they did not do more for themselves. 

The committee are therefore of the opinion, that it is just and expedient that 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 81
a suitable building be forthwith provided, at the expense of the City, to be placed in 

a healthy pleasant situation, for the accommodation of the African School, and that 

the Honorable Chairman of the School Committee be instructed to make a request 

to the City Council to that effect.195

After a second report confirmed the findings of the first, the Boston School Committee 

sought and received $2,500 from the city council to build a new structure for the African 

School. In September 1834, using part of the Abiel Smith bequest, the city purchased a lot 

at the southeast corner of Belknap Street and Smith Court from Joanna Powars Stanford 

and Abert Phelps. The city hired Richard Upjohn, then beginning his architectural practice, 

to draw up the plans for the school. His receipts indicate that he began work on the plans 

on 8 September 1834, finished on 16 December, and was paid $50 by the city on 5 January 

1835.196 The mason Cushing Nichols probably built the school in 1835; the entire project, 

including the cost of the lot, cost $7,485.61.197

The Abiel Smith School officially opened on 3 March 1835 and took the name of its 

benefactor. Its existence meant the closing of the African American school that had opened 

in the North End in 1831.198 It also meant that the schoolroom in the African Meeting 

House could be put to educating other types of scholars, including adults and older girls. 

When the state finally passed legislation mandating the integration of all public schools in 

1855, the Smith School remained open for a few months and then closed. It reopened as an 

integrated primary school, a role it served until 1881, according to some sources, although 

the 1873 city atlas has the structure labeled, “City Storage House.” While part of the 

former school served as city storage between 1882 and 1984, it was also a Grand Army of 

the Republic chapter from 1887 to 1941 and the James E. Welch Post #56 of the American 

Legion after 1941. 

SITE 13 • George Middleton / Louis Glapion House 

Address: 5 Pinckney Street 

DOC: 1786-91 

History: The George Middleton House, or at least some part of it, is now believed to be the 

oldest extant dwelling on Beacon Hill.199 In the 1920s historian Allen Chamberlain 

conducted exhaustive research on the history of this dwelling, the story of which he 

presented in full detail in his Beacon Hill: Its Ancient Pastures and Early Mansions. In brief, 

the land on which 5 Pinckney is situated was once part of a 2.5-acre pasture belonging to 

Elisha Cooke. Just before his death, Cooke began selling this pasture land off in small lots,

one of them to the housewright Temple DeCoster in October 1735. DeCoster sold this to a

Salem mariner in 1742 who mortgaged it back to him; DeCoster must have foreclosed on 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 82
the property, Chamberlain surmised, for it was part of DeCoster’s estate when he died in 

1771. In 1786 DeCoster’s son-in-law, the mariner John Hooper, with his wife and her sister 

then sold this lot to George Middleton and Louis Glapion for 30 pounds. 

Chamberlain learned from tax records and the 1790 federal census that Glapion was a 

mulatto barber and that Middleton was described as a “blackman” with various 

occupations—“drives for Dr. Lloyd,” “jockey,” “horsebreaker.” Middleton’s origins are 

entirely obscure. He was in Boston during the Revolution and was commander of the Bucks 

of America, one of the two all-black units in the Continental Army. According to Sidney 

Kaplan, virtually all that is known about Middleton’s unit derives from William C. Nell’s 

Colored Patriots of the American Revolution. Nell stated therein, “At the close of the 

Revolutionary War, John Hancock presented the colored company, called ‘the Bucks of 

America,’ with an appropriate banner, bearing his initials, as a tribute to their courage and 

devotion throughout the struggle. The ‘Bucks,’ under the command of Colonel Middleton, 

were invited to a collation in a neighboring town, and, en route, were requested to halt in 

front of the Hancock Mansion, in Beacon street, where the Governor and his son united in 

the above presentation.”200 

No military records exist for the Bucks, however, and no militia or army record exists for 

Middleton or any other black officer in the Revolution, Kaplan discovered. He suggested 

that the Bucks may been another name for the Protectors, a group of black men who 

guarded the property of Boston merchants during the Revolution. A banner presented to 

that group was exhibited in a display of “interesting relics and mementoes of the olden 

time” in Boston in 1858, and during the Civil War Nell purchased the banner from a Mrs. 

Kay, “daughter of the Ensign who received the banner” from Governor Hancock, who may 

have given Middleton the “colonel” title by which he was popularly known. Nell then 

donated the banner to the Massachusetts Historical Society. 

Middleton’s name first appears in Boston records in 1781, when he married Elsey Marsh at

Trinity Church on 11 March. He was baptized there in November 1781 (the record 

indicates he was an adult and a “free negro”), as was his first daughter Alice in 1783. 

Although not yet confirmed, he is said to have been one of the charter members of the 

African Lodge in 1784. Less is known about Louis Glapion, whose name is very rarely 

spelled the same way twice in directories and tax records; it is seen as Lapean, Lapier, 

Glassion, and Glipson. Chamberlain noted that the 1799 assessment records state that 

Glapion was French and mulatto and also that his signature was always written, “Glapion.” 

Of all the lots sold in the former Elisha Cooke pasture, the one sold to Middleton and 

Glapion was the only one built upon by 1791. Tax records assessed the lot for $25 in 1790. 

Chamberlain wrote, “This nominal valuation continues for several years, and it might be 

assumed that it was for vacant land but for the fact that in 1791 a random note appears on a 

flyleaf of the assessors’ Taking Book which reads ‘Middleton, Lewis Lapier, small house by 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 83
south side ropewalk,’” which indicated in fact two ropewalks (and by 1792 three) that 

extended from Hancock Street to just west of Grove Street. 

In the 1792 tax records Middleton and Glapion were each assessed for half a house, and in 

1793 they filed deeds in which they formally split the property, including the lot and the 

board fence. Pinckney Street had not then been platted and would not be for another 

decade, and the part of Belknap Street the property most nearly bordered was called 

Clapboard Street. At that time Middleton appears to have owned the easterly half of the 

house, closest to Belknap. In 1798, the federal dwellings tax was levied,201 the 

Middleton/Glapion house was described as a “wooden dwelling, east on Clapboard Street, 

south on Jonathan Mass and Harrison Gray Otis, land 1925 sq feet, house 345 sq feet, one 

story, four windows, value $600.” Chamberlain pointed out that “Mass and Otis” denote 

the Mount Vernon Proprietors, developers of the south slope of Beacon Hill. In that year 

Boston tax assessors valued the house at $100. 

By this time Middleton had become a prominent member of the early African American

political community. He was the third Grand Master of the African Lodge, and the vote 

among his fellow Masons to approve the warrant of Philadelphia African Americans to 

organize themselves into a Lodge was taken in Middleton’s Pinckney Street house. In 1796 

Middleton and forty-three other men of color organized themselves into the African 

Society (sometimes called the Boston African Benevolent Society), and he was licensed as a 

teacher in that society. Four years later he submitted a petition signed by sixty-seven people 

of color asking the Boston town meeting to establish an African public school.202

Middleton and Glapion continued to live in the Pinckney Street house until their deaths. 

Glapion mortgaged his half twice, in 1804 and 1811, to Benjamin Russell, editor and 

publisher of the newspaper Columbian Centinel, and according to Chamberlain at some 

point it appears as though the Middleton and Glapion families switched the sides of the 

house they occupied. Glapion, who in 1801 was assessed $200 by the city for “a long room 

and shop,” seems to have carried on his barber trade at his home. He died in 1813, and his 

will, executed 9 October 1813, named his wife Lucy executor and sole heir. His property, 

Chamberlain wrote, “consisted of the house and land, appraised at $700, and sundry items 

of furniture, which included one bed and bedding, four chairs, two tables, and a pair of iron 

fire-dogs, also his ‘razors and barber tools’ and a glass case, all valued at $24. When the 

funeral expenses were paid, including a charge for 2 lbs of candles for the church, the 

executrix had a ruinous red-ink balance on her account, and in January, 1815, she went into 

voluntary insolvency.” Lucy Glapion (often listed as Lepean in city directories thereafter) 

then seems to have left the house, but by 1816 city directories indicate that she returned to 

live at what became 5 Pinckney Street and stayed there, “with the exception of two years,” 

through 1832. 

In the spring of 1815 George Middleton died, leaving all of his property to his “good friend 

friend Tristram Babcock, of Boston, mariner,” who appears to have been white.

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 84
Chamberlain stated that his probate inventory valued his Pinckney Street house and land at 

$700 and his personal property at $50.95. “His furnishings consisted of a feather bed, an 

under-bed and two blankets, two bedsteads, five old chairs, a maple dining-table, and three 

pine tables, two iron kettles, ‘both broken,’ a tin kitchen, and a rat trap. There were also 

various odds and ends of carpenter’s and gardener’s tools and such items connected with 

his trade of jockey and horse-breaker as a saddle and four bridles, a halter and bits of 

harness. There were also a musket and violin.” Lydia Maria Child left an oddly 

condescending account of Middleton that describes the violin, a story that also makes clear 

that Middleton’s work with horses took place at his Pinckney Street house: 

Col. Middleton was not a very good specimen of the colored man. He was an old 

horse-breaker, who owned a house that he inhabited at the head of Belknap street. 

He was greatly respected by his own people, and his house was thronged with 

company. His morals were questioned,—he was passionate, intemperate, and 

profane. We lived opposite to him for five years; during all this time, my father 

treated this old negro with uniform kindness. He had a natural compassion for the 

ignorant and the oppressed, and I never knew him fail to lift his hat to this old 

neighbor, and audibly say, with much suavity, ‘How do you do, Col. Middleton?’ or 

‘Good morning, colonel.’ My father would listen to the dissonant sounds that came 

from an old violin that the colonel played on every summer’s evening, and was 

greatly amused at his power in subduing mettlesome colts. He would walk over and 

compliment the colonel on his skill in his hazardous employment, and the colonel 

would, when thus praised, urge the untamed animal to some fearful caper, to show 

off his own bold daring. Our negroes, for many years, were allowed peaceably to 

celebrate the abolition of the slave trade; but it became a frolic with the white boys 

to deride them on this day, and finally, they determined to drive them, on these 

occasions, from the Common. The colored people became greatly incensed by this 

mockery of their festival, and this infringement of their liberty, and a rumor reached 

us, on one of these anniversaries, that they were determined to resist the whites, and 

were going armed, with this intention. About three o’clock in the afternoon, a shout 

of a beginning fray reached us. Soon, terrified children and women ran down 

Belknap street, pursued by white boys, who enjoyed their fright. The sounds of 

battle approached; clubs and brickbats were flying in all directions. At this crisis, 

Col. Middleton opened his door, armed with a loaded musket, and, in a loud voice,

shrieked death to the first white who should approach. Hundreds of human beings, 

white and black, were pouring down the street, the blacks making but a feeble 

resistance, the odds in numbers and spirit being against them. Col. Middleton’s 

voice could be heard above every other, urging his party to turn and resist to the last. 

His appearance was terrific, his musket was levelled, ready to sacrifice the first white 

man that came within its range. The colored party, shamed by his reproaches, and 

fired by his example, rallied, and made a short show of resistance. Capt. Winslow 

Lewis and my father determined to try and quell this tumult. Capt. Lewis valiantly 

grappled with the ringleaders of the whites, and my father coolly surveyed the scene 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 85
from his own door, and instantly determined what to do. He calmly approached Col. 

Middleton, who called to him to stop, or he was a dead man! I can see my father at 

this distance of time, and never can forget the feelings his family expressed, as they 

saw him still approach this armed man. He put aside his musket, and, with his 

countenance all serenity, said a few soothing words to the colonel, who burst into

tears, put up his musket, and, with great emotion, exclaimed, loud enough for us to 

hear across the street, ‘I will do it for you, for you have always been kind to me,’ and 

retired into his own house, and shut his door upon the scene.203

In 1817 Tristram Babcock sold the half of 5 Pinckney George Middleton had left to him to 

David Shillaber for $500. On 1 January 1833 Shilllaber bought the other half of the 

property from Lucy Glapion for $416.66. That transaction appears to have ended any 

significant association with Beacon Hill’s African American community. In that year 

Shillaber built the brick dwelling that is now 3 Pinckney Street, between the building on the 

corner of Belknap and 5-7 Pinckney, where Middleton and Glapion had lived. 

While researching his book in the 1920s, Chamberlain received permission from the owners 

and occupants of 5-7 Pinckney to examine the interior of the house so that he might 

measure it and compare those figures to those on various deeds. He concluded, 

 

The only modern measurement that tallies satisfactorily with those given in the legal 

papers is the 38’9” of frontage westerly from Joy Street. That point is the party wall 

between the brick house of 1833 and the older house numbered 5 and 7. The latter 

is 21’4” on Pinckney Street by 18’4” deep, which figures do not in the least agree 

with any of the ancient house measurements. By adding those frontages together, it 

is seen that the western wall of the old house is all but 60’ from Joy Street, so that if 

Russell actually bought 20’ from that end of the old lot it must have been nearer 80’ 

long than 77’ originally. 

While it is not at all likely that the old house is the original structure built by 

Middleton and Glapion shortly after their purchase of the land in 1786, there are 

two things about it that brand it as an antique; namely, its timbering and its chimney, 

the latter with deep old-fashioned fireplaces. It must be all of a century old, and it 

has every appearance of even greater antiquity. Hales’s map of 1814 shows 

buildings on this site extending from Joy Street to within about 20’ of the Russell lot. 

It also shows what was probably the shop on the western end. There is small 

wonder, perhaps, that the house should wear an aspect of vulnerability after passing 

through such as series of experiences as have been noted here.204

Chamberlain finally noted that the house and its shop were occupied by three shoemakers 

and their families from 1827 to 1892. First was William Younger (1827-28), then Alexander 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 86
H. Clapp (1831-39), and then Joseph K. Adams, “a custom boot and shoemaker who, in the 

course of his fifty years or more of active life, established a high reputation” and kept his 

shop “in the western end of the house” at 7 Pinckney. The family lived in the house until 

1892. 

SITE 14 • Second Site of the Home for Aged Colored Women

Address: 27 Myrtle Street 

DOC: 1910-20 

History: Between August 1864 and 1900 the four-year-old Home for Aged Colored Women 

owned and occupied a building on this site, the southernmost extension of the 

Belknap/Jenner/Carnes ropewalk. Of the three sites in the West End the home occupied, it 

remained at 27 Myrtle Street the longest. Its significance rests in the fact not only that it 

was located “in the area where most of the Home’s residents had already lived for much of 

their lives,” historian Sarah Shoenfeld has noted, but also in that “the directors of the 

Home promoted their institution as protecting respectable black women from the 

degrading conditions for which almshouses were known.”205 

The Home for Aged Colored Women was the first home for elderly women of color in the 

city, who were refused admittance to other homes for elderly women. The idea for the 

home was evidently that of Rebecca Parker Clarke, the mother of Unitarian minister James 

Freeman Clarke, who lived with her son’s family at 64 Pinckney Street. Since about 1846 

she had been helping to support, through some form of pension, Rosanna Miller, who had 

once worked for her. Miller had been born in Somerset, Massachusetts, about 1755 and was 

listed in her own household in the 1830 Boston census. By the late 1850s Miller, though she 

had been married twice and had had eight children, had no living relatives and no one to 

rely upon for support. 

In December 1859 Clarke approached Leonard Grimes, pastor of Twelfth Baptist Church 

(site 18), and an unidentified friend and visited more than fifteen elderly African American 

women to assess the need for a “private old age home.” Convinced that such a need 

existed, Clarke invited a number of the city’s most influential and sympathetic people, 

including John Albion Andrew (site 22), to a meeting at her home. Clarke arranged for 

Andrew Cushing, superintendent of city missions and a board member of the Home for 

Aged Women on Charles Street, which declined to accept women of color, to speak on the 

need for a home for African American women. Afterward the meeting resolved to establish 

such a home. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 87
In either January or February 1860, the newly appointed board, including Andrew and 

Grimes, established committees to raise funds for the home, acquire furniture, hire a 

manager, and oversee its financial affairs. In January the Home for Aged Colored Women 

began in a rented house on 65 Southac Street, across from the home of Lewis and Harriet 

Hayden (site 19).206 By March or April Martha Thurston, wife of Pompey Thurston (see site 

5), was hired to be the home’s first matron. 

Within two years of opening the home was forced to turn away five applicants because its 

ten rooms were occupied, and in January 1863 the board began to look for a larger and 

warmer space. They estimated that with current residents and worthy applicants a new 

home would need from twenty to twenty-five rooms. In May that year a house at 27 Myrtle 

was determined suitable, but its owner, records state, “refuses to lease it for the purpose of 

the Home.” The home’s directors began a campaign to raise the $8,000 needed to purchase

the structure, and in August 1864 the Home for Aged Colored Women was incorporated 

and thus permitted to own property. The new corporation purchased 27 Myrtle, and the 

residents moved.207 There the home remained for the next thirty-two years. 

In 1869 Martha Thurston died, and Annie Stallard replaced her as matron for the next 

three years. She may have been the wife or widow of the barber Enoch L. Stallard, who in 

the early 1830s had been president of the Juvenile Garrison Independent Society.208 Rachel 

A. Smith became the home’s third matron in 1872 and remained in that position until 1897. 

 

The records of the Home for Aged Colored Women provide rich detail about the lives and

occupations of African American women, many though not all of them residents of the 

West End. Shoenfeld’s complete transcripts, published in three successive issues of the New 

England Historical Genealogical Register, show the range of their backgrounds; those 

records have been used throughout this report and may be used interpretively by BOAF 

guides in numerous ways.209

In 1855 and 1856 (and perhaps also in 1857; directories and tax records have not yet been 

checked) Dr. Thomas P. Knox lived next door at 29 Myrtle Street. Boston Vigilance 

Committee records list him as having aided in the passage of fugitives to Canada on 29 

October 1855, and on 29 April 1857 he provided medical services and board to a fugitive 

named Alice C. Greene. By 1860, when the Home for Aged Colored Women moved next 

door, Knox was living at 1 West Centre Street. 

SITE 15 • Second John P. Coburn House 

Other Name: Coburn Gaming House 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 88
Address: 2 Phillips Street 

DOC: 1843-46 

History: The second of two homes African American clothing dealer John P. Coburn owned 

and inhabited in the West End, this house may well have been the last commission of 

renowned architect Asher Benjamin(1773-1845); as Benjamin scholar Kenneth Hafertepe 

notes, the building “looks plausible for a late Benjamin commission—utterly restrained 

classicism.”210 While the Benjamin attribution has now been documented, the house’s 

legendary identity as a gaming house remains speculative. 

That Benjamin, whose plans are believed to have inspired both the Charles Street 

Meetinghouse (site 23) and the African Meeting House (site 11),211 designed this large 

townhouse for Coburn is documented in a set of building contracts between Coburn and 

the housewrights John S. Doyen and Joshua Lord and mason Slade Luther, both executed 

on 21 April 1843. In them the craftsmen agreed to perform all the specified work “in a 

good and workmanlike manner and to the satisfaction of Asher Benjamin of said Boston, 

Architect . . . in and about the erection of a dwelling house proposed to be built by said 

Coburn on his land at the corner of Southack and Butolph Streets in said Boston.” Doyen 

and Lord were to be paid $1,475 and Luther $2,065.50; the agreements stipulated that their 

work was to be complete “on or before the first day of November next.” Doyen and Lord 

were finished with their work by 21 October 1844, but Luther’s contract was not discharged 

until 2 June 1846. Tax records indicate that Coburn had moved into the not-yet-finished 

house by June 1844.212

Even as the city assessors valued Coburn’s 2 Southac Street property at $4,000 in 1850, the 

federal census that year lists the value of the corner property at $3,000. Still, it was third 

highest real property value among African American north slope residents listed in that 

census; only Thomas Dalton and British-born mariner John Holmes were recorded with 

higher estate values. By 1854 2 Southac Street was valued at $4,500 in city tax records. 

Coburn was born probably between 1809 and 1813, according to various records, and his 

death record states that he was born in Boston to John and Mary Coburn, whose place of 

birth was there listed as unknown. A white householder named John Coburn is listed in the 

1790 Boston census with an African American in his household; there is at least a 

possibility that this man was Coburn’s father. By 1830, either Coburn or his father had 

established himself as a Brattle Street clothes dealer.213 John P. Coburn’s wife, Emeline 

Gray, was a native of New Hampshire and the sister of Ira Smith Gray (site 17), who was 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 89
born in Maine about 1815. 

Tax records for 1835 show Coburn living on the western end of Southac Street near 

Wilberforce Place, but on 17 February that year he purchased 3 Coburn Court (site 17) and

lived there until 1843. It is possible that he and his brother-in-law, Ira S. Gray, ran gaming 

activities here, though these are scarcely documented either at Coburn Court or 2 Phillips 

Street. The only source so far uncovered is in a footnote in Walter Muir Whitehill’s 

Topographical History of Boston: 

Mr. Robert Butterfield has given me an undated clipping ‘Boston’s Beautiful 

Quadroons’ from the Boston Courier regarding Ira Gray, ‘the handsomest quadroon 

of his day, and the most accomplished gambler ever seen in Boston,’ who with his 

brother-in-law, Coburn, kept at the corner of Southac and North Russell Streets a

‘private place’ that was ‘the resort of the upper ten who acquired a taste for 

gambling.’214

Susan Wilson, in a publication titled Boston Sites and Insights, has asserted that most of the 

gamblers at this gaming house were white. The sources upon which these statement are 

based are not known.215

At auction on 30 April 1841, Coburn purchased the 2 Phillips Street property, with “two 

small houses or tenements” on it, for $1,000 from the estate of Amy Jackson, widow of 

Thomas Jackson. Amy Jackson is not listed in censuses or city directories as African 

American, though two men of color named Thomas Jackson were at an earlier date. In 

1824 Jackson had acquired the lot from “the probable widow” of Peter Branch, one of the 

original members of the 1796 African Society; Branch in turn had bought it in 1793. 

In 1845 Coburn was the treasurer of the New England Freedom Association, founded by 

people of color in Boston as a fugitive slave assistance group in 1842 or 1843; in that year 

Henry Weeden (site 6) was president of the group, Joshua Bowen Smith was vice president, 

the fugitive John S. Jacobs, probably then living in Chelsea, was corresponding secretary, 

and the laborer Thomas Cummings was recording secretary. James Scott (site 6), James L. 

Giles (site 20), and John St. Pierre were among the seven directors; so was Judith Smith, 

possibly the mother of Georgiana Smith (site 24). William C. Nell, Weeden, Giles, and 

Cummings were on the association’s Committee of Investigation. Coburn had been 

secretary of the freedom association earlier in 1845, when he placed a notice in the 

Liberator to acknowledge the donation of clothing for fugitives from the Lynn Sewing 

Circle.216

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 90
Though not a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee,217 Coburn did provide a third of 

the bond money to free James Scott (site 6) after his arrest on the charge of having led the 

charge on the courthouse during in the 1851 Shadrach Minkins arrest. In addition, he and 

the African American attorney Robert Morris were arrested on 1 March 1851 and charged 

with “aiding and abetting” Minkins’s escape. Witnesses asserted that Coburn had been seen 

in the courthouse hallway “making inflammatory remarks shortly before the rescue began.” 

He and Morris were, like Scott, tried and acquitted.218

In 1852 Robert Morris and Charles Lenox Remond of Salem had unsuccessfully petitioned 

the Massachusetts legislature for a charter for a black military company, an effort that 

provoked Morris, Coburn, Nell and twenty-one other men of color—including Ira Gray, 

Isaac H. Snowden, James Scott, Henry L. W. Thacker (site 16), and Benjamin Weeden (site 

6)—to present the same request to the state constitutional convention. Morris used as 

precedent a colonial law that required all blacks sixteen years old and older to appear, 

equipped, with all regular militia companies in case of alarm, and he pointed out that the 

state had just recently chartered a militia of Irish-born men. Charles Sumner (site 26) and 

Henry Wilson both lent support to the petition, but the convention tabled the question. 

Still, the petitioners proceeded nonetheless to form the Massasoit Guards (the name 

Attucks Guards had already been adopted by black military companies in Cincinnati and 

New York City) and to equip themselves, Nell wrote in Colored Patriots, “in preparation for 

volunteer service.” Nell declared that the unit did not “wish to be considered a caste

company, and hence invite to their ranks any citizens of good moral character who may 

wish to enrol their names. . . . We earnestly hope they will revive the efforts for erasing the 

word white from the military clause in the statute-book, for, until that is accomplished, their 

manhood and citizenship are under proscription.”219 

Coburn remained in the clothing business and in the mid-1860s changed its name to W. T. 

Coburn Clothing Store, after his adopted son, Wendell T. Coburn. In 1850 his household 

included a George Coburn, born in Massachusetts in 1820, possibly a brother, and Coburn 

very often had at least one boarder in his large corner home. In his first years in this house, 

1844-46, the clothing dealer Paton Stewart lived in the house with the Coburn family; it is 

possible that he clerked for Coburn in his Brattle street shop, though tax records in those 

years list Coburn himself as a tailor. In 1846, too, the black barber John J. Smith (site 24), 

who had come to Boston from Richmond in 1840, was living with Coburn at 2 Southac 

Street. Three years later tax records list at 2 Southac Street the caterer Joshua Bowen 

Smith, Frederick G. Barbadoes (possibly the son of tailor Isaac Barbadoes), and the 

African American lecturer Milton Clark, probably J. Milton Clarke, who had escaped from 

Kentucky in 1842 and settled with his brother Lewis in Cambridge in 1843. In 1846 the 

Boston publisher Bela Marsh issued their Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton 

Clarke, and while Lewis left for Canada at some point before the Civil War Milton was 

living in Cambridge by 1851. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 91
John P. Coburn remained in the house until his death on 20 January 1873, at which point 2 

Phillips Street passed to his son Wendell. Wendell Coburn’s widow Mary J. Coburn lived in 

the house until the turn of the century. 

SITE 16 • Site of Henry L. W. Thacker House

Address: 5 Phillips Street 

DOC: 1890-1910 

History: The dwelling that formerly stood on this site in the antebellum period is significant

primarily for the length of its ownership by an African American and for a fugitive slave 

incident. 

On 10 October 1833 Henry L. W. Thacker, whose date of birth is not known, purchased the 

property at 5 Southac Street from Henry Wood for no consideration. Another Henry 

Thacker, probably Henry L. W. Thacker’s father, had been in Boston since as early as 1823, 

when that year’s city directory lists him as a bootblack on Congress Street and tax records 

show him as a tenant in a house on South Russell Street. The elder Thacker, by 1855, told 

census enumerators that he was born in Virginia in 1787-88, though in the 1850 census he 

claimed not to know his birthplace and stated that he was forty years old. By 1830 Thacker 

was living on May Street. It cannot at this point be established whether it was he or Henry 

L. W. Thacker who met at George Putnam’s Belknap Street home in 1831 to discuss 

creating a college “for the descendants of Africa” and who met with Garrison before he left 

the city to raise funds for the school in England.220At this time, the elder Thacker was living 

on Southac place, off Southac Street between Grove and West Cedar Streets. 

His probable son Henry L. W. Thacker, who did not carry the middle initials in his first 

listings in tax records and directories, is listed as a waiter living at 5 Southac from 1847, but 

tax records show him in that trade and living at what was probably 5 Southac from the early 

1830s.221 In 1847, the city directory lists Joshua Bowen Smith living diagonally across the 

street in John P. Coburn’s 2 Southac Street house. Smith, who had come to Boston from 

Philadelphia in 1836, began his working life in this city at South Boston’s Mount 

Washington House. From there he entered private domestic service in the home of Robert 

Gould Shaw Sr., whose son became colonel of the Fifty-fourth Regiment of the 

Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. It was in the Shaw household that he met Garrison, 

Theodore Parker, and Charles Sumner, with whom he became a close associate.222

Apparently while living with Coburn, Smith began working with Thacker in his catering 

business, and by 1849 he began his own. Smith is believed to have employed fugitives in the 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 92
business and to have used his work to keep close watch on the activities of slave owners’ 

agents in Boston.223

In July 1847 Thacker became involved in one of the earliest organized efforts at fugitive 

assistance. Austin Bearse, a Cape Cod native and master mariner whose abolitionism had 

been kindled by what he had seen through years in the coasting trade, sailed to Albany, 

New York. While there, at the request of the Mott sisters Bearse took on board a fugitive 

slave named George Lewis and brought him to Boston by way of New York. Lewis was the 

first of many fugitives Bearse brought to Boston, though most he carried shorter distances, 

to shore by excursion boat at night from larger sloops and schooners moored in Boston 

harbor.

224 

Lewis had escaped with his daughter Lizzie, from whom he had been forced to separate in 

Baltimore; she had in the meantime been sent by “the Anti-Slavery friends” to Boston. A 

man of color on the crew of a coast survey steamer from Boston that had come to Albany 

for repairs told Lewis that he had met Lizzie where she was staying, “at Mr. Thacker’s in 

Southac Street, and found out from her that her father was in Albany.” Leonard Grimes, 

pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church (site 18) on Southac Street, came to a meeting in 

Albany and told Lewis that his daughter was safe and well in Boston. And so Bearse 

brought George Lewis east. 

When we reached Boston, Mr. Wallcutt took us to Southac Street, and while we 

were looking for the number of the house, I heard some one say, ‘Well, there’s 

father!’ We turned to look, and it was indeed Lizzie calling ‘Father!’ The next day I 

took George Lewis to Mr. Samuel Hall’s shipyard in East Boston. Mr. Hall 

employed him for three years. Some of his ship carpenters left on account of it, but 

Mr. Hall kept George. When George’s master found he could not get George back

from Albany, he sold his wife and five children to Richmond, Va. The money was 

raised, and Rev. Mr. Grimes went on to Richmond and bought them, and brought 

them all to Boston, when George was made a happy man. In 1850, he went to Nova 

Scotia; he was afraid to stay in Boston after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. 

He staid in Nova Scotia till the Proclamation of Emancipation. His daughter Lizzie

is the wife of Mr. Richard S. Brown, of the Boston Custom House, well known as a 

good citizen, and a credit to his race.225

No other accounts of Thacker’s fugitive assistance have yet been discovered. In the 1847 

Boston directory, George Lewis was listed as a carpenter living on Summer Street in East 

Boston. He was not listed in the 1850 federal census. Boston Vigilance Committee records 

do not list him among fugitives assisted in their flights to Canada, but the absence of his 

name there does not suggest in any way that he did not leave Boston or that he was not 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 93
assisted in his removal.226 Henry L. W. Thacker was among those who supported the 

formation of the Massasoit Guards in 1853. 

Thacker and his heirs owned 5 Southac Street until 1871, when Amelia Thacker, his 

daughter, sold the property to William W. Forbes for $2,500. 

SITE 17 • First John P. Coburn House / Coburn Court

Address: 3 Coburn Court 

DOC: before 1830 

History: Three Coburn Court was one of a pair of brick houses virtually concealed from the 

view of any West End street and accessible by narrow passageways from Southac and 

Garden Streets. It was the first house John P. Coburn owned in Boston, and it sat amidst 

what was an enclave of largely kin-based African American settlement from the mid-1830s. 

 

The two houses in Coburn Court were hidden from Southac Street by 24 Southac on the 

east—the longtime home of clothes dealer Peter Gray, his wife Betsey, and their son, the 

hairdresser Francis P. Gray—and on the west by 28 Southac, sold by white abolitionist 

Samuel E. Sewall to clothes dealer James Scott (site 6) in 1853 and resold by Scott to John 

P. Coburn in 1868. A passageway fifty-five feet long and four feet wide runs between these 

houses to one of originally two houses, each only eight hundred feet square, that sat on 

Coburn Court. This court was not shown on the 1873-74 G. M. Hopkins map of Boston’s 

sixth ward, but the 1888 Atlas of the City of Boston shows the passageway drawn in off 

Phillips Street between the dwellings numbered 24 and 28 Southac Street. At that time 

Elizabeth Williams owned 4 Coburn Court, while Number 3 was marked “Mary J. Coburn, 

trustee.” 

Another court ran along the rear of these two houses to Stanhope Place and connected to 

another east-west passage running to Garden Street. Three Coburn Court seems a far 

more amenable site for gaming than does 2 Phillips Street, and certainly gaming may have 

provided the wherewithal for the substantial investment Coburn made in hiring Asher 

Benjamin as his architect and in constructing such a large brick dwelling. But his gambling 

activities are no better documented on Coburn Court than they are at the corner of 

Southac and Butolph Streets. 

On 17 February 1835 John P. Coburn purchased 3 Coburn Court from Abraham Moore for 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 94
$1,500, and tax records document him as resident there between 1836 and 1843.227 Next 

door at 4 Coburn Court in 1836 was the laborer Thomas Williams, possibly the same 

Thomas Williams who had been a mariner and stevedore in the North End from as early as 

1823. Outside the court, at 24 Southac, the clothes dealer John T. Hilton (site 2) rented 

living space from Edward Maxwell and, at 28 Southac, the boardinghouse proprietor and 

mariner John R. Taylor (sites 2 & 20) also rented from Maxwell. 

By 1838 Peter Gray, who had begun his working life in Boston as a cartman, had purchased 

from Maxwell the house John T. Hilton and others had rented. Gray, a member of the 

West Church on Cambridge and Lynde Streets in 1812, had a clothes shop on Brattle Street 

by the 1830s and also owned a house at 2 Vine Street by the time he purchased 24 Southac 

Street; tax records indicate he also had a shop at 24 Southac in 1837. Gray was one of the 

trustees of the First Independent Baptist Church when it was formed from the African 

Baptist Church in 1838 (site 11). His will, dated 1839, directed that his Vine Street real 

estate be sold at his death if necessary to pay his debts but that “that no sale shall be made 

of my house in Southac Street in said Boston during the life-time of my wife.” Neither 

house had to be sold immediately, for Betsey Gray lived at 2 Vine in 1847, while 24 Southac 

remained in the Gray family and was rented to a succession of African American tenants 

until the Grays’ son, the hairdresser Francis Peter Gray, began living there in the early 

1860s. 

In the meantime, Thomas Williams died about 1842, about the same time as Peter Gray, 

and his heirs similarly rented 4 Coburn Court to people of color—including Edward Gray, 

one of Peter and Betsey Gray’s two sons, in 1843; the hairdresser Lemuel Burr, who may 

have been related to the Williams family, in 1843-55; and the barber Enoch L. Stallard, 

former president of the Juvenile Garrison Independent Society in the early 1830s, from 

1845 to 1847. From 1853 through 1860 Williams’s heirs rented the house to the Marylandborn laborer John W. Henderson and his family, who had rented 3 Coburn Court in 1848. 

In 1842, when John P. Coburn was living with Ira Smith Gray at 3 Coburn Court, William 

G. Nell was living next door at 4 Coburn Court. By that time, Nell was Gray’s father-in-law: 

the Rev. John T. Raymond had married Gray and Nell’s daughter Eliza Louisa, usually 

called Louisa, on 5 April 1841.228

Ira S. Gray told census takers that he was born in Maine about 1815, and he worked as a 

caterer most of his life.229 For a brief period in the late 1840s and early 1850s his wife 

appears to have lived with her brother William and her sister Frances Nell Cleggett in 

Geneva and perhaps Rochester, New York; for part of that time, in 1852, Gray boarded 

with Lewis Hayden at 66 Southac Street. In 1857 he, presumably his wife Louisa, and 

William C. Nell were living at 20 Grove Street with clothing dealer and abolitionist Jonas 

C. Clark. In the 1860s Gray lived at several locations north of Cambridge Street. In 1873 

Ira S. Gray and William C. Nell lived together again at 88 Kendall Street in the South End; 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 95
Nell died the next year at 64 Kendall Street. 

By 1850, Peter Gray’s widow Betsey had moved to 24 Southac Street, where she 

shepherded a household of relatives. She took care of her two sons Francis Peter and 

Edward Garrison Gray as well as Ira Nell Gray (born 1842), the eight-year-old son of Ira 

Smith Gray and Louisa Nell Gray, which suggests that some family relationship existed 

between the two Gray families. Also living in the house in 1850 were Horace Gray (born 

1843) and Rufus H. Gray, whose relationship to Betsey and Ira Smith Gray is unclear. 

Horace and Ira Nell Gray both enlisted in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War, Horace in

November 1861 in Boston for three years and Ira in Portland, Maine, in 1864 for one. 

By 1873 Francis P. Gray had moved his hairdressing shop to Shawmut Avenue in Boston’s 

South End, though he continued to live in the 24 Southac Street house passed down from 

his father until he died in 1889. The house then passed to another Gray relative. By 1883 

Francis’s brother Edward, also a hairdresser, had moved to 25 Newland Street in the South 

End and five years later had changed to the upholstery trade. By 1883 Ira Smith and Louisa 

Nell Gray were living at 25 Newland Street as well. 

The next year, however, Louisa Nell Gray was admitted to the Home for Aged Colored 

Women on Myrtle Street. The home’s records left blank the name of the woman who 

recommended her but did state that woman’s address as 86 Pinckney. In 1884, Shoenfeld 

has pointed out, 86 Pinckney was the home of John J. Smith (site 24), then running a 

restaurant in the Massachusetts State House; his wife was Georgiana O. Smith, who had 

earlier recommended other women to the home. “Louisa Gray has no one except a bad 

husband belonging to her,” the home’s records state. “She was admitted in December 1884 

as otherwise she would have gone to the Poor House.” She did, apparently, go to the poor 

house in any event: her death record states that she died on 27 December 1886 at the 

Austin Farm, where Boston’s female paupers lived before they were transferred to the 

almshouse on Long Island in 1887. Ira Gray remained at 25 Newland Street but was listed 

as rooming there in the 1888 directory.230 

SITE 18 • Site of Twelfth Baptist Church

Address: 43-47 Phillips Street 

DOC: 1850 [original structure] 

History: On this site from 1850 to 1903, Twelfth Baptist Church arose from a schism in the 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 96
African Meeting House congregation (site 11) beginning as early as 1828, and with the 

arrival of the Reverend Leonard Andrew Grimes as the congregation’s minister in 1848 the 

congregation found its spiritual center. 

Dissenting members had withdrawn from the African Meeting House congregation and 

were worshiping under the ministry of the Rev. George H. Black at another location on 

Smith Court from 1838 until 1843. It has been speculated, though not documented, that 

this group of roughly forty persons contained an unusually large number of fugitive slaves; 

Leonard Black (site 1) was one of them, but whether the others were is not known. When

George Black died in 1843, church historian George W. Williams wrote in 1874, “This little 

band was now without a leader, and was, consequently, speedily rent by a schism within its 

own circle” only to be made whole again by Grimes, who had been imprisoned for assisting 

fugitives in Virginia before he moved to the North.231

Leonard Grimes was living in New Bedford and either running a downtown grocery and 

clothing store or serving in the ministry when one member of this “little band” approached 

him about becoming their minister in Boston. Born free in Leesburg, the seat of Loudoun 

County, Virginia, on the Potomac some two hundred miles northwest of Washington, D.C., 

Grimes moved to Washington as a boy, married, and began to use his hackman’s trade as a 

cover for assisting fugitives out of Virginia. In 10 March 1840, when he was about twentyfive, Grimes was convicted on what even the court admitted was circumstantial evidence of 

having helped seven slaves belonging to Joseph Mead of Loudoun County—a woman 

named Patty and her six children—escape in his hack to Washington on 26 October 1839. 

The fugitives, the Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser reported, were believed to have 

reached Canada. Because so many had testified to Grimes’s “very high character,” he was 

sentenced to the lightest penalty his crime demanded—a fine of one hundred dollars and 

two years in the state penitentiary.232 By 1845 he had moved to New Bedford. 

Grimes visited the Boston Baptist congregation in its Smith Court rooms and afterward 

received a unanimous invitation to become minister for a three-month term. On 24 

November 1848 the Rev. Nathaniel Colver, by the 1850s one of the city’s more radical 

white abolitionists, ordained Grimes at his Tremont Street Baptist Church. Grimes 

immediately set about looking for a site for a church building and settled on a lot on 

Southac Street; according to Williams, Grimes and the congregation determined the lot 

and sanctuary should not cost more than ten thousand dollars. 

The society purposed to raise two or three thousand within its own membership; 

three thousand by loan, and solicit the remainder from the Christian public. 

Previous to this period the public knew little or nothing of this society. Bro. Grimes 

had come to Boston almost an entire stranger, and had now to undertake the severe 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 97
task of presenting the interests of a society so obscure and of so recent date. But he 

believed in his cause, and knew that success would come. He had known Dr. Neale 

in Washington City, during his early ministry; they were boys together. They met. It 

was a pleasant meeting. The Rev. Mr. Neale vouched for him before the public. It 

was not particularly necessary, for Bro. Grimes carried a handsome 

recommendation in his face. It was written all over with veracity and benevolence.233

The Twelfth Baptist Church acquired the lot on Southac Street in early 1849 and laid the 

cornerstone for the church on 1 August 1850, just six weeks before the passage of the 

Fugitive Slave Act. Again Colver was present to lead the service. But with the passage of 

the Fugitive Slave Act in late September, Williams wrote, “forty or more of the members of 

the church fled to Canada and the British Provinces, to gain the protection of the British 

flag. The church was closed; $4,500 had been expended upon it. It seemed as if they were 

to lose their house of worship. It was a sad and memorable period. Public sympathy 

ceased to flow. The hand of charity was paralyzed. The whole North was stunned.”234 

This research has not located the records of Twelfth Baptist Church to determine whether 

the names of those members were listed, much less whether a precise number of those 

leaving the congregation at that time exists. Boston Vigilance Committee records 

document that Grimes was reimbursed on 25 February 1851 for the passage of Isaac 

Gaiter, William Ringold, William Peters, and James Harris to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and 

three days later for James Dale and “Mrs. Henderson” to an undisclosed destination. 

Grimes’s name did not again appear in the committee’s fugitive case records until July 

1854, when he was compensated for services rendered to the fugitives Wesley Bishop and 

Thomas Jackson and his wife. 

Whether these persons were members of the church or fugitives from the South whose 

passage north Grimes was aiding is not known, for even as Grimes was incessantly trying to 

find funds to complete the Twelfth Baptist structure he was in the center of every major 

fugitive slave struggle in the city of Boston. In 1850, Roy Finkenbine has noted, Grimes 

collected $1,300 from church members to purchase the freedom of four of the 

congregation, two of them the deacons, who had gone to Canada after the passage of the 

Fugitive Slave Act. When the fugitive Thomas Sims was arrested and held at the Boston 

Court House in April 1851, Grimes was the one sent to tell him that mattresses were placed 

beneath his third-floor window so that he might escape, a plan foiled when officers barred 

the window. Grimes again called upon Twelfth Baptist members to purchase Sims’s 

freedom, but the $1,800 they contributed was not enough; Sims remained enslaved until the 

Civil War. Shadrach Minkins was a member of Twelfth Baptist, and Grimes was with him 

when the courtroom siege that secured his freedom began in February 1851. Lewis Hayden 

was a member of Grimes’s church as well.235

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 98
Grimes and Twelfth Baptist deacon Coffin Pitts had also advised Anthony Burns during 

Burns’s short stay in Boston in the spring of 1854 (site 5). After Burns was returned to 

Virginia, the congregation raised $1,300 in 1854 and 1855 to purchase his freedom, and 

Grimes himself traveled to Baltimore to arrange the exchange of funds and manumission 

papers. 

Burns’s rendition was the last fugitive slave case to inflame Boston, and the last to call upon 

the financial resources of the Twelfth Baptist congregation as well as the fund-raising 

attentions of Leonard Grimes. In 1855, the Twelfth Baptist Church structure was at last 

completed, having received a donation of roof slate from Asa Wilbur, deacon of, Williams 

states, “a sister church.” The church often sponsored antislavery and abolitionist lectures 

and functions, and in the spring of 1861 it was the site of a meeting advocating the repeal of 

laws that discriminated against the enrollment of African Americans in the armed forces. 

By the end of the Civil War, Twelfth Baptist Church was the third largest of the twenty-two 

churches in the Boston Baptist Association. With the influx of immigration from the South 

in the years after the war the church’s membership grew rapidly. “Revivals were of frequent 

occurrence,” Williams wrote in 1874, “and many from the South, learning of the good name 

of Rev. Mr. Grimes, sought his church when coming to Boston.” By 1871 the congregation 

had grown to six hundred members, and the church was in dire need of more space. Grimes 

and his board began an enlargement program, paid its debt in full, and the church came to 

own the cul-de-sac Dutton Place and the two wooden buildings on the west side of it. 

By 1873 Grimes and his wife had moved from the north slope to East Somerville, and it was 

in their home on Everett Avenue that year that he died. Williams described Grimes’s last 

days: 

Those who saw him in the pulpit the last Sabbath he spent on earth—March 9, 

1874—will not soon forget the earnestness and impressiveness of his manner. On

Wednesday, March 12th, he left the scene of his labors to discharge a duty nearest to 

his heart. He took $100 from his poor church, as a gift to the Home Mission Society, 

that was to be used in the Freedman’s Fund. 

On Friday evening, March 14th, he reached home just in time to breathe his 

last in the arms of his faithful, though anxious, wife. Thus he fell asleep in the path 

of duty, in the midst of a mighty work.236

 

By the late 1800s members of the Twelfth Baptist Church had begun to move to Boston’s 

South End, and in 1906 the church followed, relocating on Shawmut Avenue. In 1903 the 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 99
church sold the Southac Street church to a Jewish congregation, and the two wooden 

buildings on the west side of Dutton Place were replaced by an eight-unit tenement in 

1906-7 occupied by Jewish families. 

 

SITE 19 • Lewis Hayden House 

Address: 66 Phillips Street 

DOC: 1825-40 

History: Lewis Hayden, Boston’s most daring and committed Underground Railroad 

activist, lived in this house between 1850 and his death on 7 April 1889. It was in this house 

that he sheltered the Georgia fugitives William and Ellen Craft, from it that he engineered 

the rescue of the fugitive Shadrach, and within it that Harriet Beecher Stowe probably 

encountered thirteen fugitive slaves in 1853. Vigilance Committee records document that 

Hayden and his family sheltered or in other ways assisted scores of fugitives while they were 

living at 66 Southac Street, and these recorded instances of assistance may have been only a 

small percentage of the actual number the Haydens helped. Garrison called Hayden “my 

staunchest ally,” and he and others who often met at Hayden’s home referred to it as “the 

temple of refuge.”237 

A brick dwelling house was already standing on this property when it was transferred to 

Joseph F. Sinclair and Andrew Horn in May 1843.238 Tax records and city directories show 

that Hayden was living at 66 (then numbered 8) Southac in 1850, three years before Francis 

Jackson (1789-1861), one of Boston’s staunchest abolitionists and the treasurer of the 

Boston Vigilance Committee, purchased the same property from the Warren Insurance 

Company for $2,250.239 

Hayden biographers Stanley and Anita Robboy have noted that 66 Southac has three 

entrances—a front entrance, basement entrance, and a third “secret tunnel through which 

fugitive slaves were sometimes brought into or left the house. Two residents of Beacon Hill, 

who had been in the tunnel before it was sealed off sixty years ago, described it to the 

authors as wet and barely high and wide enough to permit one person to crawl through. It 

was at least several hundred yards long and began in the subbasement. The exact point of 

exit is unknown; it was probably at another home on Beacon Hill.”240 No other 

documentation of this third entrance is known to exist. 

Hayden had come east from Detroit, where he had settled in 1845 some six months after 

his escape from slavery with his second wife Harriet and son Joseph. In an undated letter to 

New York City fugitive assistant Sydney Howard Gay, Hayden stated that he was owned by 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 100
a Lexington, Kentucky, insurance clerk named Baxter but had been hired out to John 

Beman of the Phoenix Hotel in the same city at the time of his escape in 1844.241 His 

escape was motivated in large measure by the sale at auction of his first wife, Esther 

Harvey, and their child to Kentucky statesman Henry Clay, who ultimately sold both to “a 

slave trader by the name of Payne to go down the river, and I have not seen her or heard 

from either since.” 

When I humbly besought H Clay for a reason for his selling my wife and child, he 

haughtily & indignantly replied “he had bought them and he had sold them!” . . . My 

family is not the only one that Henry Clay has destroyed. When he is called to 

render an account for his deeds, other broken hearts besides mine and my wife’s will 

rise up in judgment against him. He will have to meet the old man Jonthan, and his 

wife, Tim Baltimore & wife, Buster[?] Bell & wife, my father & mother-in-law, at 

the judgment seat, and Christ will say to him, “See these broken hearts you have 

made & what you have done unto me: What will Mr Clay & his confederates then 

say? He that is higher than the highest regardeth, and there he higher than they.”

Hayden married again in 1842 to Harriet Bell, the mother of Joseph Hayden, and the 

family’s escape from Lexington in 1844 was assisted by Calvin Fairbank (1816-98), then a 

student at Oberlin College, and Delia Webster of Vermont. Fairbank and Webster dressed 

Hayden and his wife either as servants or as a “veiled and cloaked” white couple, hid 

Joseph under the seat of a hack, and carried the family into Ohio to the home of an 

abolitionist. From there the Haydens escaped into Canada West. Fairbank, who all told 

helped forty-seven slaves escape from Kentucky, was jailed twice in the state penitentiary in 

Frankfort for more than seventeen years. Hayden, who longed to be closer to the center of

antislavery activity, left Canada for Detroit and then for the East by 25 May 1846. Hayden 

never took another name; as he stated in an undated letter, “My name has always been & is 

now Lewis Hayden, though slaves have as many names as they have masters.” 

Hayden was in Boston by January 1846 and either living or staying as a visitor at 5 Southac 

Court, though his wife appears to have been in New Bedford, again either living or visiting, 

in April 1847.242 By 1847 the Haydens were listed at 8 (later 66) Southac Street, and six 

men of color, presumably with their families, lived there with them—the whitener 

(whitewasher) Thomas A. Tompkins, the grocers Henry Randolph and William Johnson, 

the tailor Abraham T. Simpson, the clothing dealer John St. Pierre (probably the father of 

Josephine Ruffin), and the hairdresser George W. Martin. 

The 1850 federal census shows Lewis Hayden living at 8 Southac Street with his wife 

Harriet, his stepson Joseph, then fourteen years old, and his daughter Elizabeth, then age 

five. Also living in the house, which Hayden and his wife ran as a boardinghouse, were the 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 101
fugitives William and Ellen Craft and five single men from the slave states—the cook 

Harrison Crawford, born in Virginia; the tailor Peter Custom; and three “tenders,” or 

waiters, William Griffen, Nelson Perkins, and Frank Wise. The four last men listed South 

Carolina birthplaces. Their names do not appear in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia 

Vigilance Committee records as fugitives, though they may certainly have adopted aliases 

by the time they came to Boston. 

Hayden ran a used clothing shop first at 107 and then at 121 Cambridge Street, just north 

of his house, in the 1850s. William Craft ran a cabinetmaking shop on the same side of 

Cambridge Street, at number 51, in 1850, and according to historian Gary Collison Craft’s 

business had an estimated $700 gross income in that year as well as inventory and tools 

valued at $130. The Crafts had escaped from Macon, Georgia, in 1848. The novelty of their 

escape method (see Ellen Craft’s biographical entry) and their evident absence of concern 

about capture made them instant celebrities on the antislavery lecture circuit. However, by 

1850 their notoriety made settling somewhere seem well advised. According to William Still 

in his landmark volume The Underground Railroad (1871), the Philadelphia Vigilance 

Committee suggested that the Crafts go to Boston, “as it had then been about a generation 

since a fugitive had been taken back from the old Bay State.” Following that advice, the 

Crafts moved in with Lewis and Harriet Hayden on Southac Street, William began his 

furniture making and repair shop, and Ellen was learning the trade of upholstering from a 

“Miss Dean,” a friend of George Stillman and Susan Hillard of 54 Pinckney Street. 

The federal census enumerator found the Crafts in the Haydens’ Southac Street home on 

21 August 1850, just a month before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Within another 

month, on 19 October 1850, three Macon residents came to Boston and became the first to 

put the new Fugitive Slave Act to the test, as Collison has noted. Macon jailer Willis 

Hughes acted as an agent for slaveowner Robert Collins, who claimed William and Ellen 

Crafts; Albert Beal sought fugitive William Jones, working then as a waiter at Boston’s 

Parker House; and John Knight, ostensibly on a trip to buy machinery for a Macon bucket 

factory, had probably joined Hughes and Beal to identify the Crafts. Knight had once 

worked in a Macon cabinet shop with William Craft and knew Ellen Craft as well. 

After repeated attempts to get federal officials in Boston to sign an arrest warrant for the 

fugitives, Hughes succeeded on 25 October in securing a warrant naming three persons—

William and Ellen Craft and William Jones, who had apparently left Boston for Canada by 

that date. In his journal the Reverend Theodore Parker wrote that day, “Saw J. B. Smith 

[Joshua Bowen Smith, the African American caterer at 16 Brattle, by then a resident of 

Cambridge], who says that writs are out also for the arrest of two other men working at 

Parker’s restaurant, in Court Square; that five or six fellows came there at dinner-time, 

stood on the steps, looked in, but didn’t enter. After dinner they went in and inquired for 

their fugitives. No such persons there—looked round and went off. Smith says Craft is 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 102
armed, and Ellen secreted. Informal meeting of Vigilance Committee at the office of New 

Englander. Craft has consented to be hid to-night, at the south end of Boston. Mr. — took 

him up in a coach. Ellen is to-night at —, in — Street. So all is safe for the night.”243

It is probable that Ellen Craft spent that night at the Pinckney Street home of George and

Susan Hillard. Mrs. Craft first learned of the presence in Boston of agents of her former 

master from Susan Hillard, whose husband was the longtime law partner of Charles 

Sumner but whose politics by 1850 had diverged considerably from Sumner’s Free Soil 

views. In a letter reprinted in Still’s Underground Railroad, Mrs. Hillard recounted her 

actions upon learning of the warrant for the Crafts: 

I went to the house of the Rev. F. T. Gray, on Mt. Vernon street, where Ellen was 

working with Miss Dean, an upholsteress, a friend of ours, who had told us she 

would teach Ellen her trade. I proposed to Ellen to come and do some work for me, 

intending not to alarm her. My manner, which I supposed to be indifferent and 

calm, betrayed me, and she threw herself into my arms, sobbing and weeping. She, 

however, recovered her composure as soon as we reached the street, and was very

firm ever after. 

My husband wished her, by all means, to be brought to our house, and to 

remain under his protection, saying: ‘I am perfectly willing to meeting the penalty, 

should she be found here, but will never give her up.’ The penalty, you remember, 

was six months’ imprisonment and a thousand dollars fine. William Craft went, after 

a time, to Lewis Hayden. He was at first, as Dr. Bowditch told us, ‘barricaded in his 

shop on Cambridge street.’ I saw him there, and he said, ‘Ellen must not be left at 

your house.’ ‘Why? William,’ said I, ‘do you think we would give her up?’ ‘Never,’ 

said he, ‘but Mr. Hillard is not only our friend, but he is a U. S. Commissioner, and 

should Ellen be found in his house, he must resign his office, as well as incur the 

penalty of the law, and I will not subject a friend to such a punishment for the sake 

of our safety.’”244

 

On the evening of 26 October, people of color in Boston and from other communities met 

at the African Meeting House on Smith Court to organize resistance to the rendition of the 

Crafts. Members of the Boston Vigilance Committee posted three hundred handbills 

describing Hughes and Knight and followed them through town; attorneys from its Legal 

Committee filed complaints of all sorts in order to harass them and stymie their activity. On 

Tuesday, 29 October, Knight went to visit William Craft at his 51 Cambridge Street shop, 

where Craft had moved his bed and clothing and had amassed a range of weaponry. 

Collison has cited a New York Daily Tribune report that no one could come within one 

hundred yards of the cabinet shop “without being seen by a hundred eyes” and the account 

of the Boston correspondent of the Pennsylvania Freeman that “many of the houses in 

Belknap and Cambridge streets are provided with ammunition . . . Swords and dirks, &c, 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 103
are plenty, and bayonets ‘right up.’”245

Craft had refused to allow Bostonians to purchase his freedom but did agree, as Parker’s 

journal indicates, to have his wife removed from the Haydens’ home and temporarily to 

relocate to an unidentified spot in the South End. In these years, the South End of Boston 

ranged from Fort Hill south to, roughly, Boston Common on the west; Parker himself lived 

in the South End, at 89 Exeter Place. At some point William Craft moved back to Hayden’s 

house on Southac Street, which, like Craft’s shop, had been fortified against the slave 

agents, even with gunpowder kegs stored in the cellar. In an 1893 letter to Underground 

Railroad historian Wilbur Siebert, Lynn abolitionist George Putnam recalled having heard 

English abolitionist George Thompson tell him about a visit he and William Lloyd Garrison 

had made to Hayden’s home when the Crafts were in hiding there in the fall of 1850: 

He said that on entering the house after the doors were unbarred—there with 

windows barricaded and doors double locked and barred—sat around a table 

covered with loaded weapons Lewis Hayden, his young son and a band of brave 

colored men armed to the teeth and ready for the impending death struggle with the 

United States Marshal and his armed possee.246

On 30 October a group of Boston Vigilance Committee members headed by Theodore 

Parker managed to convince Hughes and Knight that they would not be “safe in Boston 

another night,” and the two men left Boston on the first of November. A few days later in 

New York, Hughes learned that the Crafts had left Boston, but the story was apparently 

untrue, for, as his 6 November 1850 journal entry indicates, Ellen Craft was then living in 

the home of Theodore Parker: 

Ellen Craft has been here all the week since Monday; went off at a quarter past six 

to-night. That is a pretty state of things, that I am liable to be find [sic] 1000 dollars 

and gaoled for six months for sheltering one of my own parishioners, who had 

violated no law of God, and only took possession of herself! . . . . Dr. Osgood came 

to see about the Crafts. All must be secretly done, so nothing here at present. Nell 

came to say they wish to be married, I advise to-morrow, so it is agreed, to-morrow 

at eleven, at No. ---- Street. I never married such a couple and under such 

circumstances. 

Because their marriage in the South “lacked the solemnity of law” in his view, Parker 

married William and Ellen Crafts on 7 November 1850 at “a boarding-house for colored 

people,” quite possibly the Haydens’ home.247 At the time Parker, himself opposed to 

violence, gave the Crafts a revolver and a knife for their own protection. On 12 November 

Boston Vigilance Committee member Henry Ingersoll Bowditch alerted New York 

Vigilance Committee secretary Sydney Howard Gay to watch the movements of Hughes, 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 104
“the slave catching jailer of Macon Ga,” in the event that he should attempt to return to 

Boston for the Crafts. “Let the Vigilant Committee be on the alert & . . . quietly make 

arrangements for his being conveyed South of Mason & Dixon’s line,” Bowditch wrote.248 

By then, however, George Thompson had arranged for the Crafts’ removal to England by 

way of Portland, Maine, Nova Scotia, and St. John, New Brunswick, where they boarded a 

steamer for Liverpool. The Crafts stayed in England for many years. Yet their grandson, 

Henry Kempton Craft, graduated from Harvard with a bachelor of science degree in 1907, 

did graduate work there in 1915, and married Bessie Trotter, the daughter of Boston’s 

James Monroe Trotter. 

Lewis Hayden also played a significant role in the rescue of Shadrach Minkins after his 

arrest at Cornhill Coffee House in February 1851 (see site 6). Austin Bearse of the Boston 

Vigilance Committee told the story of Stowe’s encounter with fugitives at Hayden’s 

Southac Street home two years later: 

When, in 1853, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe came to the Liberator Office, 21 

Cornhill, to get facts for her “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she was taken by Mr. R.

F. Wallcutt and myself over to Lewis Hayden’s house in Southac Street, where 

thirteen newly-escaped slaves of all colors and sizes were brought into one room for 

her to see. Though Mrs. Stowe had written her wonderful “Uncle Tom” at the 

request of Dr. Bailey, of Washington, for The National Era, expressly to show up the 

workings of the Fugitive-Slave Law, yet she had never seen such a company of 

“fugitives” together before. Mr. Lewis Hayden was himself a remarkable fugitive 

slave, whose story Mrs. Stowe introduced in her “Key.”249

Hayden’s role in the May 1854 Anthony Burns rendition has been described in part under 

site 5, the Coffin Pitts house. Here it should be mentioned that it was Hayden who 

organized black abolitionists in the entire affair. Soon after Burns was arrested, Hayden 

and Seth Webb Jr., both members of the Boston Vigilance Committee, swore out a 

complaint against Burns’s claimaint, Charles Suttle, and Richmond, Virginia, merchant 

William Brent (who had accompanied Suttle in order to identify Burns) on the charge that 

they had conspired to kidnap Burns. Legal maneuvers such as this and many others were 

the standard operating procedure for the committee, part of a series of tactics designed to 

make the rendition of fugitives time consuming, costly, difficult, anxious, and intimidating. 

Hayden also dispatched black abolitionists to keep constant watch on Suttle and Brent 

while they were in Boston, and along with Higginson and Martin Stowell he assigned ten 

men to keep watch on the Boston Court House during the mass meeting at Faneuil Hall to 

assure that federal marshals did not attempt to remove Burns from the city. He helped 

organize the Vigilance Committee rally at Faneuil Hall, which may have been staged 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 105
intentionally to draw attention away from the plan that he, Higginson, and Stowell had 

formed to storm the 1836 Boston Court House in an attempt to free Burns. The three were 

among that group of abolitionists who had privately agreed to arm themselves, and they 

were among the group who seized a beam to use as a battering ram with which to beat in 

the courthouse door. Hayden and Stowell both fired pistols to cover Higginson and others 

as they withdrew from the militia that had been called out to defend the courthouse and 

keep Burns from being taken. Shortly afterward, partly for fear that he had shot the one 

murdered officer, Hayden was taken in a concealed carriage to William Ingersoll 

Bowditch’s Brookline home. (It was later found to have been Stowell’s bullet.) The Burns 

rendition was the last attempt to take a fugitive slave from Boston.250

Bearse related another incident in which Hayden’s involvement was critical. At eleven 

o’clock one night in October 1854, Wendell Phillips and Samuel Gridley Howe came to 

Bearse’s house at City Point in South Boston to report that a fugitive was aboard the brig 

Cameo, then bound for Boston from Jacksonville, Florida, with a cargo of lumber. After 

Bearse, his brother, and other men they summoned searched every wharf in the city, they 

found the Cameo tied up at Boston Wharf, found the fugitive, and returned to the 

Vigilance Committee to obtain a writ to search the vessel. In the meantime someone had 

compelled the fugitive to change from “his slave dress of tow cloth” and moved him to 

another vessel under the same ownership that was about to leave for the South. Bearse, 

Phillips, and others bore the man away. Bearse wrote, “Mr. Phillips put him into a carriage, 

and we drove directly to Lewis Hayden’s house, in Southac Street.” 

Mr. Hayden kept the fugitive about two weeks, when one night, at a meeting of the 

Vigilance Committee, he informed us that his house was closely watched by a 

constable and policeman, and he thought it necessary to remove him at once. 

Accordingly, by agreement, Mr. William I. Bowditch, of Brookline, came with his 

span of horses to Boston, and he drove to Mr. Hayden’s house. Mr. Bowditch 

opened the carriage door, and the fugitive, dressed in woman’s clothes, got in. We 

then drove down Cambridge Street, over the bridge to East Cambridge, thence to 

Somerville, from there to Medford, and finally to Concord—arriving at about one 

o’clock. We drove directly to Mr. Allen’s house, by agreement—he being one of the 

Vigilance Committee. The door was opened, when two men stepped out of the 

house and took in our lady. We then drove to the tavern, put up our horses and 

rested until three, a.m., arriving at Brookline at about breakfast time. 

The slave was afterwards sent to Canada, where he lived nine years. After the 

Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, he returned to Boston, joined a colored 

regiment, went South, and was killed in battle. This slave proved a true patriot by 

sacrificing his life for his country.251

The account books of African American physician John V. DeGrasse, who practiced in an 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 106
office on 17 Poplar Street beginning in late October 1852, make clear that Hayden boarded 

many persons who were never counted official residents of Boston. Between that date and 

1855, eleven people in addition to the Hayden’s wife, son, cook, and “servant girl Ellen” 

were listed in DeGrasse’s accounts at this address and as having received some sort of 

medical treatment or visit.252 Checking DeGrasse’s accounts against those of the Boston 

Vigilance Committee also makes clear that he treated fugitives, among them Joseph Loper, 

William Manix, “Mrs. Cooley and child,” and probably others; that some of the eleven 

people he treated at 66 Southac Street were fugitives would not be at all surprising.253

According to popular journalistic accounts, John Brown is believed to have visited Lewis 

Hayden at 66 Southac Street at least once during his seven visits to Boston between 1857 

and 1859 to garner financial and physical support for his plan to raid the federal arsenal at 

Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and instigate a slave uprising. Hayden is known to have 

contributed funds in support of Brown’s intended raid during Brown’s Boston visit in late 

May 1859. At that time, too, Harriet Tubman made a contribution; on 30 May that year she 

was staying at 168 Cambridge Street, the home of African American porter and fugitive 

assistant Burrill Smith.254 

In 1858 Hayden’s clothing store failed, and his abolitionist friends secured him work as 

messenger to the Secretary of State, a position he held until his death in 1889. Hayden is 

said to have been instrumental in convincing John A. Andrew (site 22), an attorney, 

abolitionist, and close friend of Charles Sumner (site 26), to run for governor. Andrew 

served as the state’s chief executive from 1861 to 1866. Lewis Hayden served as a recruiting 

agent for Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first regiment of men of color 

authorized to serve in the Union Army, and the Haydens’ only son Joseph served in the 

Union Navy throughout the Civil War and died at Fort Morgan, Alabama on 27 June 

1865.255 In 1873 Lewis Hayden was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. 

On 2 October 1865 Edmund Jackson, brother of Francis and executor of his will, sold 66 

Southac to Harriet Hayden for $2,250, the price for which Francis Jackson bought it in 

1853. Between 1865 and 1894 Harriet Hayden took out several mortgages on 66 Southac 

Street from Edmund Jackson, Susan B. Anthony, William Ingersoll Bowditch, and others; 

all were satisfactorily paid off. Lewis Hayden died 7 April 1889, and Harriet Hayden died in 

1893. On 1 March 1894 Harriet Hayden’s executor, Norwood P. Hallowell, a former 

lieutenant colonel in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, sold 66 Southac to 

one William H. Smith for $4,000. She left several thousand dollars to Harvard University 

for scholarships for poor and deserving medical students of African descent. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 107
SITE 20 • Site of John Sweat Rock House 

Other name: Site of John R. Taylor Boardinghouse 

 Site of William T. Manix Boardinghouse 

Address: 81-83 Phillips Street 

DOC: 1847 (former structure) 

1890-1905 (current structure) 

History: Now occupied by turn-of-the-century brick tenements, this site was formerly the 

home of African American physician and activist John Sweat Rock (1825-66) and a 

boardinghouse documented to have housed fugitive slaves under two successive 

boardinghouse keepers. 

On 4 February 1848, Frederick Clapp purchased property upon which “two new brick 

dwelling houses” had been built on the north side of Southac Street (now Phillips) between 

Lindall Place and West Cedar Street for nine thousand dollars. By 1849 tax records list the 

African American waiters James L. Giles and James A. Tilghman among the residents in 

these two buildings along with mariner John R. Taylor, who had been operating a 

boardinghouse called “Temperance House” at 40 Southac Street in 1846 and 1847. It was 

there that he had boarded the fugitives John H. Lomax, Henry H. Garnet, Joseph Johnson, 

and Thomas Miller, whom Taylor suspected was an imposter, for the first Committee of 

Vigilance of Boston of 1846-47.256 Giles had been a member of the New England Freedom 

Association, the African American fugitive slave assistance group, in 1845. 

By 1849 Taylor and his wife had moved to Clapp’s new building at 81 Southac, and the 1850 

census shows thirteen other African American tenants in the dwelling in that year. None of 

the African American residents of 81 or 83 Southac (then one of several listed as 3 and 5 

Southac Street, distinguished from each other only by owners and assessed values) listed in 

tax records or in the census are listed in city directories except the cook Benjamin Giger, 

who had been living on Bridge Street in 1846, and the bootblack George Gaul, whose 

family had been Bostonians from the early nineteenth century. Taylor is documented to 

have housed fugitives at 81 Southac Street as well: On 16 November 1850 Francis Jackson’s 

records note that he boarded escapees Henry Long and a man identified only as Jones. In 

late January 1852 the Boston Vigilance Committee reimbursed Giger for boarding the 

fugitive John Bennet.257 

Taylor lived at 81 Phillips through part of 1855, but by then he may have been in his sixties, 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 108
and his name had ceased to appear in Boston Vigilance Committee records and other 

sources that record his aid to fugitive slaves in earlier years. By the spring of 1855 William 

T. Manix, an African American porter who had been living on Coral Place off Andover 

Street on the north side of Cambridge Street, had moved to 83 Southac Street and had 

begun to run a boardinghouse there, according to the 1855 state census. 

Between 1 August 1855 and 4 December 1856 Boston Vigilance Committee records 

reimbursed a William Manix (only one man of that name is listed in Boston censuses and 

directories at the time) for boarding twelve fugitives on four separate occasions, 

presumably most if not all of them at this 83 Southac address. It is likely that Manix was a 

fugitive himself, for he is listed in Jackson’s fugitive record in the New-York Historical 

Society collections as having been sent to Canada in 1856 along with two of the fugitives he 

was paid for boarding on 4 December that year. Manix appears to have moved by 1858, and 

in 1862 he was working on a steamboat and boarding at 62 Southac Street. He disappeared 

from directory and census listings after that point. 

In 1855 Manix boarded several documented fugitives at 83 Southac Street. One of them 

was Elizabeth Cooley and her daughter. In February 1852 Vigilance Committee records 

note that Lewis Hayden had been paid for boarding “Mrs Cooly & child” and that in April 

of the same year he was paid again for boarding “Mrs Cooley & daughter.” Jackson’s 

accounts at New-York Historical Society indicate that the two were to be sent to New York 

in 1853, but “New York” was crossed out. Between 23 December 1854 and 27 March 1857, 

the physician John V. DeGrasse provided care for the wife and daughter of a “Mr. Cooley” 

at 83 Southac Street. The 1855 state census records Elizabeth Cooley, her age shown as 

thirty-two, and a fifteen-year-old Marianna (the first name is apparently unclear) Cooley at 

Manix’s 83 Southac boardinghouse, as well as a forty-one-year-old carpenter named 

Loderic Cooley; it is possible that the last-named was a husband or other relative who 

escaped to Boston at a later date. 

It is possible, though not yet confirmed, that “Mrs. Cooley” was the Elizabeth Cooley living 

at 62 Phillips Street in April 1897 when she told Wilbur Siebert of her escape from slavery 

in January 1851: 

She had hidden out two years, when she finally got away from Norfolk, Virginia, on

a boat which took her to Boston. She had been a seamstress and had an easy time, 

but had wanted to be free from her childhood days. She married a free negro. Eliza 

Baines was a colored woman at Portsmouth, Virginia, who worked for captains of 

vessels. She was able to learn from them their times of sailing. She harbored 

fugitives and got numbers of them on board boats sailing for Boston and New 

Bedford. Once when a party of slave-hunters came to her house to find runaways, 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 109
she outwitted them by hiding the slaves between the rows in her garden and 

spreading sheets over them. When some of her fugitives had been put safely aboard 

for the North, her happiness, she went about singing “It’s all right, hallelujah, glory 

to God.”258

The other fugitives from slavery whom Manix is known to have sheltered were Jane 

Johnson and her sons Isaiah and Daniel. Johnson’s escape was one of the most open and 

spectacular of all during the 1850s, having been effected in broad daylight from the deck of 

a steamboat at Walnut Street wharf in Philadelphia on 18 July 1855. Johnson, who with her 

sons, both younger than twelve at the time, had been purchased in 1853 in Richmond by 

John Hill Wheeler, who was then a North Carolina state legislator. Appointed U.S. 

minister to Nicaragua by President Franklin Pierce in 1854, Wheeler was en route from 

Washington to Nicaragua when Jane Johnson endeavored to make her escape. While 

waiting for the steamboat to depart, Wheeler went to dine at a nearby hotel, and Johnson 

told two separated people of color that she wished to be free. The two sent emissaries to 

William Still, secretary of Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee, and he and Passamore 

Williamson, the secretary of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of 

Slavery, went to the wharf with a description of Johnson and her sons. They found 

Wheeler, Johnson, and her sons on the second deck of the steamboat. Still informed 

Johnson that, having been brought into a free state by her master, she had a right to be 

free, and she and her children were helped off the boat while Wheeler attempted to take 

hold of both Johnson and Passamore Williamson. Johnson was taken out of Philadelphia 

quickly, and Williamson, who refused to state where the Johnson and her children had 

been taken (Still claimed Williamson was not told) was jailed at Moyamensing Prison on a 

charge of contempt of court.259 

In his account of the event, Still wrote that Johnson “very naturally and wisely concluded to 

Canada, fearing if she remained in this city . . . that she might again find herself in the 

clutches of the tyrant from whom she had fled.” Clearly Still aimed to protect her. Johnson 

was in fact sent to Boston, as a letter from William C. Nell to the Rochester, New York, 

abolitionist Amy Kirby Post, among other documents, makes plain. “The woman—Jane 

Johnson for whom Passamore Williamson had been imprisoned—I had the pleasure of 

escorting from the depot in Boston recently on her destination,” Nell wrote to Post on 13 

August 1855. “She is a woman who can take care of herself.” The records of the Boston 

Vigilance Committee include a 10 November 1855 reimbursement to William Manix for 

boarding Jane Johnson and her two children, and for shoes and other expenses related to 

her.260 And, as Katherine E. Flynn’s excellent genealogical work has discovered, Johnson 

remarried and remained in Boston. Within a year of her arrival, she and her family moved 

to 1 Southac Court, the longtime home of the William Riley family (see below). 

John Sweat Rock lived at 83 Phillips in 1860.261 Born free in Salem, New Jersey, Rock’s 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 110
poor health initially prevented him from becoming a doctor; he instead became a dentist in 

Philadelphia as well as an amateur historian. Rock also started a night school for blacks 

and was an active antislavery reformer. In time he returned to the study of medicine and 

graduated from the American Medical College in 1852. 

In 1853 Rock moved to Boston where he set up a practice among people of color. He is 

said to have treated fugitives, although the only documentary evidence of his having done 

so is a Boston Vigilance Committee entry dated 26 Aug 1854: “Dr J S Rock Medical 

attendance on Eliza Jones child.” At that time, however, Rock was boarding in the house of 

Lewis Hayden, certainly the most determined fugitive slave activist in the city of Boston, 

and it is clear that much that went into helping fugitives in both white and black 

communities was never recorded in Vigilance Committee treasurer Francis Jackson’s 

record books. 

After surgical treatment in Paris in 1858, Rock returned to Boston to study law, was 

admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1861, and became the first person of African descent 

to be admitted to argue before the United States Supreme Court. Rock was also the first 

African American to be received on the floor of U. S. House of Representatives during a 

session. During his twelve years in Boston he was a member of the Twelfth Baptist Church 

and an active member of the African American political community. Rock was in particular 

one of the most articulate and forceful spokespersons for permitting men of color to serve 

in the military during the Civil War. After his death in 1866, his widow Maria continued to 

live at 83 Phillips Street for several years, but her whereabouts after 1868 are unknown.262

In the same block between Grove and West Cedar Streets are the sites of other properties 

significant in the history of the north slope’s African American community. 

Directly across the street was Wilberforce Place, the site of the soapworks of Primus Hall

(1756-1842). Hall’s house, where he lived from at least the late 1790s when he ran the 

school for children of color in it, faced West Cedar Street (called Southac from 1733 to 

1810 and George from 1810 to 1826). Primus Hall owned a large segment of land than 

covered the interior of this block and touched on two streets at the modern-day sites of 61-

63 West Cedar Street and 82-88 Phillips Street; his land encompassed sout sides of the land 

that today bears his name, Primus Avenue (formerly Wilberforce Place). Tax records 

suggest that his soapworks was on Primus Avenue. 

In the next lot east on Southac Street, along Southac Place, was the boardinghouse of 

Samuel Guild, where David Walker (site 1) and Coffin Pitts (site 5) both lived in 1826. 

Each moved to separate dwellings on Belknap Street the following year.263 Southac Place 

and Southac Court both terminate in a lane at their south end and are separated by a row 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 111
of buildings. Between Southac Place and the Lewis Hayden House were the houses owned 

and occupied by William Riley and his family at 68 and 70 Southac Street, the latter of 

which housed 1 Southac Court. 

William Riley had been a Brattle Street clothes dealer since 1827. By 1829, tax records 

document, he was renting on Southac Street from Catherine Leitner, who rented several 

dwelling houses in the West End to people of color and for several years in the 1830s lived 

next door to the Rev. Thomas Paul’s widow, Catherine Paul, on Grove Street. By 1835 

Riley and his wife Elizabeth had two children, William J. and George Putnam Riley, the 

younger son probably named for George Putnam of Belknap Street, who owned the house

on the west side of Southac Court by 1835. By that year William Riley had purchased both 

68 and 70 Southac Street, the former a wooden house and the latter brick. In that year too 

the Rileys’ daughter Eliza was born. 

Sharing 68 Southac with Riley and his family between 1836 and 1843 was the barber 

Thomas Cole, who was very active in the African American political community on the 

north slope. He had spoken out against colonization at the African Meeting House several 

times in 1831 and was a member of the Massachusetts General Colored Association; he 

was among the men of color who met at George Putnam’s Belknap Street home to discuss 

creating a college for young men of color and supported Garrison’s efforts to raise money 

for such an institution. Cole also attended the 1833 convention of free people of color in 

Philadelphia. When he died in 1847, Cole left three hundred dollars to a relief fund at the 

former African Meeting House, all of his books to the Adelphic Library Association, four 

hundred dollars to the Bay State Lodge Grand United Order of Odd Fellows #114 as a 

fund for funeral expenses, and to William Riley’s wife Elizabeth three hundred dollars as 

well as his feather bed “which formerly belonged to my mother, all my sheets, 

counterpanes, pillowcases, one dozen towels, and my best china tea set.”264

William Riley himself died two years later, in late July 1849. In his will he left all his real 

and personal property to his wife with the exception of cash in trust to his three children 

when they came of age and a few small cash bequests to his wife’s children from her first 

marriage and the Twelfth Baptist Church for its building campaign. His widow Elizabeth 

appears to have lived with her children from both marriages at 70 Southac Street. She was 

an activist in her own right, having been a member of the Afric-American Female

Intelligence Society and of the interracial Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society along with 

Susan Paul, Martha Pero, Chloe Barbadoes, and other women of color in the 1830s. When 

Lewis Hayden (site 19) and others rescued the fugitive Shadrach Minkins from the Boston 

Court House in 1851, Hayden disclosed more than thirty years later, he and Robert Morris

hid Minkins in the attic of Elizabeth Riley’s home before taking him out of the city

altogether.265

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 112
In 1856, 1 Southac Court became the residence of Jane Johnson and her two sons. In a 

letter to Passamore Williamson dated 3 December 1855, Nell explained that he had met 

Johnson and “her two Boys” at the rail depot in Boston “in my capacity as a member of the 

Vigilance Committee, and was subsequently engaged in securing Home and employment 

for her.” Boston Vigilance Committee records list two reimbursements on behalf of Jane 

Johnson to fugitive assistant Robert F. Wallcutt, one on 22 November 1855 for furniture 

and the other on 13 February 1856 for goods unspecified. Nell noted that each time he saw 

Johnson “she was full of gratitude to You and the other noble friends who rescued her.” 

Writing to Williamson again on 26 May 1856, Nell stated, “Jane Johnson called in this 

morning and expressed much pleasure on hearing from you. She requested my informing 

you that she now lives No 1 Southack Court—and is quite well.”266

Probably by 1857 Jane Johnson remarried to a Lawrence Woodfolk (or Woodfork), an 

African American cook born in Essex County, Virginia, and about thirty-nine years old 

when he filed his intention to marry her on 13 August 1856. By 1858 the family had moved 

to Grove Street and by 1859 to Revere Street Court. The couple is listed in the 1860 census 

with Jane’s sons Daniel and Isaiah, as well as an eleven-year-old Ellen A. Johnson whose 

identity is unclear. Isaiah Johnson served in the Fifty-fifth Regiment of Massachusetts 

Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. Woodfolk died in December of 1861, and Jane 

Johnson Woodfolk married again to the Maryland-born mariner William Harris. She died 

on 2 August 1872 at her home on 5 Fruit Street, north of Cambridge Street, of dysentery. 

Katherine E. Flynn has presented compelling evidence for the theory that Johnson was the 

author of the The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the only holographic slave narrative so far 

discovered and now believed to be the first novel written by a black woman who had been a 

slave.267

At some point between the Shadrach rescue and 1867 Elizabeth Riley had died, and 

William Riley’s real estate at 68 and 70 Southac Street was divided between his three 

children. In 1861 their daughter Eliza had married the poet Elijah William Smith Jr., the 

son of the Philadelphia-born composer and musician who married the Rev. Thomas Paul’s 

daughter Anne Catherine. She and her husband agreed to share 70 Phillips (the same 

building as 1 Southac Court) with her brother George P. Riley, who worked as a barber. 

Their brother William J., also a barber, took the wooden house, 68 Phillips. As of 1874 both 

still owned the houses. 

Directly across the street from Southac Court is the site of the home of the Reverend 

Samuel Snowden and his family. It is here, according to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, 

that thirteen fugitives arrived on the doorstep on 8 October 1850, the day Snowden died. 

They were not the only ones to have been sent to Snowden’s home after his death, 

occurring as it did only weeks after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. The former 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 113
fugitive Isaac Mason’s 1893 narrative documents his similar experience. Mason had 

escaped slavery in 1849, married in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1850, and was 

working as a hod carrier in Philadelphia when the sight of his former owner on the streets 

forced the couple’s hasty departure in the fall of 1850: 

When we arrived at Boston the first business my attention was directed to was to

find Mr. Snowdon to whom I had a letter of introduction from Mr. Gibbs. After 

making some inquiry I was sadly disappointed to learn that he was dead. The 

gloom that began to spread over me was soon to disappear; the silvery lining was

near by. A place of rest and shelter was providentially prepared for us in the 

hospitable residence of the late Lewis Hayden. We stayed with him two or three 

weeks, and being unsuccessful in obtaining work in that city we were sent to 

Worcester. In using the term we here is in reference to two young men, like 

myself seeking liberty and employment. I left my wife in Boston with the Hayden 

family. 

Mason’s narrative stated further that William C. Nell “sent us to Worcester” with a letter 

introducing the three men to William Brown, who boarded them for the night.268 Francis 

Jackson’s Boston Vigilance Committee records document that Lewis Hayden was 

reimbursed for boarding Mason, James Jackson, and George Reason on 16 November 

1850, and Jackson’s second set of records at the New-York Historical Society list the three 

men as having been sent to Worcester. 

Snowden, who had lived at what was later numbered 5 or 9 Belknap Street since about the 

time he came to Boston in 1818 to about 1840-41, moved to 73 Southac (then one of several 

numbered 5 Southac) in 1842. Snowden, the Standard declared, always opened his home to 

fugitives, and David Walker biographer Peter Hinks has stated that he had a “special 

mission to black mariners.”269

Snowden was born in slavery in Maryland between about 1763 and 1773. Little is known of 

his early life, but by 1800 he had become an itinerant minister in the African Methodist 

Episcopal organization. He was preaching in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in that year, and the 

federal census shows him in Portland, Maine, in 1810.270 Snowden was still in Portland eight 

years later when two members of the West End’s Bromfield Street Methodist church 

assigned to locate a black minister approached him. As the number of black congregants 

grew, the Bromfield church sought a minister of color so that these members might “have 

public exercises among themselves both for their own enjoyment and for the benefit of that 

portion of the city in which they resided.”271 When he came to Boston that year, the church 

records state, Snowden “at once entered upon the work of preaching to his brethren in 

private homes and wherever he could find opportunity.” The May Street Methodist 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 114
Episcopal church was built by 1823. 

Snowden attended the first annual convention of free people of color in Philadelphia in 

1831, and he was one of nine counselors to the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which, 

Hinks and others suggest, was an unusual position for a man of color to hold. In 1842 and 

1843 his family shared 73 Southac Street with the laborer Israel Holmes;272 from 1844 until 

his death Snowden shared the house with the mariner George Manluff or Mandluff, who is 

not listed as a resident of Boston in censuses or directories. 

Like their father, Snowden’s sons and daughter Isabella were active in fugitive assistance. 

Isabella, who married the barber Henry Holmes and was living in 1850 on Holmes Alley, 

was reimbursed on 16 November that year for boarding twelve fugitives since the time of 

the Vigilance Committee’s creation less than a month before. The records identify her as 

“Father Snowden’s daughter.” Two of Snowden’s sons, Isaac and Charles, were arrested on 

Court Street in April 1851 for “walking up and down before the chained Court House” at 

one o’clock in the morning; taken to the “lock-up,” they were searched and found to be 

armed. The Liberator explained that the brothers, who both by then had moved to 

Cambridgeport, carried the guns for protection “as most colored people do who have 

occasion to leave the city, over the bridges, late at night. Colored persons have been several 

times, of late, attacked and beaten on these long bridges, and in their neighborhood.”273

Isaac Snowden, who worked as a printer, was a member of the Boston Vigilance 

Committee. By 1855 the Snowden siblings had sold their interest in the house their father 

had owned in Holmes Alley to Joseph Scarlett (sites 8 & 10). 

SITE 21 • Thomas Paul House

Address: 36 West Cedar Street (formerly 26 George Street) 

DOC: 1815-22 

History: Thomas Paul (1773-1831), pastor of the African Meeting House from 1806 to 1829, 

lived in this house at some point from about 1822 until his death from tuberculosis on 13 

April 1831. 

Paul was born free on 3 September 1773 in Exeter, New Hampshire, and, at the age of 

twenty, attended the Free Will Academy in Hollis, New Hampshire, with two of his 

brothers. In 1804 or 1805 he was ordained in West Nottingham, New Hampshire, by the 

Rev. Thomas Baldwin of Boston, who also married him to Catherine Waterhouse of 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 115
Cambridge in December 1805.274 By July 1805, Paul was apparently living in Boston. He 

became a member of the First Baptist Church in the North End, and with such other 

African Americans as Scipio Dalton he began meeting for worship in private homes in the 

city. In 1805 he and Dalton wrote both the First and Second Baptist Churches of Boston to 

ask for their assistance in establishing a church for people of color, and from those letters 

the African Meeting House was ultimately created. On 4 October 1806 Paul was installed 

as pastor of the African Meeting House.275

Paul and his family lived on Belknap Street until 1823, when they moved to this 

neighborhood. Tax research needs to be undertaken to establish when he lived at this 

address, for he traveled often in the 1820s, and in 1826 he lived close to Primus Hall near 

or on the northeast corner of West Cedar and Southac Street. In 1824 Paul traveled to 

Haiti, where he had stayed for six months with Prince Saunders in 1817. During the later 

trip he had helped several Boston families of color resettle there, but the ultimate failure of 

the experiment extinguished Paul’s initial enthusiasm for colonization. Paul earlier helped 

found New York City’s African Baptist Society, later called the Abyssinian Baptist Church. 

He was a member of the Prince Hall Masons and an agent for Freedom’s Journal. See site 

11 for information on his ministry at the African Meeting House. Paul’s family was noted 

for its abolitionism. His brother Nathaniel, minister of the Union Street Baptist Church in 

Albany, New York, was an antislavery activist. Thomas Paul’s daughter Susan was a 

founding member of a temperance society founded by African American women in Boston, 

a life member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, a teacher, the founder of the 

Garrison Junior Choir, and an officer of the Second Annual Anti-Slavery Convention of 

American Women in 1838. Paul’s daughter Anne, who married the composer Elijah 

William Smith, is also said to have been an abolitionist, though little has so far been 

uncovered about her.276

SITE 22 • Site of John A. Andrew House

Address: 110 Charles Street 

DOC: 1890-1910 (current structure) 

History: On this site stood the home of John Albion Andrew (1818-67), whose efforts while 

governor of Massachusetts convinced President Abraham Lincoln to permit the creation of 

the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first regiment of men 

of color authorized in the Union Army. Well before he became governor, Andrew was 

deeply involved in the African American community on Beacon Hill, having helped 

purchase the freedom of the family of a fugitive slave and having been instrumental in 

creating the Home for Aged Colored Women. Andrew was an attorney, a member of the 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 116
Boston Vigilance Committee, and a close associate of Charles Sumner (site 26). 

John Andrew was born in Windham, Maine, graduated from Bowdoin College in the class 

of 1837, and studied law in the Boston office of Henry H. Fuller, the uncle of 

Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Andrew boarded on Howard Street when he first came 

to Boston in 1840, and by 1846 he boarded at 2 Cambridge Street. By 1847 his law office 

was at 4 Court Street, the same building in which Charles Sumner had long kept his 

practice, and in 1858, the year he was elected to the state legislature, he moved to what was 

then 71 Charles Street, renumbered in 1866 as 110 Charles. 

Between 1852 and 1855 Andrew worked patiently to help Seth Botts, a fugitive who had 

taken the name Henry Williams in Boston, negotiate the purchase and release of his wife, 

children, mother-in-law, and wife’s siblings still held in slavery (see site 4). William C. Nell 

credited Andrew with helping assure that the 1855 bill to desegregate Boston schools would 

not fail of passage. Andrew was an ardent member of the Free Soil Party, and, as one 

nineteenth-century biographical compendium noted, was evidently of a mind with Sumner: 

He believed in “building up” rather than in “breaking down,” and held, with some 

philosophers of world-wide renown, that the best way is to present truth with all its 

evidence to the acceptance of men; and that when truth is one accepted and 

actuative, all errors of theory and practice will eventually be expurged and fall away. 

For these reasons he never identified himself with the Garrisonian school of 

abolitionists. He remarked to its leader on one occasion: “My fidelity to the existing 

institutions of government, its charters, its organization, and the duties of its 

citizenship, is, ever has been, and, I doubt not, will always be, unshaken.”277

Andrew worked assiduously on behalf of the Boston Vigilance Committee and its Legal 

Committee in particular. In 1854 he defended the men under indictment in Boston for the 

rescue of Anthony Burns, and in September 1859 the Vigilance Committee reimbursed 

Andrew for his expenses in “the Hyannis case,” a reference to the ultimately fruitless effort 

to convict the men who had sent the fugitive Columbus Jones back to slavery in May that 

year.278 In December Andrew spoke on behalf of John Brown after his Harper’s Ferry raid 

and originated and directed measures adopted for his defense. That year and early in 1860 

he also worked with Rebecca Parker Clarke and Leonard Grimes to create the Home for 

Aged Colored Women, upon whose board he served from 1860 to 1867, until he died. 

Andrew was elected Governor of Massachusetts by the largest popular vote ever cast for 

any candidate to that time and served until he retired in 1866. He died of apoplexy at his 

Charles Street home and was buried at Hingham, where he and his family had lived in the 

1850s. After his death the African American citizens of Boston resolved in public meeting 

that “the colored soldiers will ever remember that it is to him they are indebted for equal 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 117
military rights before the law.” 

SITE 23 • Charles Street Meetinghouse 

Other name: Charles Street AME Church (1876) 

 

Address: 62-76 Charles Street, corner of Mount Vernon Street 

DOC: 1807 

History: This church, the design of which has been attributed to Asher Benjamin, housed 

the outgrowth not only of the first explicitly antislavery congregation in Boston but also of 

the first African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the city. 

The church, built as the Third Baptist Church of Boston, had an interesting antislavery 

association well before the First AME congregation came to it. In April 1836 member 

Timothy Gilbert, later an active financial supporter of the Boston Vigilance Committee, 

tested a church policy stipulating that if any member brought a person of color to a service, 

the church would immediately forfeit that member’s right to a pew and force his or her own

expulsion. Gilbert invited several African Americans to join him in his pew, was 

immediately expelled, and set out with several other Third Baptist members to create the 

First Free Baptist Church in 1836. 

The new church was officially recognized in 1839, when Nathaniel Colver was elected its 

pastor. In time members of other churches—including William Ellery Channing’s Federal 

Street Church, North Church, and South Boston Baptist—joined First Free Baptist. 

Among them was T. C. Tingley, who was asked to resign his pastorate at North Church 

after having delivered a sermon stating his hope that people of color would soon to be able 

to occupy any pew rather than be confined to the church gallery. First Free Baptist 

ultimately became Tremont Temple, which was the first church in Boston to abolish pew 

rental fees and declared that “all who practice slavery or justify it shall be excluded from 

the church and its communion.” Nathaniel Colver was a member of the Boston Committee 

of Vigilance in the 1850s. 

In 1876 the First AME congregation purchased the Charles Street Meetinghouse. This 

congregation was the second of its denomination in New England, the first having been 

instituted in 1830 in New Haven and the second either later the same year or in 1833 by 

Noah C. W. Cannon in Boston. Nineteenth-century AME historian Alexander Walker 

Wayman identified Cannon as the church’s “missionary to the New England States.” 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 118
Sources also disagree about whether its original site was on Belknap or West Centre 

(Anderson) Street; by 1841, two years after the congregation had been granted a charter by 

the state legislature, the church was definitely on Anderson Street.279 The 1874 G. M. 

Hopkins Atlas of Boston shows the “Colored Church Bethel” at 37 Anderson Street, 

between Phillips and Revere Streets. 

On 15 December 1876, when its congregation numbered about two hundred persons, the 

First AME Church purchased the Charles Street Meetinghouse for forty thousand dollars. 

“In the early history of this church the Negroes of Boston were only allowed to occupy the 

first two rows in the gallery on the Charles Street side during the services,” AME historian 

Richard R. Wright Jr. wrote in 1916. “Now they own the building.” Between 1881 and 1887, 

John T. Jenifer was pastor of the church and raised twenty-two thousand toward payment 

of the mortgage on the building.280 The AME congregation held services in the 1807 

Charles Street church until 1939, even after many of its members had moved to the South 

End of Boston. It was the last black institution to leave Beacon Hill. Still called the Charles 

Street AME Church, it is now at 551 Warren Street in Dorchester. 

SITE 24 • John J. Smith House 

Address: 86 Pinckney Street 

DOC: 1835-45 

History: John J. Smith was a free African American from Richmond, Virginia, who settled 

in Boston about 1840 and lived in this house from 1878 to the mid-1890s.281 Smith was a 

noted abolitionist, his wife Georgiana was active in the effort to secure integrated schools 

in Boston, and their daughter Elizabeth is believed to have been the first teacher of African 

descent in the city’s newly integrated system. 

In 1846 John J. Smith was boarding at 2 Southac Street in the home of John P. Coburn. 

Oddly, Smith is not listed in the federal census or in city directories during the 1840s or 

1850s except in 1847, when he is shown at Coburn’s house and working in a barber shop on 

Staniford Street. According to John Daniels’ 1914 history of black Boston, however, Smith 

operated a barber shop at the corner of Howard and Bulfinch Streets in Scollay Square that 

was “one of the favorite gathering-places” of abolitionists. . . . It is said that when Charles 

Sumner, the noted Senator and Abolitionist, could not be found at his home or office, he 

could usually be located at Smith’s shop.”282 A 27 August 1844 receipt in the Boston Public 

Library’s Charles Sumner Papers documents that Sumner patronized Smith’s shop 

frequently, though it does not indicate the shop’s exact location, and the source of Daniels’ 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 119
statement is not known.283

In 1849 Smith went to California where, according to his obituary, he remained “several 

years.” He was certainly back in Boston by February 1851, for he played a key role in the 

rescue of Shadrach Minkins. After having hid Minkins in the attic of Elizabeth Riley’s 70 

Southac Street/1 Southac Court home, Lewis Hayden took Minkins by a roundabout route 

to the Cambridge home of the Rev. Joseph Lovejoy and then returned to Boston. Then he 

and John J. Smith returned to Cambridge, and Smith drove Hayden and Minkins to the 

home of Francis Edwin and Ann Bigelow in Concord.284 Smith’s obituary states he was also 

active in the 1842 rescue of the fugitive George Latimer. 

With Benjamin F. Roberts, Smith was active in the effort to desegregate Boston schools in 

the late 1840s and early 1850s, and he attended a private night school to improve his own 

education. His wife Georgiana was also involved in the school struggles and was chosen to 

represent African American parents at a testimonial to William C. Nell in December 1855. 

On behalf of the parents, she presented Nell a gold watch for his “untiring exertions in 

securing Equal School Rights for the colored children of the city of Boston,” and she made 

a short speech in an effort to describe the “heartfelt feelings of respect and gratitude” they 

felt toward him. Her own nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth, with thirteen-year-old Ira Nell 

Gray (site 17) and five other children, had just presented a bouquet to Nell. Elizabeth 

Smith later became the first African American teacher in the Boston public school system 

in the early 1870s, at the Phillips School on Anderson Street. 

By 1860 Smith’s shop was at 11 Devonshire Street, and his residence was at 7 West Centre 

(Anderson) Street. During the Civil War, Governor John Andrew appointed him a 

recruiting officer for the four Massachusetts African American regiments, and later in the 

war he was sent to Washington, D.C., to serve as a provost marshal to recruit for the Fifth 

Calvary, an African American unit as well. After the war, Smith was the third African 

American elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, serving there in 1868, 

1869 and 1872; his wife Georgiana was active in the work of the Freedman’s Bureau. From 

1876 to 1883 city directories indicate that Smith ran a restaurant inside the Massachusetts 

State House; after that state he returned to hairdressing at a shop on Exchange Street. 

In 1878, the year he moved to 86 Pinckney Street,285 Smith was appointed to the Boston 

Common Council. Smith’s obituary states that he was “the first of his race” to serve on that 

body and that while on the common council he worked successfully to have a man of color 

placed of the Boston police force for the first time. John J. Smith’s daughter Adelaide, born 

in 1859, married Lewis Terry, who was white, and Terry purchased property at 45 Wellesley 

Park in Dorchester around the turn of the century for his father-in-law, who moved there 

around the turn of the twentieth century. He died there 4 November 1906. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 120
 

SITE 25 • George and Susan Hillard House

Address: 62 Pinckney Street 

DOC: 1830-40 

History: For thirty years, from the early 1840s to the early 1870s, this was the home of 

George Stillman and Susan Hillard, the former the longtime law partner of Charles Sumner 

(site 26) and the latter an active shelterer of fugitive slaves. 

Sumner and Hillard shared a law office at 4 Court Street (the address also used by John 

Albion Andrew [site 22] for many years) from November 1834 until Sumner left for 

Washington as the Free Soil Party’s successful candidate for U.S. Senator.286 Hillard, three 

years older than Sumner, had been born in Machias, Maine, and graduated from Harvard 

in 1828. An idealist, he had been associated with George Bancroft in the Round Hill 

Seminary and in 1833, the same year that he was admitted to the Boston bar, he worked 

with the Unitarian George Ripley on his weekly newspaper Christian Register. 

Though Hillard had initially been much more openly antislavery than Sumner and certainly 

much more political—he was a member of Boston’s common council, a city solicitor, a state 

legislator and senator, and a federal district attorney after the Civil War—in the end the 

two could not reconcile after Daniel Webster’s infamous 7 March 1850 speech calling for 

the preservation of the Union above all else and for no federal action on the slavery 

issue.287 Hillard, a Whig, defended Webster; in addition he was a federal commissioner 

charged with upholding the Fugitive Slave Act. Sumner, as a Free Soiler and so-called 

Conscience Whig, was ostracized by many of his former friends on Beacon Hill but quickly 

became Boston’s most powerful defender of equal rights for African Americans, 

particularly in the difficult years immediately after the Civil War. 

Susan Hillard involved herself with fugitive slaves at least since William and Ellen Craft 

were in Boston in 1850. She claimed that her husband was also sympathetic to fugitives as 

well as active in efforts to aid them. The Crafts’ story, and the Hillards’ role in it, has been 

told under site 19. George Hillard’s sympathies often weighed on the side of racial equality 

despite his feeling about the political actions of 1850. William C. Nell wrote of the efforts 

to integrate Boston schools, “Hon. George S. Hillard and Rev. John T. Sargent, on one 

occasion, were the only two in the School Board to vote in our favor; and Mr. Hillard, on 

several occasions since, when his legal duties required otherwise, has volunteered his 

acquiescence in our appeal.”288 And he remained in many ways close to and politically 

allied with Sumner. In one June 1854 letter to Sumner in Washington he congratulated him 

on his last speech on “the Nebraska bill,” telling him he thought it “the best speech you 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 121
have ever made. . . . We are going to fill up that region with free laborers, & secure it 

against slavery,” Hillard added.289

Susan Hillard is recollected often for her efforts on behalf of fugitives, whom she boarded 

or sheltered for a time in this house. James Freeman Clarke, the Unitarian minister who 

lived next door with his family and mother Rebecca (see site 14) at 64 Pinckney Street, 

related one story in his memoir of 1883: 

My neighbor and friend, Mr. George S. Hillard, was an United States 

Commissioner. It might be his business after the slave law was passed (1850) to issue 

a warrant to the marshal for the capture of slaves. But Mrs. Hillard, his wife, was in 

the habit of putting the fugitives in the upper chamber of their own house, and I 

think Mr. Hillard was aware of the fact and never interfered. There was once a 

colored man, a fugitive, put in this upper room, and when Mrs. Hillard went in she 

found he had carefully pulled down the shades of the window. She told him she did 

not think there was any danger of his being seen from the street. ‘Perhaps not, 

Missis,’ he replied, ‘but I do not want to spoil the place.’ He knew that after he had 

gone, there would be some one else who would need to be protected. He did not 

want any one to see his colored face there, lest it might excite suspicion, to the injury 

of his successors.290

A retrospective account from a 1926 issue of the Boston Evening Transcript counted the 

Hillard house among Boston’s “safe harborages” for fugitives and described the discovery 

of architectural and artifactual remnants assumed to be related to that use: 

A safer haven for the hiding of a slave could hardly have been found, for, as Mr. 

Hillard was an ardent Webster Whig, few would have suspected him of aiding and 

abetting the ‘Underground’ people. It is anybody’s guess as to whether he did 

knowingly lend himself to slave-hiding, but it is well enough known that Mrs. Hillard 

was as keen an abolitionist as her husband was a Webster politician, and that she did 

in fact secret [sic] fugitives in their Pinckney street house, which Mr. Hillard built in 

1846. Only a few years ago, when some repairs were being made in the plastering of 

the ell, a well-concealed trap door in the ceiling of a closet unexpectedly dropped 

upon the head of a workman, revealing an unfinished space under the lean-to roof 

large enough to hold several human beings. This place was without windows, but it 

was ventilated in a measure by an opening into a shaft under a skylight. Recalling 

the tradition that this house had been a station on the ‘Underground’ in Mr. 

Hillard’s time the then owner had the place explored, with the result that two tin 

plates and two iron spoons were found on the floor. Were these the relics of the last 

meal ever served to fugitives under that roof?291

Philadelphia Vigilance Committee secretary William Still documented that the Hillards 

took into their home five fugitives, three of them related, between 1855 and 1858. In 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 122
November 1855, Phillis Gault escaped from Norfolk, Virginia, with twenty other people of 

color aboard Captain Alfred Fountain’s schooner to Philadelphia. Fountain, one of a 

handful of master mariners who are known to have willingly and regularly assisted slave 

escapes, brought the group to Still in Philadelphia. Some went on to New Bedford, but 

Gault, Still wrote, “as she had formed a very high opinion of Boston, from having heard it 

so thoroughly reviled in Norfolk, . . . desired to go there.” To Boston she was sent—

William Manix (site 20) was paid for boarding her on 17 March 1856—and she then seems 

to have secured a position at the Hillard home and to have lived there at least through 

1858. 

Gault had been widowed as a young woman when her husband died in the yellow fever 

epidemic that struck Norfolk in 1855, and her letter from 62 Pinckney Street to Still on 22 

March 1858 makes clear that she had young relatives, apparently nephews and perhaps 

nieces. One of them, Dick, had by that time escaped to Boston and was living with her at 

the Hillards’; another was still in Norfolk. “I wish you would see the Doctor for me and ask 

him if he could carefully find out any way that we could steal little Johny for i think to raise 

nine or ten hundred dollars for such a child is outraigust just at this time i feel as if i would 

rather steal him than to buy him.”292

The boy she called Dick in this letter was Dick Page, who was only ten years old when he 

escaped by schooner in 1857. This identity is surmised from another account and letter in 

Still’s book about and by Thomas F. Page. In late March 1856, Captain Fountain again 

brought 14 fugitives from Norfolk to Philadelphia; as before, some went to New Bedford 

and some to Boston. Page, whom Still estimated to be about eighteen years, “first took up 

his abode in Boston, or New Bedford, where most of the party with whom he escaped went, 

and where he had an aunt, and perhaps some other distant kin. There he worked and was a 

live young man indeed—among the foremost in ideas and notions about freedom, etc., as 

many letters from him bore evidence.” By 1857 he wrote to Still from Boston, “Mrs. Gault 

requested me to learn of you if you ask Mr. Bagnal if he will see father and what he says 

about the children.” On 6 October 1858 Page wrote Still again from Niagara Falls, 

apparently after having explored and determined that he did not choose to live in Canada: 

I was home when Aunt had her Ambrotype taken for you. She often speaks of 

your kindness to her. There are a number of your friends wishes you well. There 

are a number of your friends wishes you well. My little brother is going to school

in Boston. The lady, Mrs. Hillard, that my Aunt lives with, thinks a good deal of 

him. . . . Do you ever see my old friend, Capt. Fountain? Please to give my love 

to him, and tell him to come to Boston, as there are a number of his friends that 

would like to see him.293

From Page’s last letter it is possible at least to suggest that he and Dick were brothers and 

Gault their aunt. Then, shortly after Thomas Page probably came to Boston, Captain 

Baylies of Norfolk, another mariner who worked with Still and other fugitive activists in 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 123
Philadelphia, brought fifteen fugitives from Norfolk to League Island near Philadelphia. 

Many of these fugitives too went to New Bedford, but Mary Gray, the daughter of Sophia 

Gray, “was sent to Boston, where,” Still wrote, “she had an aunt (a fugitive), living in the 

family of the Hon. George S. Hilliard [sic]. Mr. and Mrs. Hilliard were so impressed by 

Mary’s intelligent countenance and her appearance generally, that they decided that she 

must have a chance for an education, and opened their hearts and homes to her.” Still 

wrote, 

On a visit to Boston, in 1859, the writer found Mary at Mr. Hilliard’s, and in an 

article written for the Anti-Slavery Standard, upon the condition of fugitive 

slaves in Boston and New Bedford, allusion was made particularly to her and 

several others, under this hospitable roof, in the following paragraph: 

“On arriving in Boston, the first persons I had the pleasure to converse 

with, were four or five uncommonly interesting Underground Rail Road 

passengers, who had only been out of bondage between three and five years. 

Their intelligent appearance contradicted the idea that they had ever been an 

hour in Slavery, or a mile on an Underground Rail Road. Two of them were 

filling trustworthy posts, where they were respected and well paid for their 

services. Two others were young people (one two, and the other three years out 

of Slavery), a girl of fifteen, and a boy of twelve, whose interesting appearance 

induced a noble-hearted Anti-Slavery lady to receive them into her own family, 

expressly to educate them; and thus, almost ever since their arrival, they have 

bene enjoying this lady’s kindness, as well as the excellent equal Free School 

privileges of Boston. . . . 

This ‘boy of twelve,’ alluded to, was not Mary’s brother. He was quite a 

genius of his age, who had escaped Norfolk, stowed away in a schooner and was 

known by the name of “Dick Page.”294

Still’s published account contains one final record of a fugitive whom the Hillards aided—

Louisa F. Jones, who bore the name Mary Milburne in slavery. Still stated that her owners 

were the “Misses Chapman” and included an engraving of her, but he did not state where 

she had come from in the South or a great deal about her background. She left disguised as 

a man and stowed aboard a steamboat for Philadelphia. After staying in that city for a short 

time, she left for Boston with “a letter of introduction to William Lloyd Garrison,” and she 

wrote Still from Boston on 15 May 1858: 

I arrived hear on Thirsday last, and had a lettor of introduction giving to me by 

one of the gentlemen at the Antoslavery office in New York, to Mr. Garrison in 

Boston, I found him and his lady both to bee very clever. I stopped with them the 

first day of my arrivel hear,295 since that Time I have been living with Mrs. 

Hilliard I have met with so menny of my acquaintances hear, that I all most 

immagion my self to bee in the old country. I have not been to Canaday yet, as 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 124
you expected. I had the pleasure of seeing the lettor that you wrote to them on 

the subject. I suffored much on the road with head ake but since that time I have 

no reason to complain.296

George and Susan Hillard remained at this address through the early 1870s. By 1868 

Hillard was appointed a federal district attorney, but by 1873 he was in private practice as 

Hillard, Hyde and Dickinson at 14 Pemberton Square. He had moved to Longwood in 

Brookline by the late 1870s. 

SITE 26 • Charles Sumner House

Address: 20 Hancock Street 

DOC: 1810-20 

History: From 1829 to 1867, this was the home of Charles Sumner (1811-74). Though he 

came later than most to articulating his position against slavery and its spread into U.S. 

territories, not having taken a firm stand on the issue until 1845, Sumner’s growing 

conviction and the strength of his oratory established him as the foremost advocate of 

racial equality in the national political sphere in the 1850s and 1860s. His commitment to 

the issue was particularly critical in the years after the Civil War, when many civil rights 

issues hung in the balance. 

Sumner, a twin and the son of Charles Pinckney and Relief Jacobs Sumner, was born in a 

rented frame dwelling at the corner of May and Butolph Streets on 6 January 1811. He did 

not come to live at 20 Hancock until he had graduated Harvard. At Harvard Latin he had 

known, though not well, Wendell Phillips; at Harvard he had been close friends with John 

White Browne, who became secretary of Boston’s first Vigilance Committee in the mid1840s. But Sumner was not involved with fugitive slave issues in the 1830s and 1840s, and 

according to Anne-Marie Taylor’s recent biography of Sumner he was wary of political 

involvement until the mid-1840s, and in fact afterward. 

Sumner was a different sort of abolitionist than Garrison, Phillips, and the rest of what 

even in their own time were often dubbed the “Boston clique,” sometimes the “Boston 

ladies.” He never disavowed the U.S. Constitution, as Garrison and Phillips did; indeed, 

throughout his life he insisted, as he stated in his 1860 “Barbarism of Slavery” speech, “The 

pretension that man can hold property in man was carefully, scrupulously, and completely 

excluded from the Constitution.” While Garrison believed only moral influence could 

overturn slavery, Sumner believed that only when politics and morals were fused could 

slavery die and both democracy and civilization flourish. Taylor has argued that Sumner 

avoided political involvement because as a young man it seemed to him that the political 

and moral spheres never intertwined, but it was because they needed to do so that he could 

no longer avoid such involvement.

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 125
Sumner appears to have grown involved in antislavery issues at the time of George 

Latimer’s arrest in Boston in 1842. Latimer, a fugitive from Norfolk who had escaped with 

his wife and child, was arrested without a warrant on a charge of theft. He was remanded 

for a trial without a jury and held for days, while throughout the state abolitionists 

conducted a mammoth petition drive and mass meetings. At that time, according to 

Garrison biographer Henry Mayer, Sumner told abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman that 

he would endorse any move among the Boston bar to refuse to assist Southerners seeking 

legal services in the effort to reclaim fugitive slaves.297 

Sumner’s first public address against slavery, which was also a speech strongly against going 

to war with Mexico over Texas, was in 1845. It occurred five months after one of the first 

antislavery meetings Sumner had ever attended, an anti-Texas rally at Faneuil Hall in 

January which was probably the first time Sumner had ever heard William Lloyd Garrison 

speak. For Garrison, Mayer states, this meeting was also a “major political landmark. . . . 

for the first time his viewpoint found expression at a meeting called by a bipartisan group of 

‘political gentlemen,’ and he exercised his talent for inspirational leadership upon a group 

that he neither convened nor controlled.” Sumner afterward said how impressed he was 

with Garrison and told Judge Joseph Story that he had been a Liberator reader for years.298

From that point on Sumner’s political interest and commitment grew. His distance from 

the conservative wing of the Whig establishment—the so-called Cotton Whigs—increased, 

and by 1848 he had aligned himself with those Conscience Whigs and Democrats who 

formed the core of the Free Soil Party in Boston. He hoped once and for all, according to 

Mayer, to undo the “alliance between ‘the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom’ that 

perpetuated slavery.”299 

In 1849, with African American attorney Robert Morris, Sumner became chief plaintiff’s 

counsel in Sarah C. Roberts v. the city of Boston. The case was initially brought in the court 

of common pleas by Benjamin F. Roberts (see site 3) on behalf of his five-year-old 

daughter Sarah and on appeal was brought before Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the state 

Supreme Court. Since March 1847 the Roberts family had been living at 3 Andover Street, 

in the sixth primary school district. The city of Boston, which had at that time twenty-two 

primary school districts and 160 primary schools, provided two schools for children of color, 

one of them in the eighth district—in the basement of the African Meeting House—and 

the other in Sun Court Street, in the second school district, in the North End. The Boston 

school committee then had a bylaw that gave it the power, “under the constitution and laws 

of this commonwealth, to make provision for the instruction of colored children, in 

separate schools established exclusively for them, and to prohibit their attendance upon the 

other schools.” The committee also had a regulation that scholars were to go to the schools 

“nearest their residences.” 

Sumner stated that Sarah Roberts was refused an admission ticket to the primary school 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 126
nearest her Andover Street home, the customary procedure, and was ejected when she 

tried to go in without a ticket. He pointed out that the school “in Belknap street” was 2,100 

feet from the Roberts home, “and in passing from the plaintiff's residence to the Belknap 

street school, the direct route passes the ends of two streets in which there are five primary 

schools. The distance to the school in Sun Court street is much greater. The distance from 

the plaintiff's residence to the nearest primary school is nine hundred feet. The plaintiff 

might have attended the school in Belknap street, at any time, and her father was so 

informed, but he refused to have her attend there.”300 Sumner argued, “The separation of 

the schools, so far from being for the benefit of both races, is an injury to both. It tends to 

create a feeling of degradation in the blacks, and of prejudice and uncharitableness in the 

whites.” 

C. J. Shaw, the Boston school committee counsel, countered that the two primary schools 

for black children were “as well conducted in all respects, and as well fitted, in point of 

capacity and qualification of the instructors, to advance the education of children under 

seven years old, as the other primary schools” and that the fact of their being further from 

her home did not unlawfully exclude her from public school education. The committee, 

Shaw stated, had concluded “apparently upon great deliberation . . . that the good of both 

classes of schools will be best promoted, by maintaining the separate primary schools for 

colored and for white children” and that racial prejudice, “if it exists, is not created by law, 

and probably cannot be changed by law.” The court rejected Sumner’s argument, but 

William C. Nell claimed that though Sumner’s argument failed to sway the justices it “had a 

most potent bearing on the Legislature which granted our rights”; it was in the 

Massachusetts legislature that the effort to integrate the city’s schools was finally won in 

1855.301 

Sumner was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1851. In 1852 he was instrumental in securing the 

pardon and release of Daniel Drayton, who had spent more than four years in Washington 

jail for attempting to take seventy-seven fugitives from that city to Frenchtown, New Jersey, 

in April 1848. From 1851 through 1855 he worked with John A. Andrew on negotiating the 

purchase of the enslaved family of Seth Bott (site 4). Still, Garrison upbraided him for not 

making a public pronouncement on slavery. His old friend John White Browne must have 

heard sentiments to that effect, for he wrote Sumner in June 1852 that William I. Bowditch 

shared with him the speculation that Sumner was about to move for repeal of the Fugitive 

Slave Act. Browne wrote, “Don’t let the unjust & ill considered words said here [that is, in 

Boston] about your tardiness to speak in the subject press you to speak one moment earlier 

than your nature and instincts are ready to the attempt to do their own spontaneous work.” 

And after the rendition of Anthony Burns Sumner received this letter on the Fourth of July 

1854 from one of Boston’s staunchest abolitionists, Francis Jackson: 

On this once glorious day, and before I leave this money cursed City, which 

volunteered to send Syms and Burns into hopeless slavery, and which is now hanging 

out its lying banners on every hand, before I go out of the sight of these exhibitions 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 127
of hypocricy [sic] to spend the day in an AntiSlavery grove in the country, I cannot 

begin the day better than by first sending you my thanks, which I do most heartily 

for your noble words and manly bearing in the U.S. Senate; and although I am not, 

and for many years have not been a party to this despotic government, never the 

less, I continue to watch its movements with not the less interest, and to rejoice in 

the courageous acts of all those opponents of the slave power, who feel it to be their 

duty to help man this piratical ship. 

I assure you that as far as my knowledge extends, Anti-Slavery people of 

every stripe and hue, are highly pleased & many are overjoyed with your glorious 

exhibition of courage and ability in the Senate. Your very able speech in the Senate, 

calls to mind that of John Quincy Adams in the House, when he asked the Speaker 

if he would be in order to present a petition from slaves, which he then held in his 

strong hand—the venom which was then spit at his head and which has now been

hissing at yours, comes from the same old serpent, whose coils now occupy seven 

eighths of the Senate Chamber. 

Your brave words will give courage and vigor to all the opponents of Slavery, 

who will work all the faster for its overthrow—and while you go for reforming the

old pro-slavery government—I shall work for the establishments of a new free 

republic at the north. 

Again I thank you, and allow me to assure you, that I am your friend and 

brother, and the Slaves friend and brother.302

 

The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the machinations of proslavery senators finally moved 

Sumner to speak in ways that outraged his southern colleagues. On 18 May 1856 he 

delivered his famous “Crime against Kansas” Speech on the floor of the Senate, in which 

he singled out Senators Stephen Douglas of Illinois and, in particular, Andrew Butler of 

South Carolina and “his mistress, the harlot, Slavery.” What was happening in Kansas was, 

Sumner declared, “the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of

Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the 

hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the 

National Government.” 

To Sumner, the crime was slavery and the criminal the “slave power of the Republic” 

embodied in such men as Butler, who “misnames equality under the Constitution in other 

words, the full power in the National Territories to compel fellowmen to unpaid toil, to 

separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction block then, sir, the 

chivalric Senator will conduct the State of South Carolina out of the Union!” Sumner 

argued bitterly that Kansas, only years old, was far in advance of Butler’s venerable state. 

Already, in Lawrence alone, there are newspapers and schools, including a High 

School, and throughout this infant Territory there is more mature scholarship far, in 

proportion to its inhabitants, than in all South Carolina. Ah, sir, I tell the Senator 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 128
that Kansas, welcomed as a free State, will be a “ministering angel” to the Republic, 

when South Carolina, in the cloak of darkness which she hugs, “lies howling.”303 

Four days later, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, related to Butler, beat 

Sumner severely while Sumner was writing at his desk in the Senate chamber. The attack 

scandalized the North, and Sumner left the Senate and spent most of the next four years in 

relative seclusion and recuperation. 

The “Crime against Kansas” speech and the assault on Sumner provoked a stream of 

sympathetic letters. On behalf of the colored citizens of Boston, John S. Rock (site 20) 

wrote to Sumner on 6 June 1856 to report that they had met at the Twelfth Baptist Church 

(site 18) on 3 June to “express their indignation at the recent outrage.” Among those 

present chosen as officers were Coffin Pitts (site 5), Leonard Grimes, Robert Morris, Jonas 

W. Clark, William Logan, Robert Johnson (site 4), William C. Nell (site 6), Major 

Mundrucu, the Rev. Mr. Freeman, William Preston, Henry Randolph, J. T. Sidney, John 

Stephenson, George W. Ruffin, and Rock. In resolutions passed at the meeting, they 

commended Sumner’s “long-continued disinterested service in our behalf.” They 

recognized in this “dastardly attempt to crush out free speech . . . the abiding prevalence of 

that spirit of injustice which has for two centuries upon this continent, ground our 

progenitors and ourselves under the hoof of slavery.” 

After Sumner’s 1860 “Barbarism of Slavery” speech, Rock—among many others, including 

Robert Morris’s thirteen-year-old son—wrote Sumner to congratulate him and to ask for a

copy of his speech. Rock wrote Sumner twice, once to say that Boston’s African American 

community wished to present him with some gift, “in consideration of your invaluable 

services to the cause of freedom and the heroic manner in which you have defended our 

cause.” Some wished it to be a gold-headed cane, Rock said, a choice he did not approve 

“for reasons which I need not state,” he told Sumner, and he suggested instead the eightvolume Etudes sur l’histoire d’haiti by B. Ardouin because “it is the most perfect history of 

Hayti that has ever been published” and because it was written and published by a man of 

color. “I know your modesty, how you refused the Silver service that was preparing [sic] for 

you in 1856,” Rock wrote. “But I hope you will look upon this effort in a different light and 

receive from us at least some token of our veneration and esteem.”304

Charles Sumner was reelected to the Senate in 1857, 1863, and 1869. He helped craft the 

Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which guaranteed equal rights and voting rights to 

people of color. Sumner also is credited with having guided through the Thirty-seventh 

Congress a bill removing “all disqualification of color in carrying the mails,” which became 

federal law on 19 December 1864. The most immediate beneficiary, according to Dorothy 

Porter Wesley, was William C. Nell, who became a postal clerk on 1 January 1863, before 

the legislation became federal law. In a letter to William Lloyd Garrison written the year 

before he died Nell claimed to have been Civil War “the First Colored Man employed 

about the United States Mail.”305 Less easily documented is the relationships between 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 129
Sumner and both Joshua Bowen Smith and John J. Smith (site 24): little exists to or from 

either in the the voluminous Sumner correspondence at Harvard University’s Houghton

Library. 

Next door to Sumner’s home is the final site of the Home for Aged Colored Women (site 

14) at 22 Hancock Street. The home occupied the southern half of this double house from 

1900 to 1944. The structure had space for thirty residents, but no more than twenty lived 

here. The matrons during these years were Mary E. Townsend (1897-1914), Mary E. 

Armistead (1914-30), and Alice D. Scott (1930- ?). In 1943 six residents and seven boarders 

were living in the home, which closed in 1944 and was sold to Helen Hebb, who ran it as a 

boardinghouse. After the home closed, it eventually became a foundation dedicated to the 

needs of the African American elderly. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 130
Suggestions for Further Research

The primary resources that exist for studying the community of African descent on the 

north slope of Boston’s Beacon Hill are remarkably rich. This study tapped only a modest 

number of them. However, in the course of research for this Historic Resource Study the 

authors grew sufficiently familiar with the state of the literature on this population to 

suggest areas in which research is most needed. Any future research project should initially 

consult Beth A. Bower, “Manuscript Collections Relevant to African American History at 

the Massachusetts Historical Society” (Typescript, Massachusetts Historical Society, 

Boston, November 2001), which describes that institution’s pertinent collections for all 

periods. 

• The migration from the North End to the West End has not yet been systematically 

documented, and it is an issue both BOAF administrators and interpreters wish to 

understand better. This study was unable to find any published or unpublished research on 

the subject, although there is work in progress.306 There is no sense, clear or fragmentary, of 

whether a residential concentration or dispersion of people of color existed in the North 

End, what if any existed between residential patterns and the maritime economy in the 

North End, when the move from the North End to the West End began, over how long a 

period the migration took place, if it was motivated by particular circumstances and what 

those might have been, and how long a population of African descent remained in the 

North End after people of color had established neighborhoods in the West End. The fact, 

for example, that a school for African American children existed in the North End until 

1831 certainly suggests that a sufficiently large black population remained in that part of 

the city to support it.307 These questions matter as they would in any migration study, 

because many migrations combine pushes and pulls: to understand why the West End 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 131
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 132

community of color developed, it is critical to understand what happened in the North End 

beforehand and concurrently. Examining these questions should also help develop a better 

understanding of both neighborhoods and Boston as a whole in the late 1700s and early 

1800s. 

• Similarly, the migration from the West End to the South End is not well documented. 

This research uncovered only piecemeal evidence of movement, some from the early 1870s, 

and the motivations for moving to the West End cannot be fathomed from what little the 

authors learned. A much lengthier and more intensive study is called for. 

• Another critically understudied area is the westernmost section of the West End south of 

Cambridge Street, specifically the Phillips Street area west of Grove Street. The research 

for this study suggested strongly that an African American neighborhood may have 

emerged earlier, though it may have been a poorer community of tenants, than existed 

further east on Joy Street. The vague descriptions of social turmoil in this section of the 

West End from the 1770s through the 1820s need to be more fully researched, as does the 

mysterious absence of structures from these blocks of Phillips (Southac) Street on the J. G. 

Hales map of 1814. This research also began to demonstrate the importance of the street in 

fugitive slave assistance. Finally, despite the absence of extant structures Primus Hall’s 

soapworks needs to be examined in detail and however possible. What Michael Terranova 

has done for former Belknap Street, Smith Court, and Holmes Alley—specifically, research 

in the earliest available deeds and tax records—needs to be done for Phillips Street and the 

streets, courts, and places abutting it; the tax and deed research undertaken for this project 

demonstrates clearly that a large number of African American people lived in, owned, and 

transferred property on Southac Street. 

• Another related area in need of research is the relationship between such white 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 133

abolitionists as Samuel E. Sewall, the brothers Francis and Edmund Jackson, Nathaniel I. 

and Henry I. Bowditch, Wendell Phillips, and Charles Sumner to the African American 

community. In addition to being active members of the Committee of Vigilance, all of 

them acted as facilitators in the process of obtaining houses and mortgages among people 

of color; they often witnessed legal documents and acted as estate executors as well. Francis 

Jackson purchased the house in which Lewis Hayden’s family lived, and his brother 

Edmund later sold it to Harriet Hayden; Wendell Phillips owned the house in which the 

clothes cleaner John Wright lived (whose son was named for Phillips); Sewall sold James 

Scott the house he later resold to John P. Coburn. The real nature of such real estate 

transfers and scores of others needs to be examined more fully to understand both the 

dynamics of property ownership among black Bostonians and the real relationship between 

the city’s black and white abolitionists. 

• Another migration-related issue is broader, and that is the need to develop a more 

comprehensive understanding of the migration to Boston both from the northern New 

England states, principally Maine and New Hampshire, and from the Canadian maritime 

provinces. The number of early Boston black families with Maine and New Hampshire 

roots is striking, and the antebellum presence of so many Nova Scotia and New Brunswick 

natives suggests a noticeable but heretofore unstudied movement. How much, if any, of 

this latter migration relates to the confiscation of Loyalist estates during the American 

Revolution is not yet known, and this study was unable to engage in the research it would 

have taken to determine this question. 

• The records of the Prince Hall African Lodge, Boston between 1807 and 1846 have been 

compiled by H. V. B. Voorhis of the Grand Masonic Lodge of Massachusetts in Boston, 

but the authors lacked the time to consult them. Peter P. Hinks has suggested that they are 

an invaluable source of information on the north slope community and should be examined 

in detail; these records should help pinpoint the several sites of the African American 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 134

Masonic halls in the neighborhood. 

• The Liberator, which was in effect Boston’s African American newspaper from 1831 to 

1870, should be searched to document more fully the activities of the New England 

Freedom Association from 1842/43 to 1846. The subscription lists are at Boston Public 

Library and should be examined for Boston subscribers, both black and white. Though 

certainly time consuming, a full survey and index of the Liberator, perhaps to refine James 

T. Abajian’s Blacks in Selected Newspapers, Census, and Other Sources (1977, 1985), would 

also be in order, in view of the fact that Boston’s pre-1850 vital statistics have not been 

published and its post-1850 vital records often fail to include those of people of color. 

• Records for all of the West End’s African American churches should be located and 

researched. The Boston Baptist Association should be consulted to learn if its archives 

contains the records of the Twelfth Baptist Church and, if not, where those records are, if 

they survive. In particular it would be useful to know the identities of the forty members of 

dissenting group who, under George H. Black (sites 1, 11 and 18), formed the First 

Independent Baptist Church as well as of the families who left Boston for Canada after the 

passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Church records generally should provide vital statistics 

unrecorded by the city and should shed light on the migration of parishioners from the 

West End to the South End. 

• Research Suffolk County Probate Records for further information on nineteenth-century 

African American Bostonians. Information on spouses, children, heirs, and property 

inventories can be obtained from this search. Carol Stapp began research of probate 

records, but many more are available. A selected listing follows: 

Name Year Probate Docket

Abel Barbadoes 1817 25218 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 135

Benjamin P. Bassett 1854 39382 

Jonas W. Clark 1870 50262 

John P. Coburn 1873 53597 

Thomas Dalton 1849 36207 

John V. DeGrasse 1868 49179 

James Gould 1831 29625 

Lewis Hayden 1889 82151 

George B. Holmes 1829 29040 

Peter Howard 1854 38871 

Simpson H. Lewis 1887 77719 

Emiliano F. B. Mundrucu 1863 44890 

Oliver Nash 1862 44329 

John B. Pero 1864 45674 

Coffin Pitts 1871 51981 

Caroline Putnam (GP dau-in-law) 1882 67917 

George Putnam 1878 61335 

Cuff Roberts 1831 29707 

Robert Roberts 1860 43224 

John S. Rock 1866 47491 

George L. Ruffin 1886 76773 

Joseph Scarlett 1898 109052 

Samuel Snowden 1850 36952 

Henry L. W. Thacker 1869 49570 

George Washington 51520 

Prince Watts 1806 22623 

• The authors recommend completing for the entire nineteenth century the demographic 

research undertaken for this study. BOAF and/or the Museum of Afro American History 

should attempt to acquire the Boston data assembled by the Afro American Communities 

Project at the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s and to merge that data into the Access 

database this project has created. Other specific recommendations will be presented with 

those supplements. 

• A full analysis of African American occupational and residential structure should be 

undertaken once the demographic data is assembled. This research and other studies hint 

at a declension from the late eighteenth century, when men of color were working at skilled 

trades such as hat making, wig making, cordwaining, to the 1830s and 1840s, when most 

appeared to be working as laborers and mariners; work in skilled trades was by then limited 

to such service occupations as hairdressing, clothes cleaning and second-hand clothes 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 136

dealing, waiting tables, and less often catering. The concentration of men of color in 

clothes cleaning on Brattle Street also begs analysis, as does its primary location 

immediately behind the Cornhill offices of the Liberator and the Massachusetts AntiSlavery Society, which may be more than a geographical coincidence. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 137

 

Notes 

1. Despite repeated attempts, the authors failed to gain access to the Boston Athenaeum’s 

Database Directory of African-Americans in Boston, 1820-1865, and to the database compiled 

by James Oliver Horton during his Afro-American Communities Project at the Smithsonian 

Institution in the 1980s While this HRS was being prepared, the Boston Athenaeum was under 

renovation and its collection were in offsite storage. The authors attempted to gain access to the 

database at this storage site but were unsuccessful. Neither of these databases in any event 

covered the years before 1820, and for those years the authors sought the database compiled by 

the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities in Boston, which covered the years 

1790-1820. While the authors were ultimately successful in acquiring a copy of this last source, 

created on an old platform, it was located at such a late point that they had already been 

compelled to compile the earlier data. 

2. Sarah J. Shoenfeld, “Applications and Admissions to the Home for Aged Colored Women in 

Boston, 1860-1887,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 155 (July 2001): 251-

272; 155 (October 2001): 397-413; 156 (January 2002): 62-85. 

3. See Beth A. Bower, “Manuscript Collections Relevant to African American History at the 

Massachusetts Historical Society” (Manuscript, Massachusetts Historical Society, November 

2001), 9-10, for collections related to abolition and fugitive slaves. 

4. The Gay Papers are in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collections, Butler Library, Columbia 

University. Gay’s “Record of Fugitives [Slaves], 1855-58,” is a two-volume narrative of 

fugitives who came to the New York Vigilance Committee and were forwarded to other 

vigilance committee, including Boston’s. Gay’s correspondence, including this record, has never 

been published. He was born in Hingham, Mass., educated at Harvard, and had strong ties with 

many Massachusetts abolitionists. 

5. According to city directories only, Ridgeway Lane or “alley” was a common address among 

people of color only through about 1827. The barber Peter Howard was listed on the street in 

directories between 1816 and 1820, William G. Nell was listed in 1816, the cook Sally Ross in 

1823, the “fruiterer” John Slade in 1818, and Abel Barbadoes Jr. in 1816 and 1820. The latest 

directory listings were for Tamar Crosby, the laborer Henry Green, and the barber James H. 

Howe in 1827. This study did not consult tax records for Ridgeway Lane. 

6. Annie Haven Thwing, The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, 1630-1822 (Boston: 

Marshall Jones Company, 1920), 199. 

7. Allen Chamberlain, Beacon Hill: Its Ancient Pastures and Early Mansions (Boston: Houghton 

Mifflin Company, 1925), 57. 

8. Thanks to Michael Terranova for pointing out this omission in the text and on Price’s map. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 138

 

9. Ellen Fletcher Rosebrock, “A Historical Account of the Joy Street Block between Myrtle and 

Cambridge Streets” (Manuscript Prepared for the Museum of Afro-American History, Boston, 

22 December 1978), 2; Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, 2d ed. 

(Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 7. 

10. Beth A. Bower, “The African Meeting House, Boston, Massachusetts: Summary Report of 

Archaeological Excavations, 1975-1986” (Museum of Afro American History, Boston, 

Massachusetts, n.d.), 107-8. 

11. Thwing, Crooked and Narrow Streets, 207. On the physical evolution of the West End, see 

Nancy S. Seasholes, “Gaining Ground: Landmaking in Boston’s West End,” Old-Time New 

England 77, 266 (Spring/Summer 1999): 23-45. 

12. Elizabeth H. Pleck, in Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865-1900 (New York: 

Academic Press, 1979), 12-13, has noted that blacks never composed more than 2 percent of 

Boston’s population in the 1800s, despite the increase in their numbers from 3,496 in 1870 to 

11,591 in 1900. 

13. John Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negroes (Boston and New 

York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914; reprint, New York: Arno Press and the New York 

Times, 1969), 17. 

14. As noted earlier in this text, Chamberlain, Beacon Hill, 57, stated, “On the northwest slope of 

the Hill, streets had been laid out as early as 1730, and a number of small and scattered houses 

had been built between Myrtle and Cambridge Streets.” Ibid., 213-14, noted that James Allen 

laid out and created what are now Grove, Anderson, Garden, Phillips, and Revere Streets through 

the “extreme westerly pastures” on the north slope of the hill between Myrtle and Cambridge 

Streets about 1725 and divided the land into 89 house lots about 1725. About four years later 

Byfield Lynde continued Phillips and Revere (then called Southac and May Streets) from Allen’s 

western boundary and extended Southac “so as to swing around on the westerly side of the lot, 

more or less on the lines of West Cedar Street.” Thwing, Crooked and Narrow Streets, 208-9, 

stated that the first sale of lots in the Revere-Phillips-Grove-Anderson area was in 1729 and that 

a “bowling green” existed “west of Anderson Street and south of Phillips Street” in 1731. 

Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 2, noted that a 1743 map includes the 

“legend ‘Hell Hill’ written near the beachfront around Southack and West Cedar streets.” 

15. Whitehill, Topographical History of Boston, 70-71. Mysteriously, Map of Boston in the State 

of Massachusetts Surveyed by J. G. Hales, 1814, the first map of the city to show the footprints 

of buildings on streets, shows not a single structure on Southack Street between George and 

Grove Street except at the corners of Grove Street. Between Grove and Centre structures are 

shown only at the corners of Grove and Center. The vacancy seems especially strange in view of 

the association of the western end of the street with Mount Whoredom and the contemporary 

complaints about the street, only four blocks long. Deeds and tax records document that the 

Hales map is not always reliable. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 139

 

16. Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace, 27, states that this law, which the legislature passed on 26 

March 1788, was designed to “suppress and punish rogues, beggars and other idle, disorderly, 

and lewd persons”; its fifth section provided “that no person being an African or Negro, other 

than a subject of the Emperor of Morocco, or a citizen of some one of the United States (to be 

evidence by a certificate from the Secretary of the State of which he is a citizen), shall tarry 

within this Commonwealth for a longer time than two months.” 

17. Massachusetts General Court, House of Representatives, Free Negroes and Mulattoes, 

Presented for the Committee to the House 15 June 1821 by Theodore Lyman Jr. (Boston: True & 

Green, 16 January 1822) 3, 15. The provocation for the legislature’s mandate appears to have 

been legislation passed in other states calling for the removal of free people of color; 

Massachusetts lawmakers evidently anticipated an influx of these exiled persons. 

18. Whitehill, Topographical History of Boston, 71, who cited Josiah Quincy’s Municipal 

History (Boston, 1852), 26-27, 102-5, and Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy (Boston, 1868), 396-97 

. On racial violence in Boston and such other cities as Providence and New Bedford, see Leonard 

P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 1986), 100, 102, 112; George H. Moore, Notes on the History of 

Slavery in Massachusetts (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1866), 237-41; James Oliver Horton 

and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free 

Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 164; Robert J. 

Cottrol, The Afro-Yankees: Providence's Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, 

Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1982), 54-57; and Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s 

Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: 

University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 106-17. Racial violence in the 1830s, related 

principally to the rise of abolitionism, has received considerable attention; see in particular 

Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in 

Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 

19. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 15 September 2002, citing Abigail Belknap to Nathaniel 

Belknap 17 April 1730, SCD 44:145; Belknap to children, 5 August 1732, SCD 46:287; Belknap 

to Jenner, 31 December 1733, SCD 48:179; see Thwing, Crooked and Narrow Streets, 209-10, 

who noted the sale of the ropewalk from Belknap to Jenner in 1733 and its purchase by Edward 

Carnes in 1771. 

20. Ellen Fletcher Rosebrock, “A Historical Account of the Joy Street Block between Myrtle and 

Cambridge Streets” (Manuscript Prepared for the Museum of Afro-American History, Boston, 

22 December 1978), 2. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 15 September 2002, points out that 

Chamberlain, Beacon Hill, 215, noted the presence of a north-south ropewalk “in the vicinity of 

Ridgeway Lane.” Bonner’s map, The Town of Boston in New England (Boston, 1722) is 

reproduced as plate 24 in Alex Krieger and David Cobb with Amy Turner, eds., Mapping Boston

(Boston: MIT Press for the Muriel G. and Norman B. Leventhal Family Foundation, 1999); 

Burgis’s map, To His Excellency William Burnet, Esqr. This Plan of Boston in New England is 

humbly Dedicated by His Excellency’s most obedient and humble servant Will Burgis (Boston, 

1728) is reproduced as plate 25 in the same volume. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 140

 

21. Thwing, Crooked and Narrow Streets, 199. 

22. Thwing, Crooked and Narrow Streets, 209-10; Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy 

Street Block,” 1-2, 4. 

23. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 November 2002, cited SCD 49:58v; see also Rosebrock, 

“Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 4. 

24. See Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630-1800, a CD-ROM database 

compiled by the Massachusetts Historical Society and copublished by MHS and the New 

England Historical Genealogical Society. Locker’s newly free status was apparently recorded to 

establish his eligibility for road work, which he presumably was required to do in lieu of paying 

poll tax: May 18, 1762 "Tobias Lockman has been free 6 years ye.1 March," ordered to do 18 

days of highway work (TR 19:196) December 15, 1762 Order of May 18 not fully complied 

with; "Toby Lockman" reassessed 18 days of highway labor (TR 19:240) June 11, 1766 "Order 

was this Day given to Tobias _____ & Scepio (late Capt. Fayerweathers) Free Negros, to work 

on the High Way before the Market, four Days each, there being several Years duty due from 

them." (TR 20:218) November 6, 1766 Selectmen order complaint made against "Tobias 

Lochman & Scipio, Free Negroes, ye latter late a servant of Capt. John Fayerweather" for failing 

to work 4 days on town highways this year as ordered. (TR 20:236) 1780 Inhabitant, Ward 7 

(Assessors' taking Books, BSP 9:34) 

25. Fayerweather’s 11 September 1760 will, probated 1 October 1760, reads in part, “Item I give 

my Negro Scipio who has behaved well his freedom in one Year after my decease, as also ye 

Bed & Bedding he usually lodges in, and also ye Sum of three pounds lawfull money, and I order 

my Children to give security to ye satisfaction of ye Select Men of ye Town that he shall never 

be any charge to the said Town.” (SPR 57:254) On 12 May 1762 his name appears on a list of 

free negroes in Boston—“Scipio, late a Servant of Capt. Fayerweather” (TR 19:195); on 18 May 

1762 town records state, “Scipio Fayerweather has been free since last September, ordered to 

perform 2 days of highway work for the town” (TR 19:196). 

26. In a 30 January 1979 memo (page 5) appended to “Historical Account of the Joy Street 

Block,” Rosebrock has noted that Pierce appears in directories from 1789 to 1825 as white 

except in the 1813 directory. No probate record exists for him in Suffolk County. In 1789 he kept 

a boarding house on Belknap Lane; by 1796 he was a messenger at the custom house; in 1810 he 

was a retailer; and in the 1810 census he is listed as white. 

27. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 38. Nearly all of the foregoing 

discussion is taken from Rosebrock’s very careful account, as amended by the equally careful tax 

and deed research by Michael Terranova. This narrative would be impossible without these two 

sources. 

28. Locker’s will, dated 23 July 1783, states that he, being “Sick & Weak of Body but of sound 

disposing Mind,” left his entire estate to his wife Margaret; whatever was left after her decease 

was bequeathed to Boston Smith (SPR 82:637); his will was probated 26 August 1783, and his 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 141

 

inventory totaled £95.11.4 (SPR 82:650). 

29. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 45, who further stated that the 

assessor suggested in a note that Bean was a servant. Terranova notes that Bean remained at this 

address at least through 1803. 

30. Thanks to Terranova for clarifying the exact chain of title and chronology of land transfer 

between Locker, Boston Smith, Hamlet Earl, and Cuff Buffum. 

31. See Liberator, 4 August 1832, 122, for a list of the original members. 

32. See Chamberlain, Beacon Hill, 222, 238, 244. Terranova, e-mail to Grover, 26 July 2002. 

Thanks again are due to Terranova for clarifying the land transfer on Holmes Alley. 

33. This theory is stated in the otherwise excellent study by Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty, 

31, and is often seen in popular accounts of the area. 

34. See Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the 

American Revolution, rev. ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 206-8. 

The original petition, Unenacted Legislation House Doc #2358, is in the Massachusetts 

Archives. 

35. Kaplan, Black Presence, 206-7. 

36. Lamont D. Thomas, Paul Cuffe: Black Entrepreneur and Pan-Africanist (Urbana and 

Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 78, 80. These and other letters between Cuffe and 

Saunders and Locke are in the Slaughter Collection, Trevor Arnett Library, Atlanta University, 

New-York Historical Society, and the Cuffe Papers at New Bedford Free Public Library. 

37. Bower, “African Meeting House,” Appendix 1, states that in 1808 the school was taught by 

blacks, “revenue 12.5 cents per child per week”; Charles Shaw, A Topographical and Historical 

Description of Boston, from the First Settlement of the Town to the Present Period; with Some 

Account of Its Environs (Boston: Oliver Spear, 1817), 269-70, stated that Prince Saunders, a 

“man of colour and education,” was teaching the school and had about forty students, but he was 

not specific about the years during which Saunders was instructor there. 

38. “Catalogue of the families onboard the brig Traveller going from America for Sierra Leone 

in Africa sailed 12 month 10 1815 from Westport,” Cuffe Papers, New Bedford Free Public 

Library, reprinted in Kaplan, Black Presence, 161. 

39. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 36-37. 

40. Perry Lockes, Sierra Leone Africa, to “beloved Father,” 7th month 13 day 1816, New 

Bedford Whaling Museum, transcribed and reprinted in Rosalind Cobb, Wiggins, ed., Captain 

Paul Cuffe’s Logs and Letters, 1808-1817: A Black Quaker’s “Voice from within the Veil”
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 142

 

(Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996), 421-22. 

41. See Shaw, Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, 269-70, where he states 

Saunders was in the employ of Emporer Christophe (who committed suicide in 1820), and J. 

Marcus Mitchell, “The Paul Family,” Old-Time New England 53, 3 (Winter 1973): 73-77. 

42. Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of 

Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 75, 

101-2. 

43. Thanks to Michael Terranova for this information on Jessamine’s emigration to Haiti. 

44. Quoted in Liberator, 4 May 1833, 72. 

45. Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace, 61, citing Washington, Story of the Negro, 1:227. 

46. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, “Power and Social Responsibility: Entrepreneurs 

and the Black Community in Antebellum Boston,” Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business 

Community, 1700-1850 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1997), 335. For details on 

Barbadoes’s political activity and family, see his biographical file. Rebecca Barbadoes, 

“widow,” is shown at 4 Southac Court in the 1863 directory and at 42 Grove in the 1873 edition. 

47. Franklin Dorman, Twenty Families of Color, 1-4, states that Quawk Barbadoes and his wife 

Kate were both admitted to the Congregational church of Lexington on 19 April 1754 and were 

“clearly” slaves or servants of an unknown master who freed them in the mid-1700s. On place 

names as surnames, see Lorenzo J. Greene, “The New England Negro as Seen in Advertisements 

for Runaway Slaves,” Journal of Negro History 29, 2 (April 1944): 125-46; Gary B. Nash, 

Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, 

Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1988); and J. L. Dillard, Black Names, vol. 13 in 

Joshua A. Fishman, ed., Contributions to the Sociology of Language (The Hague and Paris: 

Mouton, 1976). 

48. Bower, “African Meeting House,” 48, states Isaac Barbadoes’s date and place of birth. In 

1863 Barbadoes lived on south Washington Street, in what is now Chinatown, while his wife of 

twenty-seven years, Sarah Benson Barbadoes, remained in the family house at 4 1⁄2 Belknap 

Place. By 1868 Isaac Barbadoes had returned there, and in February 1873 he died. 

49. See Franklin A. Dorman, Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts, 1742-1998 (Boston: 

New England Historical Genealogical Society, 1998), 4, who states that nothing more has been 

learned about Robert Barbadoes, and cites the Dictionary of Negro Biography, 307, and James 

G. Barbadoes in Liberator, 7 June 1834. 

50. The 1847 directory lists Barbadoes at 28 Belknap, while the next year’s directory lists her 

across the street at number 27. Tax records compiled by Terranova do not list Barbadoes at 28 in 

1847 or 1848. It thus seems likely that the 1847 listing is a typographical error. In 1868 the 

Boston directory lists Barbadoes at the rear of 52 Joy. By 1868 the street name has change, the 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 143

 

street has been renumbered, and the even and odd sides of the street have been reversed. What 

was 27 Belknap is now 52 Joy, and it is next to/in the same building as 1 Smith Court. Thus 

Barbadoes had actually not moved from 1847 to the time that she was accepted for admission to 

the Home for Aged Colored Women in 1878. 

51. Sarah J. Shoenfeld, “Applications and Admissions to the Home for Aged Colored Women in 

Boston, 1860-1887,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 156 (January 2002): 

65. Shoenfeld’s manuscript was published in two subsequent issues of the Register, hereafter 

cited as NEHGR. Shoenfeld made an electronic copy of her manuscript, which has an index and 

appendix not available in the published version, available to the authors. 

52. DeGrasse’s account book is in box 1, folder 2, DeGrasse-Howard Papers, 1776-1976, 

Massachusetts Historical Society. Ms. N-310. The DeGrasse-Howard Papers are owned by Mrs. 

Shirley Asbury Downs and were placed on permanent loan to the Museum of Afro American 

History in 1998. 

53. These figures for 1840 and 1850 are taken from “Number of Colored Persons in Each Ward,” 

in The Directory of the City of Boston: Embracing the City Record, a General Director of the 

Citizens, And a Special Directory of Trades, Professions, &c. . . . From July 1850 to July 1851.

(Boston: George Adams, 1850), 6. Adams’s figures by ward add up to 2102, though his figure 

for colored persons for the entire city is 2,112. 

54. Adelaide M. Cromwell, “The Black Presence in the West End of Boston, 1800-1864,” in 

Donald M. Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience: Black & White Abolitionists in Boston

(Bloomington: Indiana University, 1993), 156–67. 

55. Adams’s 1850 directory (see note 42) defined the boundaries of ward 6 as follows: 

“Beginning at the water, at the easterly end of Cambridge Bridge; thence by the centre of 

Cambridge street to Temple street; thence by the centre of Temple and Mount Vernon streets to 

Beacon street; thence by the centre of Beacon street and the Western avenue to the boundary line 

between Boston and Roxbury, on the Western avenue; thence northerly by said boundary line to 

the water; thence by the water to the point begun at.” 

56. Elizabeth H. Pleck has sent the authors copies of the pension files of Thomas Cannon, whose 

wife Caroline Wainwright moved from Nova Scotia to Boston about the end of the Civil War, 

and Shoenfeld’s work reveals that applicants Nancy Waldron, Hannah Casey, and Fanny Cox 

were natives of Nova Scotia. 

57. This Downeast migration makes Boston’s African American community different than New 

Bedford’s, where only six of 1,007 people of color (0.6 percent) claimed birthplaces in the 

Canadian maritime provinces in 1850. 

58. The authors stated these assumptions in the list attached to “Ten Percent Progress Report, 21 

December 2001.” 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 144

 

59. This address was initially numbered 8 Belknap in the 1830s through the early 1840s. By 

1849 it had been renumbered as 4 Belknap, and at the time this part of Belknap Street was 

renamed in 1855 it became 81 Joy Street. According to Terranova, renumbering of addresses was 

necessary because Belknap Street was renamed Joy Street in two stages. South of Myrtle Street 

was renamed in 1851; north of Myrtle Street, which had been the original extent of the street in 

the eighteenth century (and, like other north-slope streets, it was numbered beginning from 

Cambridge Street), was renamed in 1855. See Street Laying Out Department, Record of Streets

(1902). Numbered addresses are not common in city directories until 1830, and city tax records 

do not supply numbered addresses until 1849. Establishing the exact location of dwellings based 

on information offered in city directories can only be done by cross-checking those listings 

against listing in the same years in tax records. Tax records indicate the names of property 

owners, which can then lead one to deeds. The deeds describe the property, which makes it 

possible to pinpoint exact locations. In this way Terranova was able to determine that several 

listings for 8 Belknap from city directories in 1839-42 were really the same house as 4 Belknap 

in city tax records from 1849 to 1854. Without his work it would not have been possible to 

determine David Walker’s exact residence. 

60. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 15 September and 16 November 2002, stated that BOAF ranger 

Horace Seldon established that David Walker’s residence on Belknap Street in 1827-28 was 

owned by William Humphrey and that Seldon’s deed research revealed that 81 Joy is the only 

property Humphrey ever owned on Belknap Street. 

61. The distillery was described fully in an advertisement of its sale at auction in the Columbian 

Centinel, 18 October 1806, 3:5, transcribed by Ellen Fletcher Rosebrock and passed along 

to the authors by Beth Bower: 

“DISTIL HOUSE FOR SALE/ To be sold at auction on THURSDAY, the 6th day of 

November next, at 10 o’clock, on the premises, (if not before sold at private sale) 

THAT noted DISTIL HOUSE, at West-Boston, being the largest in the United States. 

The land measures 140 feet on Hancock Street and 140 feet on Belnap [sic] Street, 

and 130 feet from street to street, nearly the whole of which is covered by the Distil 

house. It has five large stills and worms on a new and improved construction, with 

tubs, etc. Eight liquor cisterns, measuring upwards of two thousand gallons. Two low 

wine cisterns of 5000 gallons. Fourteen return cistern, fiteen Rum butts, of an extra 

size. A patent and exclusive right which makes a great saving of fuel, with the 

necessary apparatus with cranes, troughs, etc. 

 “A well and lot situated in chamber street, to be sold with the Distil House, 

which will probably give water enough to supply the whole town with an aqueduct to 

conduct the same to the distil house, and which at a small expense may be extended 

so as to supply two hundred families with water. A guarantee will be given of the 

Aqueduct which was laid by permission of the Selectmen. 

 “The whole works are calculated to make one hundred hogsheads of Rum 

per week or 5200 hogsheads a year, and a saving can be made of one third the 

labour, and half the fuel usually expended in making the same quantity of Rum in 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 145

 

other Distilleries. And the cost of the land, buildings, etc. in less than half the cost of 

the distilleries usually employed to make the same quantity of Rum. 

 “Of the above is not sold at private sale by the 6th of November next, the land 

wil be sold at auction at 11 o’clock, on the premises in House lots, viz. 7 lots, on 

Hancock street, , 20 feet by 70—and 7 lots on Belknap Street, 20 feet by 60. 

 “At the same time will be sold, the Stills, Worms, Butts, Tubs, Cisterns, 

Crains [sic], and all the materials; which are mostly new—and will be sufficient to 

build three or four Distil Houses larger than any in Boston. 

 “The lots will be sold for 1-4 approved notes at 60 days, and the remains 1-

4th in 12 months; 1-4th in two, and 1-4th in three years, on interest annually; and the 

materials for improved, endorsed notes, payable in 6 and 12 months, on interest. 

 “For terms or information, apply to FRANCIS C. LOWELL, URIAH COTTING, 

or HENRY JACKSON./ T. K. JONES & CO. auct.”

62. Four Belknap was legally connected to 9 Hancock Street property it adjoins. It was part of a 

group of eight Belknap Street properties so connected to Hancock Street properties, all of them 

having once been the grounds of an eighteenth-century distillery. Eighty-one Joy was not 

separated from the 9 Hancock Street parcel until the twentieth century, most likely after 1925. 

Thanks to Michael Terranova for this information, and to Jan da Silva for the deed work on 4 

Belknap/81 Joy. 

63. Michael Terranova, phone conversation with authors, 16 July 2002. A notation in the spring 

1825 city tax records for this lot on Belknap Street mentions an “unfinished house,” Terranova 

later noted, and the wording of a deed dated 30 August 1825 implies that the house had been 

completed since a previous deed, dated 8 June 1825: “Being the same premises conveyed to me 

said Hervey Bates by deed of Benjamin Clark Dunn and others on the eighth day of June last 

recorded in Suffolk Registry Lib. 309 fol 229 with the dwelling house then standing in said 

premises which is the northerly house of a block of houses built by Royal Makepeace Esquire 

[the row of eight houses on Hancock Street], together with another dwelling house since erected 

on the premises” on Belknap Street. 

64. “Document II: David Walker Addresses the Massachusetts General Colored Association, 

1828,” in Peter P. Hinks, ed., David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World

(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 86. The document was reprinted 

from Freedom’s Journal, 19 December 1828. 

65. Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of 

Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 68, 

found Walker on Southac Street among “a number” of black and white tenants in 1826. Seldon 

and Terranova noted that Coffin Pitts was among the blacks living there with David Walker; 

Terranova to authors, e-mail, 12 November 2002, who also notes that Samuel Guild sold the 

property in the same year Pitts and Walker moved to Belknap Street. See SCD 328:36, dated in 

the deed index as 6 August 1827. 

66. Mayer, All on Fire, 83, cites the exact month the first edition appeared as well as the method 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 146

 

of distribution but provides no citation. James W. Stewart, “shipping officer,” lived at the head 

of Smith Court, rear of 38 South Russell Street, in 1827, according to tax records that year. In the 

introduction to Maria Stewart’s first publication, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, 

the Sure Foundation of Which We Must Build (1831), she expressed confidence that God would 

protect her from her enemies, “as he did the most noble, fearless, and undaunted David Walker.” 

See Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer

(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press: 1987), 30. 

67.The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, A Fugitive from Slavery. Written by Himself (New 

Bedford: Press of Benjamin Lindsey, 1847), 33-34. This narrative is available in full on line at 

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/black/black.html. 

68. The 1836 Boston directory lists Taylor as running a boardinghouse on Southac Street “2d 

door from West Centre,” but the directory for 1837-38 shows him at 12 Belknap, as do assessors’ 

records for 1838; Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 November 2002, provided the information 

from the 1837-38 directory and the tax records. 

69. Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, 36. 

70. Ibid., 38-39. 

71. Ibid. 

72. Holmes’s deed for 12 Belknap is SCD 302:196, dated 17 August 1825. The value of the 

property rose from $600 in May 1825 to $1,800 in May 1826; Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 

November 2002. 

73. In 1822, the last year in which he appears in the tax record, “George Holmes, Blackman,” 

was exempted (as was customary for a man who was elderly or sick). The 1823 deed to George 

B. Holmes was notarized unusually late, by Sampson H. Moody at the Nantucket Supreme 

Judicial Court, on 23 March 1824, perhaps, Terranova suggests, because of the death or illness of 

the elder George Holmes. 

74. Hinks, To Awaken, 75. 

75. Thanks to Michael Terranova for this tax information on Hilton. 

76. Proceedings: Agreeably to Previous Notice, a Meeting of the Colored Citizens of Boston Was 

Held in Southac Street Church, on Monday Evening, Dec. 17th, 1855, for the Purpose of 

Presenting a Memorial to Mr. William C. Nell . . . (Boston [?], 1855), 20. 

77. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 November 2002, notes that the first deed between Hosah 

Holmes Caples is dated 25 November 1833 and does not indicate that she is deceased; the second 

is dated 3 December 1833 and seems to indicate that she has died. 

78. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 November 2002, notes that a Peter Clark “accompanied 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 147

 

Primus Hall several times to witness his signature in several deeds from 1817-1825 [and] may be 

the same person as the Peter Clark of Boston (1839), later of Hubbardstown, Worcester County 

(1845) who lent Anthony money in two mortgages for Anthony’s home on 12 Belknap Street.” 

Boston directories of 1833 and 1836 list a Peter Clark as a clothes dealer at 16 Brattle Street; 

Jonas W. Clark was at 18 Brattle Street between 1833 and 1841. This Peter is probably Jonas’s 

and Anthony’s father or perhaps brother. 

Anthony Clark’s marriage history is unclear. A marriage record exists, dated 4 May 1839, 

between an Anthony F. Clark and Fanny Lenox, the daughter of John Lenox, Esq., of 

Watertown. This was probably the African American barber and son of William Lenox of 

Newton, who had served in the Revolutionary War; a Fannie L. Clark, whom we suppose to be 

Anthony F. Clark’s widow, appears in the 1883 and 1888 Boston city directories at 82 Phillips 

Street, where the porter Osmore Freeman, also a former Joy Street resident, also lived at the 

time. That Anthony Clark and Fanny Lenox married in 1839 seems further suggested by the later 

marriage, in 1854, of John T. Hilton’s daughter Lucretia and John Miner Lenox, Fanny Lenox’s 

brother. However, three of Clark’s four children were born before 1839, and his wife is listed as 

“Pheba” in the 1850 federal census. 

79. See the Liberator, 20 April 1833, 63. The officers were John Davis, president; Hilton and 

James G. Barbadoes, vice presidents; Samuel Jasper, who was a deacon of the African 

meetinghouse, treasurer; and Cyrus C. Ames, secretary. Clark was on the executive committee 

with Samuel Cook, Charles H. Roberts, Samuel Fowler, and Thomas Henderson. 

80. Boston Vigilance Committee records document Clark’s activity as a fugitive assistant in 

1857, by which time he may have been living on Grove Street. 

81. Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, Mass., and 

London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 142. 

82. [Francis Jackson], “The Boston Vigilance Committee Appointed at the Public Meeting in 

Faneuil Hall October 21st 1850 to assist Fugitive Slaves. Treasurers Accounts”. (Facsimile 

reprint, Bostonian Society, n.d.), entries for 1 January and [?] April 1857, at which point Clark 

was living at 20 Grove Street. 

83. “Map of Boston in the State of Massachusetts,” surveyed by J. G. Hales, 1814, a remarkably 

detailed map for its time, delineates buildings with lines drawn in certain ways to show whether 

they are constructed of wood (diagonal lines) or brick or stone (lines “etched parallel to their 

sides”). Churches and meetinghouses, taverns, and schools are also demarcated by differing 

lines, and Hales drew figures in densely settled streets to indicate every five or ten buildings. 

However, the Hales map is not completely accurate. 

84. This information is from Michael Terranova, who notes that John Harris Roberts is among 

the children of Robert Roberts and Sarah Easton Roberts listed by Graham Russell Hodges in his 

introduction to The House Servant’s Directory, whereas Harriet is not. John Harris (born in 

1820) could only have been seven or eight years old, Terranova points out, when he inherited his 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 148

 

half of 14 Belknap Street in 1828. He speculates that Harriet may have been Roberts’s child by 

an earlier marriage in 1805 with Dorothy Hall, in which case Harriet, like her half-brother John 

Harris, was also quite young (perhaps between nine and sixteen years old) at the time she 

became a joint owner of 14 Belknap. 

85. In Boston on 22 November 1833 Robert Roberts presented an affidavit before David L. 

Child, Suffolk County justice of the peace (and husband of Lydia Maria Child), about the details 

of the enslavement of James, Aaron, and William Hall, Jude Hall’s three sons, and of his efforts 

to attempt to get information about them and assist them. By this time Roberts’s first wife had 

long since passed away of consumption. See George Quintal Jr., Patriots of Color, ‘A Peculiar 

Beauty and Merit’: African Americans and Native Americans at Battle Road & Bunker Hill

(Boston National Historical Park and Minute Man National Historical Park, February 2002), 

117-19. 

86. The information on the building contract is from Michael Terranova. 

87. Thomas, Paul Cuffe, 48. 

88. Susanne M. Olson, curator at Gore Place in Waltham, phone conversation with author, 17 

July 2002, states that Roberts’ date and place of birth come from his statements in Suffolk 

County court documents related to the divorce of his third or fourth wife. 

89. The House Servant’s Directory; or, A Monitor for Private Families, etc. . . (Boston: Munroe 

and Francis; New York: Charles S. Francis, 1827). Roberts’ presence in both the Appleton and 

Gore families is established in Christopher Gore to Nathan Appleton, Waltham, 11 October 

1825, Nathan Appleton Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, cited in Graham Russell 

Hodges, “Editor’s Introduction,” in The House Servant’s Directory; or, A Monitor for Private 

Families, etc., with an introduction by Graham Russell Hodges (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 

1998), xi. 

90. Hodges, “Editor’s Introduction,” in House Servant’s Directory, xiii. 

91. See Liberator, 12 February, 12 March, and 22 October 1831; and Roy E. Finkenbine, 

“Boston’s Black Churches: Institutional Centers of the Antislavery Movement,” in Jacobs, ed., 

Courage and Conscience, 180. An affidavit by Roberts appears as an appendix in The Despotism 

of Freedom; or, The Tyranny and Cruelty of American Republican Slave-Masters: Shown to be 

the Worst in the World: in a Speech, Delivered at the First Anniversary of the New England AntiSlavery Society, 1833, by David L. Child (Boston: Boston Young Men’s Anti-Slavery 

Association, 1833). 

92. According to Lynn Museum archivist Diane Shepard, a directory had been published in Lynn 

in 1832, but no other had been published in intervening years. The 1841 directory Roberts 

compiled and issued is marked vol. 1, no. 1. He is listed therein as a printer living at the corner of 

Summer and Shepherd Streets. Phone conversation with author, 17 July 2002. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 149

 

93. For the most complete account of Barzillai Lew’s military service see Quintal, Patriots of 

Color, 150-54. Kaplan, Black Presence, 21-22, state that Barzillai Lew of Chelmsford was a 

veteran of the French and Indian War and was 32 years old when he fought at Bunker Hill in 

June 1775 in Captain John Ford’s company, the Twenty-seventh Massachusetts Regiment. Lew 

also marched to Ticonderoga and served a full seven years in the Continental Army as a frontline soldier, fifer, and drummer. The Kaplans added the legend that he later organized a “guerilla 

band” known as Lew’s men. Dorman, Twenty Families of Color, 278, has added somewhat more 

detail: Barzillai Lew served in the French and Indian War in its “final phases,” from 10 March to 

1 December 1760, and was “probably present” at the British capture of Montreal. He returned to 

Chelmsford and was definitely in that town between 1772 and 1776, when he served in 

Chelmsford’s Seventh Middlesex Militia in Capt. John Ford’s company as both a fifer and a 

cooper, from 6 May to 1 August 1775. Citing William C. Nell’s Colored Patriots of the 

American Revolution, Dorman adds that Lew was present at the Battle of Bunker Hill as a fifer. 

Lew was also at Cambridge between January and April 1776 and took part in the Ticonderoga 

campaign of July-December 1776. He was discharged at Albany on 1 January 1777 but enlisted 

again as a fifer and served briefly. Lew returned to Dracut and worked as a cooper. He and his 

wife Dinah Bowman Lew had twelve children. See also Martha Mayo, Profiles in Courage: 

African-Americans in Lowell (exhibition brochure, Center for Lowell History, University of 

Massachusetts Lowell, 1993) 

94. Dorman, Twenty Families, 278. Dorman notes that Peter Freeman’s death record lists him as 

a widowed porter, but no Massachusetts marriage record has been found. On 23 January 1866 

Freeman sold the property to John P. Coburn for $75, and Coburn assumed a mortgage of $1,600 

on the property. 

95. Putnam’s advertisement first appears in the Liberator, 10 March1832, issue, where his name 

in bold type is spelled Putman; 2 Bromfield is described therein as “the new building.” The ad 

ran continuously through October 1832. Terranova has located the ten-year lease Putnam and 

Clark signed for the 14 School Street shop, dated 6 January 1837, to begin 15 January; see SCD 

416:111v. 

96. Liberator, 5 November 1831, 179; “A Token of Gratitude,” ibid., 13 April 1833, 58. Those 

present at Putnam’s house were Samuel Snowden, Primus Hall, Putnam, Peter Howard, Charles 

Caples, William Brown, John B. Pero, John T. Hilton, George W. Thompson, J. [I?] Silver [John 

or Joseph], Lewis York, J. Lennox of Watertown, P. (probably a typographical error; should be 

F. for Francis) Standing, Thomas Cole, Charles L. Remond of Salem, Emiliano F. B. Mundrucu, 

and Henry Thacker. 

97. Liberator, 19 March 1833. On Stewart’s views in this regard, see “An Address Delivered at 

the Masonic Hall,” Liberator, 2 March 1833. 

98. James O. and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians, 32. Horton and Horton, ibid., 66, state that 

Jane Putnam assisted the Boston Vigilance Committee, but I have not found her name among 

those records. In this connection it is worth pointing out that the George Putnam of Belknap 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 150

 

Street and later of Salem is not the George W. Putnam who corresponded with Wilbur Siebert in 

1893 about Underground Railroad activity in and around Boston and Lynn. George W. Putnam 

was white, living in Lynn in 1850, and was listed in the federal census in Lynn that year as age 

38 and a painter; he was enumerated not far from the abolitionist Jesse Hutchinson. Joseph 

Putnam, the brother of George Putnam of Belknap Street, married Caroline Remond, the sister of 

black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond of Salem, which may explain in part the family’s move 

to Salem. See Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (New York: 

Oxford University Press, 1988), 20. 

99. Johnson quoted in Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class

(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 222. 

100. James O. and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians, 44. 

101. Horton, Black Bostonians, 44 n. 24 cites only the 1845 Boston Baptist Association minutes; 

the authors’ assumption is that Jackson’s can have been the only source for the statements about 

Johnson’s fugitive status. E. F., which in some instances looks like E. T. in Jackson’s hand, does 

not appear in Boston directories between 1850 and 1860. 

102. Reprinted in Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class

(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 221-23. 

103. Evelina Bell Johnson’s account, told to her daughter Adelaide Johnson Trusty, states that 

Evelina was one of three daughters—herself, who married Robert Johnson; Elizabeth, who 

married Henry Williams; and Rebecca, who married William Taylor—and two sons, Ludwell 

and Albert, of Prudence Nelson and James Bell of Washington, D. C. The letters between John 

A. Andrew and Sumner—dated 22 January and 3 August 1852; 22, 24, and 31 January; 2, 16, 19, 

23 February; and 3 and 10 March 1855—mention Prue Bell; her daughter Elizabeth, married to 

Seth Botts who is later identified as Henry Williams, “that being the name he wears in Boston, 

having adopted it, when he was a fugitive”; her daughter Evelina; and sons Jesse, Albert, and 

Ludwill, who was identified as “the youngest boy.” Seth’s and Elizabeth’s children, who came 

with their mother to Boston in March 1855, were identified on 22 January 1855 as Oscar, age 

ten; Mary Millburn, age seven; and Adelaide Rebecca, age six. The middle child’s name is 

puzzling, because William Still, The Underground Railroad (1871; reprint, Chicago: Johnson 

Publishing Company, 1970),583-85, identifies an adult woman having this exact name in slavery 

having come to Boston in 1858. 

104. Quoted in Cromwell, Other Brahmins, 222; 

105. Horton, Black Bostonians, 44, 64, 87. 

106. Quoted in Cromwell, Other Brahmins, 222. This excerpt must refer the attack on Garrison 

after the 14 October 1835 first anniversary meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. 

See Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: 

St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 200-206. Mayer’s account of this mob action, the only time Garrison is 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 151

 

known to have been assaulted by a mob in Boston, does not attribute any activity to men of color 

in Garrison’s rescue except an unidentified hack driver who took Garrison from Mayor Theodore 

Lyman’s office by a circuitous route to the Charles Street jail. Garrison’s rescuers from the 

Wilson’s Lane carpenter shop where he had been tied up were two truckmen, Daniel and Buff 

Cooley, presumably white because they have not been found in any census or directory to be of 

African descent. However, the incident needs further research because of the veracity of the rest 

of Evelina Johnson’s account. Terranova was visited some years ago by two sisters whose greatgrandfather was Robert Johnson Sr.; a story passed down in their family has it that Garrison took 

refuge under a trap door in Johnson’s 16 Belknap Street house. 

107. Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: The History of the 54th Regiment of 

Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863-1865. (1894; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 

12-13. Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace, 73-74, 75 n.1, states that recruiting for the Fifty-fourth 

began earlier that day in the midst of the West End’s “Negro colony” at the corner of Cambridge 

and North Russell Street, on the site that was occupied in 1914 by Negro Odd Fellows Hall. On 

28 May the Fifty-fourth Regiment marched through Boston and left for the South; then the 55th

MA was raised and left on 21 July. After that the third group of African American troops from 

Massachusetts, the Third Cavalry, was recruited, and “took the field.” Daniels did not cover the 

participation of men of color in the U.S. Navy. 

108. Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, 12-13, 406, 411, 413; see the verse he wrote in jail on 416-

418 and his letter, published originally in the Liberator, 7 October 1864, 418-19. Many thanks 

to Carl J. Cruz of New Bedford for providing a photocopy of the relevant page of Massachusetts 

Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines in the Civil War (Norwood, Mass.: Norwood Press, 1931-35) 

4:741, which provides both the place and date of Johnson’s death, his occupation at time of 

enlistment, date of enlistment, date of muster, and date and place of capture. That Johnson was 

then married is surmised from the fact that a pension file exists for Robert Johnson Jr., Company 

F, Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry, filed by his widow Helen M. Johnson on 25 May 1865, 

(application 95126, certificate 75183), and a claim was also filed by a minor, Helen M. Munroe 

(marked “Gdn,” presumably for “guardian,” on the index card) on 24 August 1874 (application 

217183, certificate 167902). 

109. See Cromwell, Other Brahmins, 222, and Massachusetts Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines, 

4:741.The 1868 directory lists a Henry W. Johnson, clerk, boarding at 73 Joy Street; the 1873 

directory lists a man of the same name and occupation in a house at 40 1⁄2 Grove Street, also in 

the sixth ward. In 1883 two Henry W. Johnsons are listed, both of them clerks, one at a house at 

31 Havre Street and the other boarding at Glen Road in Jamaica Plain. In 1893 one Henry W. 

Johnson is listed, a clerk working at 142 Atlantic Avenue and living at 25 White Street in East 

Boston. Boston death records were not checked. 

110. The date of this construction is pinpointed in a deed between Pitts and his neighbor George 

Putnam; thanks to Terranova for this information. 

111. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., has noted that when the British fleet left Boston on 17 March “three 

thousand Boston Tories sailed away with them.” See “A Brief History of Boston,” in Alex 

Krieger and David Cobb with Amy Turner, eds. Mapping Boston (Boston: MIT Press for the 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 152

 

Muriel G. and Norman B. Leventhal Family Foundation, 1999), 6. 

112. On Trinity, the third Anglican parish in Boston, see Whitehill, Boston, 40-41. The data on 

the Vassalls is from Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630-1800. 

113. See the Liberator, 4 August 1832, 122, which lists the founders. At that date the newspaper 

noted the Darby Vassal was one of only five founders still living. 

114. See Shoenfeld, “Applications and Admissions,” NEHGR 155 (October 2001): 401, 401 n. 

73, n. 74:“MRS. ANNE REBECCA YORK. 25th Oct. 1869. 78 yrs. Has a settlement in Boston where 

she has lived most of her life. Her husband, a worthy man, having died, she went for a time to 

California; there she married again; but the husband proved worthless, made way with her little 

property, & she returned to Boston; has supported herself since by cooking & sewing. She is still 

very active and capable, but too old to live alone earning her living. The Overseers of the poor 

will pay to the Treasurer of the Home, her allotment from the City, 2 dolls. per month; Mrs. 

Horace Gray $1 per month, & Trinity Church $2.// May 2nd 1870. Mrs. York could not be 

brought to understand she could render by sewing, or other work, was due to the Home; though 

this was explained to her before entering, and often afterwards. Her disposition would not brook 

subordination to necessary rule; & it was with great satisfaction that the Managers accepted her 

proposal to leave the Institution, & provide for herself.” 401 n. 73 states that she was a laundress 

living on Belknap St. in 1837 and a dressmaker in San Francisco in 1858; 401 n. 74 states, from 

the home’s 1870 annual report, that Mrs. York “was still too young and active to find in the 

comforts of the Home a sufficient compensation for the sacrifice of her own independent 

earnings. She left us in the spring, after a stay of about six months, with the understanding that, 

should she become too infirm to provide for herself, she might again apply for admission to the 

Home. We hear, that with some assistance from friends, she has been able to keep herself 

comfortable up to this time.” Lewis York was no longer listed in Boston directories after 1833. 

115. A copy of this plan was filed 11 January 1900 in the land registration office with SCD 

2667:257. 

116. Michael Terranova’s work in Boston tax records has established these occupants at 20 

Belknap: tailor William Guion Nell (1822-23), barber James G. Barbadoes (1824-26), barber 

William J. Wilson (1826), mariner and laborer William Brown (1824-25), coachman Francis 

Cummings (1827-28), clergyman Stephen Dutton (1829-30), Moses Ferguson (1830-31), barber 

James Burr (1831-32, 1835), mariner John M. Bell (1835), laborer Alfred Williams (1836), and 

clergyman Joseph Lewis (1839). The black mariner John Henry was a tenant there beginning in 

1831-32 and bought the dwelling from Samuel H. Babcock in 1835; he and Lewis were the sole 

tenants thereafter through 1849. City directories add a few more—William Turner, a mariner, in 

1841, and Elizabeth Johnson, in 1847—living at this address, but little is know about any of 

them. 

117. See Charles Emery Stevens, Anthony Burns: A History (Boston: John P. Jewell & Co, 

1856), and Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in 

Emerson’s Boston. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 153

 

118. See Von Frank, Trials of Anthony Burns, 1-2, 84-90, and Robert L. Hall, “Massachusetts 

Abolitionists Document the Slave Experience,” in Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience, 91-92. 

119. The only Crumpler listed in Boston directories is an Arthur Crumpler, shown as a porter at 

122 Tremont Street in 1878 and 1883 and in the same occupation in 1888 but with no place of 

work indicated that year. This Crumpler boarded at 4 Hamilton place in 1878, had a house at 

Readville in 1883, and was living at 1 Sears place in 1888. 

120. Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty, 25-28. In 1866 Octavia Grimes, the wife of Rev. 

Leonard Grimes, was discovered to be charging five dollars of each Boston employer with whom 

the freed people were placed and to be keeping the fee rather than forwarding it to the 

Freedman’s Bureau; in addition, the white matron of the Howard Street School in Cambridge 

was accused of mistreating the Virginians and of being “bent on making money off freed people 

and [caring] . . . nothing for their welfare” (28). Such abuses, Pleck has stated, compelled the 

bureau to disband the program in 1868. 

121. George W. Forbes, “Biographical Sketches of Eminent Negroes” (Mimeo Typescript, 

Boston Public Library, Ms. AM. 282) and Robert P. Smith, “William Cooper Nell: Crusading 

Black Abolitionist,” Journal of Negro History 55 (July 1970), state that William G. Nell was free 

man of color and a tailor from Charleston, S. C., who was working as a ship’s steward aboard the 

merchant vessel General Gadsden in 1812 when the British warship Recruit chased it, apparently 

all the way to Boston Harbor. The crew of the Gadsden is said somehow to have been able to 

escape and take refuge in Boston. James Oliver Horton, “Generations of Protest: Black Families 

and Social Reform in Ante-Bellum Boston.” New England Quarterly 49, 2 (June 1976): 249-50, 

249 n. 15, citing this version of story, states rather that Nell was captured with the Gadsden crew 

by British forces and spent time in a British brig as prisoner; when he was freed he traveled to 

Boston and was working there as tailor by 1817. Both accounts state that he met his wife Louisa 

in Brookline and married in the North. 

122. Tax records show Henry as owner of 20 Belknap in 1835 and 1836, and the 26 February 

1835 surveyor’s plan registered with Coffin Pitts’ deed for 18 Belknap in March 1835 identifies 

the house just south as “brick house of John Henry.” However, Terranova points out, SCD 

419:67, the property transfer from Samuel H. Babcock to John Henry, is dated 21 April 1837, 

which suggests a less formal transfer of ownership may have taken place between the two before 

1837. Terranova posits that Babcock may have negotiated a lease with Henry that permitted him 

to collect taxes from other tenants in the house but required him to pay taxes on the property 

from 1835 until the formal transfer of ownership in 1837. John Henry’s daughter Rachel Only 

sold the property to Ann Lynch on 21 August 1865 (SCD 865:107). 

123. Hinks, To Awaken, 67; Liberator, 13 April 1833; Clare Taylor, Women of the Anti-Slavery 

Movement: The Weston Sisters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1995), 30-41. John B. Pero 

disappeared from Boston directories after the 1847 edition. In 1848 a Martha A. Pero is listed as 

“widow” and living in a house on Cottage Street in East Boston. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 154

 

124. Liberator, 28 May 1831. 

125. There must have been a hotel or popular eating house at this address, for six men of color 

are listed as waiters, hairdressers, or bootblacks there in the 1836 and 1841 city directories. 

Bostonian Society reference librarians have been unable to pinpoint a specific business at this 

address in those years, however. 

126. On the tendency of slave owners to give Africans classical names such as Caesar, Cato, 

Pompey, and Scipio, see Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black 

Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 81. On naming patterns 

among African Americans, see also J. L. Dillard, Black Names, vol. 13 of Contributions to the 

Sociology of Language, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (The Hague: Mouton, 1976); John Thornton, 

“Central African Names and African-American Naming Patterns,” William and Mary Quarterly, 

3d ser., 50, 4 (October 1993), and Lorenzo J. Greene, “The New England Negro as Seen in 

Advertisements for Runaway Slaves,” Journal of Negro History 29, 2 (April 1944). 

127. Shoenfeld, “Applications and Admissions to the Home for Aged Colored Women in 

Boston, 1860-1887,” NEHGR 156 (January 2002): 63-64. 

128. See Whitehill, Boston, 50, and “A Boston Chronology,” in Krieger and Cobb with Turner, 

eds., Mapping Boston, 243. Thanks to Michael Terranova for these citations on the “brick only” 

rule. 

129. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 November 2002. Terranova notes that other examples of 

this style are found on Joy Court, Holmes Alley, and on the north side of Pinkney Street. 

130. Memorandum attached to Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 3. 

131. Liberator 27 July 1833, 119. City directories in these years often listed occupants of 3 

Smith Court as living at either rear 25 or rear 29 Belknap Street. 

132. Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace, 58. Daniels stated that the shop was the site of “secret 

councils, to devise ways and means of protection and general assistance” on the Underground 

Railroad; these councils, he continued, “were most frequently held at the shops or homes of 

Negroes. A barber shop of one Peter Howard, situated at the corner of Cambridge and Irving 

Streets, in the West End, was an early rendezvous.” The Howard shop was at an unnumbered 

location on Cambridge street in city directories from 1813 to 1829, listed at 8 Cambridge in 

1830, and listed thereafter at 82 Cambridge Street. More research needs to be done in tax records 

on this and other African American businesses on Cambridge street. 

133. The best account of the Minkins affair is Collison, Shadrach Minkins, 122-33. 

134. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac, “Introduction,” in Dorothy Porter 

Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell, Nineteenth-Century African 

American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist: Selected Writings, 1832-1874 (Baltimore: Black 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 155

 

Classics Press, 2002), states that Nell was born “on Beacon Hill . . . December 20, 1816, at 64 

Kendall Street, Boston,” and cites for this statement page 10 of Nell’s Colored Patriots of the 

American Revolution but allows that that “(street name [is] not identified)” in that source. Nell 

stated on page 10 of Colored Patriots, “I was born on Beacon Hill, and from early childhood, 

have loved to visit the Eastern wing of the State House, and read the four stones taken from the 

monument that once towered from its summit.” Kendall Street in Boston is not on Beacon Hill; 

according to the list of streets maintained by the Boston city archives, it did not exist until 1845 

and was not accepted until 1860. Kendall Street is in ward 11 and runs from Shawmut Avenue to 

Tremont Street. Nell died at 64 Kendall Street in 1874. 

135. See “Address of Mr. Nell” in Proceedings: Agreeably to Previous Notice. By 1841 Battiste 

was running a boardinghouse and lived in Sun court, which ran from North Square to Ann Street. 

Nancy Woodson might have been the daughter of George Street bootblack and blacking maker 

Joseph Woodson. 

136. On Nell’s early activity, see Liberator, 21 January 1832; 3 October 1832; 3 January 1833; 

and 30 March 1833; see also Horton, “Generations of Protest,” 251-52. Horton states that Nell’s 

October 1833 address at the second anniversary of Juvenile Garrison Independent Society was 

published in the New England Telegraph. 

137. For examples of the placement advertisements Nell ran in the Liberator, see Dorothy Porter 

Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac, eds.,William Cooper Nell, Nineteenth-Century African 

American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist: Selected Writings, 1832-1874 (Baltimore: Black 

Classics Press, 2002), 15-16. 

138. Wesley and Uzelac, eds.,William Cooper Nell, 23-24. Nell’s sister Frances must have 

accompanied him to Rochester, for in Rochester she married the barber Benjamin Frances 

Cleggett. She, if not her husband, may have resettled in Boston by 1855. See Kathryn Grover, 

Make a Way Somehow: African Americans in a Northern Community (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse 

University Press, 1994), 178-79, 226, on Nell’s work for Douglass and the presence of him and 

his sister in Rochester. John V. DeGrasse’s medical account book is the source of our contention 

that Frances Nell Cleggett was living in Boston by 1855. On 3 March 1855 DeGrasse vaccinated 

a child for “Mrs. Clegget,” living at 1 Southac Court. The sister of both William C. and Frances 

Nell, Louisa Nell, had married Ira Smith Gray, who was living close by on Southac Street in the 

1850s. See the DeGrasse-Howard Papers, box 1, folder 2. The inside flyleaf reads, “Dr. John V. 

DeGrasse/Jan. 10th 1853./Boston/Office no. 17 Poplar St,” which establishes his office location, 

but the entries actually begin 25 October 1852 and end 25 June 1855. They are followed by an 

alphabetical listing of patients, most of them with addresses, and then by a continuation of 

accounts organized by patients’ names; these accounts continue through June 1857. 

139. Wesley, “Introduction,” in Wesley and Uzelac, eds., William C. Nell, 46-47; they note that 

the federal law (document #458) “to remove all disqualification of color in carrying the mails” 

did not pass the 37th Congress 2d sess. S. 237 until 19 December 1864, after Nell became a clerk; 

Nell’s letter to Garrison is dated 9 April 1873. 

140. See Dorman, Twenty Families of Color, 457-58, for varying reports on the Weeden 
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brothers’ father. See also Daniel Weeden Jr., Jamestown, R.I., manumission of slave Charles, 10 

September 1794, and manumission certificates for ten slaves, 10 March 1775, Rhode Island 

Monthly Meeting slave manumissions, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence. 

141. On the New England Freedom Association, see James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, 

“The Affirmation of Manhood: Black Garrisonians in Antebellum Boston,” in Jacobs, ed., 

Courage and Conscience, 144. In their introduction to William Cooper Nell, 18, Wesley and 

Uzelac state that the association was founded in 1843, though in “Integration versus Separatism: 

William Cooper Nell’s Role in the Struggle for Equality,” in Jacobs, ed., Courage and 

Conscience, 215, Wesley stated the date of formation as 1842. See Wesley and Uzelac, eds., 

William Cooper Nell, 146-47, for a reprint of “Meeting of the New England Freedom 

Association, Liberator, 12 December 1845, which lists the officers and directors of the group. 

142. “First of August in Boston,” Liberator, 7 August 1846, 127. Thanks to Joan Beaubian and 

Marlo Ramos for locating this article for us. 

143. Weeden and William Wells Brown spoke at a Boston colored citizens meeting on 18 

February 1848 about such an organization. See the Liberator, 27 July 1849, about the 

presentation to Garrison. 

144. See Dorman, Twenty Families of Color, 457 ff. 

145. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 28, has dated it to 1815-28. 

146. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 November 2002, notes that Phinney sold several of these 

lots to African American men described as mariners as well as to the Sons of the African 

Society. On 9 July 1799 Phinney also purchased from Scipio Dalton one hundred acres in 

Passamaquody Bay in Maine; see SCD 192:93. 

147. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 28-30, citing Suffolk County 

Deeds 193:222 and 192:192. 

148. Rosebrock has stated that Wilcox sold his property for $600 to Samuel D. Parker “still 

apparently without a building on it,” in 1815 (SCD 249:117), but this seems unlikely to us. 

149. On this deed, SCD 249:117, Wilcox’s wife Chloe (or Cloey) signed with her mark. 

150. See Wiggins, ed. Captain Paul Cuffe’s Logs and Letters, 328-29, for a transcription of the 

1815 letter to Locke. Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, 161, contains a reproduction of the 

Traveller’s passenger list, the original of which is in the Manuscripts Division, New Bedford 

Free Public Library. 

151. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 28-30, citing SCD 328:236 and 

600:36. Rosebrock notes that the 1874 G. M. Hopkins Atlas of Boston incorrectly inscribed the 

properties on Smith Court. It labeled the west end of 3 Smith Court as #5 and as being owned by 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 157

 

the heirs of George Washington. In fact #5 is the house just west of 3, which is the house owned 

by Washington’s heirs. Scott & Taylor owned 3 Smith Court. , Joseph Scarlett owned the house 

next to Holmes Alley, #7 Smith Court, and the house in back of it (now #7A); he did not own #5, 

as the map inscription has it. 

152. Benjamin F. Washington is listed as a florist working and living on Pleasant Street in A. B. 

Sparrow, comp., The Stoughton Directory, 1902-3 (n.p.: Newton Journal Publishing Co., 1902). 

R. Adelaide Washington is shown as a florist living and working at 946 Pleasant Street in 

Directory of Stoughton Massachusetts 1921-2 (Boston: A. E. Foss Co., 1921). 

153. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 25-28. The deed between Phinney 

and Guss is SCD 192:135. Guss is listed as a black laborer in Mount Oreb in the Taking Book 

for 1798; see ibid., 26. Two deeds exist between Guss and John Williams: on 21 November 

1798 he and his wife Nancy deeded to Williams his rights to a house “on land the property of 

James and Jeremiah Allen, which land is bounded on Buttolph St. and Southack St. a mutual 

release” (SCD 190:269), and the next day Guss appears to have purchased the property back 

from Williams with the land (SCD 190:269). His surname is spelled “Gust” in the 1810 federal 

census. 

154. At the time of his death in early February 1844 John Scarlett also owned land and a house at 

9 South May Street, one-seventh of a house and land at 710 Washington Street, and one-fifth of a 

house and land at 17 Belknap Street, which, with the 11 South May Street property, were 

collectively worth $1,264.69 when outstanding mortgages were subtracted from their appraised 

value. The Belknap Street property was described as “one undivided fifth part of a certain half 

part of a wooden dwelling house” on a passageway, probably Smith Place. See Carol Buchalter 

Stapp, “Afro-Americans in Antebellum Boston: An Analysis of Probate Records” (Ph.D. diss., 

The George Washington University, 1990), 2: 598. 

155. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 25-28, citing SCD 193:223, and 

memo to Rushing and Bower, 2. This was probably the Richard Johnson whom William C. Nell 

later described in his Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 90-91, who was indeed a 

mariner and had been taken prisoner for six months during the War of 1812. But Johnson was 

better known as a trader and abolitionist in New Bedford; in 1850 he was the most affluent man 

of color in the city. With another mariner and black activist, William Vincent, he was the first 

Liberator agent in New Bedford and a subscriber from the first issue. Johnson was among those 

men of color who attended the 1831 meeting in Boston to discuss the formation of a college for 

people of color in the United States. 

156. See Von Frank, Trials of Anthony Burns, 165-66. 

157. A habbitmaker is a tailor who, in strict terms, makes loose-fitting garments for the clergy. 

Terranova, e-mail to authors, 16 November 2002. This was the school Primus Hall founded in 

1798 and initially conducted in his home on Southac Street. this school in 1798, and initially it 

had been held in his home. According to an 1849 publication on Boston’s public schools, it 

moved to a location described as “a carpenter's shop...adjoining the old church,” until space for it 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 158

 

was completed on the ground floor next door in 1808. See Dorothy Porter Wesley, “Integration 

versus Separatism: William Cooper Nell’s Role in the Struggle for Equality,” in Jacobs, ed., 

Courage and Conscience, 209, which reproduces an engraving of the Smith School with its 

history below. 

158. Terranova, e-mail to Grover, 21 July 2002, points out that Raillion did not actually sell his 

land for the Smith School; his creditors apparently took the land in a settlement and passed it on 

to Joseph Powars, who rented a tenement on the corner. Decades later Powars’s, heir, his 

daughter Joanna, sold it to the city of Boston. Terranova further suggests that William Henry 

probably named his son William Augustin after Augustin Raillion. The upper floors of the 

building on the site of the Smith School, whose first floor was a grocery for many years, were 

rented to people of color, as was the building next south of it on Belknap Street before it was 

razed and rebuilt as a stable. Both were owned by Nancy Collins, “spinster,” whose children 

were fathered by Augustin Raillion. 

159. Memorandum in Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block.” Henry’s 16 

November 1835 inventory is in Suffolk County Probate Records #31072. The engraved view is a 

woodcut made in 1851 that primarily depicts the African Meeting House but shows at far right a 

small frame house where William Henry’s house would have been. It is shown in this view as 

one and a half stories with its gable end to the street and a center chimney. See ibid., 22. 

160. Bower, “African Meeting House,” 9, 87, 141. Edward W. Gordon, “Beacon Hill/North 

Slope Cultural Resources Area Survey” (Final Report, Massachusetts Historical Commission, 26 

November 2001), unpaginated, states that the Flemish-bond brickwork on the second story of 2 

Smith Court suggests a construction date earlier than1853, “perhaps as early as the late 1810s.” 

However, our analysis and Terranova’s finds the brickwork pattern more a variation of 

American, or common, bond rather than Flemish. 

161. They were married by Rev. Francis A. Matignon; see Town Records 30:268. 

162. Bower, “African Meeting House,” 53-54. 

163. Bower, “African Meeting House,” 141. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street 

Block,” 22, states that the house facing Smith Court was originally two stories high. The 1884 

information derives from a photograph in the collections of the Society for the Preservation of 

New England Antiquities, 141 Cambridge Street, Boston. 

164. The biographical background on Abbott comes from Gordon, “North Slope Survey.” 

165. Bower, “African Meeting House,” 7, 59. 

166. The first black Baptist church was founded in Savannah, Ga., in 1779, and there were 

African American churches in Petersburg, Richmond, and Wmsburg before 1785. But none of 

the original church structures of these congregations have survived. The authors contacted Leslie 

Hunt, Manuscripts Archivist at the Balch Institute, Philadephia; Jewell Anderson Dalrymple, 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 159

 

Reference Coordinator, Georgia Historical Society; Michael Roudette, Reference Librarian, 

Schomburg Library, New York City; Donald Yacovone, Massachusetts Historical Society; Roy 

Finkenbine, Assistant Professor of History, University of Detroit; Richard K. Dozier, Professor 

of Architecture, Florida A & M; the Society of Architectural Historians through its listserv; John 

Michael Vlach, Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, George Washington 

University; Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, 

University of California, Berkeley; Martha J. McNamara, Associate Professor, Department of 

History, University of Maine; and Marilyn Richardson, Former Curator, Museum of AfroAmerican History (1989-1991), but no one has been able to document an earlier structure built 

for an African American congregation in the United States. 

167. George A. Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 

1750-1860 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 267. 

168. The deed between Dalton and Phinney is dated 30 March 1799 and is SCD 191:199; 

according to Terranova, the deeds between Scipio Dalton and Cromwell Barnes are dated 11 

March 1800 (SCD 194:86, 194:90). Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 

cited an 1810 deed from Charles Cushing to Dalton (SCD 231:255), but Terranova states that 

this is apparently a release of an earlier mortgage from Dalton to Cushing. 

169. William C. Nell, “History of the Belknap street Baptist Church,” Liberator, 19 November 

1858, quoted in Bower, “African Meeting House,” Appendix I: 1-2; see also 46, 57. 

170. Levesque, Black Boston, 266, 268. 

171. Levesque, Black Boston, 268, 294 n. 7, states that Nell, in his 1858 “synoptical history” in 

the Liberator, named Dalton, Fairfield, Broomfield, Bailey, Winslow, Basset, and Robbins, but, 

strangely, did not mention either Paul or Cato Gardner, who is believed to have been the primary 

fund raiser in the African American community. Dalton asked to be dismissed from the First 

Baptist Church, but records do not show such a request from Gardner, Levesque notes. In 

addition, when the African Meeting House’s seventy-two pews were put up for sale to raise 

money for construction, twenty-four were purchased. However, Levesque’s note does not make 

clear whether the names of pew purchasers are listed in any church records or any other source. 

172. Assessors’ records for Southac Street between 1835 and 1845 show that both Ward Jackson 

and Daniel Wild owned dwellings in which African Americans were tenants; these longstanding 

connections deserve further research. 

173. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 15-17; Bower, “African Meeting 

House,” Appendix; Barbara Pearson, “Historic Structures Report: African Meeting House” 

(Boston: Museum of Afro-American History, 1982). 

174. Shaw, Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, 269-71. On 17 November 

1811 Wild and Bentley discharged their interest in the property to “Deacon Samuel Jasper or 

Deacons of the African Baptist Church and their successors in office . . . in trust for the Baptist 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 160

 

Church.” Thanks to Michael Terranova for this information (SCD 264:18). 

175. Pearson “Historic Structures Report,” citing Frederick C. Detwiller, “African Meeting 

House, Smith Court, Boston: An Architectural/Historical Analysis” (Boston: Society for the 

Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1975). Both Bower, “African Meeting House,” 148-

49, and Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 20, reiterate this hypothesis. 

Most of these authors suggest that Benjamin himself may have designed the African Meeting 

House. 

176. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 10, 20; Thomas quoted in the 

Ruffin Papers, Howard University Library, and quoted in Cromwell, Other Brahmins, 36-37. 

177. See Shaw, Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, 269-70, where he states 

Saunders was in the employ of Emperor Christophe (who committed suicide in 1820), and J. 

Marcus Mitchell, “The Paul Family,” Old-Time New England 53, 3 (Winter 1973): 73-77. For 

church membership figures, see Levesque, Black Boston, 271. 

178. Levesque, Black Boston, 273-74; Hinks, To Awaken, 75, 101-2; A Narrative of the 

Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (Philadelphia: Merrihew & 

Gunn, 1838), 83. 

179. This discussion is taken from Levesque, Black Boston, 271-78. The editorial in New 

England Spectator was entitled “Errors of Influential Men” and appeared in the 18 October 1837 

issue; it is reprinted in ibid., 277. Garrison’s reply was published in Liberator, 27 October 1837, 

and is reprinted in ibid., 278-79. 

180. SCD 435:171. 

181. Levesque, Black Boston, 279-83; Liberator, 10 August and 21 December 1838. 

182. Liberator, 15 September 1841; Mrs. E. Barney in Anne Warren Weston Papers, Boston 

Public Library; and Donald Jacobs, “A History of the Boston Negro from the Revolution to the 

Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1968) 147, 227, cited in Bower, “African Meeting 

House,” appendix. 

183. The “New Years Evening” date appears in the Liberator 2, 1, 7 January 1832, 3. The 

statement that the New England Anti-Slavery Society was founded on 6 January 1832 and was 

organized in the basement of the African Meeting House is found in a retrospective article from 

the Liberator by William C. Nell, whose accounts we have found not always accurate. We have 

yet to check the letters of those who attended this organizational meeting to verify Nell’s 

statement. 

184. Another African American, Charlotte Goddard is listed in the Boston directory of 1827 as 

running a boardinghouse on 85 Broad Street, not far from Ann Street, and in 1836 as running a 

shop next door to William Goddard’s boardinghouse of 1830, at 147 Ann Street. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 161

 

185. Born in Lunenberg, Adeline Faggins died in 1861 at the age of 62 years and 2 months in 

Cambridge, where she was living with her son William. Skeene was her second husband, whom 

she married at the Charles Street Baptist Church. Her marriage record lists her maiden name as 

Faguins; her first husband was Daniel Low. See the New England Historical Genealogical 

Register 88 (1934): 334. Her entry in Francis Jackson’s Boston Vigilance Committee Treasurers 

Accounts is dated 16 July 1857, when she was living at 9 Southac Place. Southac Place is only 

two doors down from the Hayden house at 66 Southac. It is now a parking lot behind 70-76 

Phillips (formerly Southac) Street. 

186. See Barbara Yocum, “Revised Draft Historic Structure Report: Smith School House, 

Boston African American National Historic Site, Boston Massachusetts” (Boston: National Park 

Service, North Atlantic Regional Office, 1992), for a far more detailed treatment of this site. 

187. Just south of the Smith School site, on a lot owned by Nancy Collins, “Mrs. Jefferson & 

others” (no doubt Jane Jefferson, probably the widow of laborer Thomas Jefferson) were tenants 

in 1827. In 1831, the laborers Robert Morris and Robert Mitchell and the tailor Joseph J. 

Williams were tenants there. By 1835 the structure was converted into a stable. 

188. William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in 

Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 45, 193 

n. 40; Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, 209. 

189. “Queries Respecting the Slavery and Emancipating of Negroes in Massachusetts, Proposed 

by the Hon. Judge Tucker of Virginia, and Answered by the Rev. Dr. Belknap,” Collections of 

the Massachusetts Historical Society, for the Year 1795 (reprint, Chicago: Johnson Reprint 

Corporation, 1968) 4: 207-8. 

190. See Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, 66-67. Other sources have stated that Primus 

Hall’s home was at the northeast corner of West Cedar and Revere streets, but according to 

Terranova’s analysis of deeds and tax records it was at 2 Wilberforce Place, now Primus 

Avenue, a two-story frame double house. Hall’s soapworks must also have been in this court. 

191. Leslie A. Mead, “Intensive Archaeological Survey at the Smith School House at Boston 

African American National Historic Site, Boston, Massachusetts” (Lowell, Mass.: National Park 

Service Building Conservation Branch, 27 March 1995), 8-9. 

192. Bower, “African Meeting House,” 57-58; Pearson, “Historic Structures Report,” 12. 

193. Joseph M. Wightman, comp., Annals of the Boston Primary School Committee from Its 

First Establishment in 1818 to Its Dissolution in 1855 (Boston: George C. Rand & Avery, city 

printers, 1860). 

194. The stock was thirty shares of the Newburyport Turnpike; twenty shares in Second New 

Hampshire Turnpike; seventeen shares in the Kennebeck Bridge; five shares in the bridge at 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 162

 

Tiverton, R.I., and 5 in the “bathing House,” the location not stated. See Rev. Thaddeus Mason 

Harris, D.D., A Discourse delivered before the African Society in Boston, 15th of July, 1822, on 

the Anniversary Celebration of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 

1822). Elsewhere his date of death is put at 1822. 

195. Mead, “Intensive Archaeological Survey,” 9. 

196. The deed for the schoolhouse lot is SCD 32:128-29. The architect of the Abiel Smith School 

had not previously been identified and was discovered by accident by Grover while researching 

the Rotch-Jones-Duff House in New Bedford, long attributed to Upjohn, in the Upjohn 

Collection of Architectural Drawings by Richard, Richard Mitchell, and Hobart Upjohn at the 

Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. In Upjohn’s notebook (Z-4) 

labeled “Receipts of work for various clients while in Boston, 1834-39,” one of the first entries is 

for “Plans of African Schoolhouse.” The plans themselves are not in the Avery collection, nor 

are they in the Upjohn Papers at New-York Public Library. Many thanks to Janet S. Parks at 

Avery for pointing out the existence of this Boston client book to me. Upjohn designed the Smith 

School before he designed St. John’s Church in Bangor, Maine, in 1835, the plans for which are 

said to have helped earn him the commission for Trinity Church in New York City in 1839. 

197. Bowers, “African Meeting House,” 57-58, Appendix I:14. She notes that Nichols’s 29 

November 1837 bill asks “a further advance of $2000 on account of erection of the African 

School House in Belknap Street.” Nichols built 60 Temple Street, which is also on the north 

slope of Beacon Hill. 

198. See Liberator, 24 September 1831, and Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace, 446. The school 

that closed was presumably not the primary school whose creation had been recommended in 

1822; a primary school existed on Sun Court Place in 1847 when Sarah Roberts was testing the 

segregationist policies of the city’s school system. 

199. Only one other house on all of Beacon Hill—the Ditson House at 43 South Russell Street—

may be older. Chamberlain, Beacon Hill, conducted an extensive search both of the area and of 

deeds and tax records to determine the oldest extant dwelling, and Michael Terranova has 

revisited deed and tax records for several structures. One double house at 44-46 Temple Street 

was built for or by Bela Clap about 1787, still standing when Chamberlain was writing, was 

razed by St. John’s Church and is now a vacant lot. The original part of the Middleton and Lewis 

Glapion house may date to 1786-91. A frame house built by housewright Gershom Collier at the 

rear of Joy Court may date from 1795-97. The Ditson house at 43 South Russell Street may date 

from April 1797-October 1798. The frame houses at 3 and 7A Smith Court probably date from 

1799. See Chamberlain, Beacon Hill, 222, 238, 244. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 26 July and 18 

November 2002. 

200. The other black unit was the First Rhode Island, under the command of Col. Christopher 

Greene. See Kaplan, Black Presence, 66-67, and Nell, Colored Patriots, 24-25. 

201. Chamberlain, Beacon Hill, 223, notes that the 1798 tax was assessed “against every 

dwelling-house in the country, together with the land adjacent up to 2 acres in extent, in order to 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 163

 

raise $2 million for the Federal Treasury.” 

202. Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, 66-67. 

203. William C. Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 25-27, taken from an 

unknown recollection of Lydia Maria Child. 

204. Terranova, in several e-mails to the authors, has suggested that Chamberlain’s concern over 

a three-foot discrepancy in the measurements of the total frontage of the lot seems excessive; “it 

is not uncommon,” he writes, “for the total additive dimensions of a large property to drift over 

time as neighboring properties encroach,” and Chamberlain’s conclusion may have stemmed 

from one of two possible interpretations of an ambiguous document. Terranova also disagrees 

with Chamberlain’s statement that no part of the original 1786 structure built by Middleton and 

Glapion exists currently. 

205. Shoenfeld, “Applications and Admissions,” NEHGR 155 (July 2001): 256. 

206. This account comes almost entirely from Shoenfeld, “Applications and Admissions,” who 

generously shared with the authors the electronic version of her manuscript, which contains an 

index as well as appendices not published in the New England Historical Genealogical Register. 

207. Terranova’s research has established that 27 Myrtle, which stands on the twenty-four-foot 

width of the Belknap/Jenner/Carnes ropewalk, is part of a lot that the Rev. Thomas Paul owned 

briefly, having purchased it in August 1816 from the estate of Lazarus Lovell (SCD 252:139). In 

August 1817 Paul sold to William Brown (SCD 256:29) 20 feet 9 inches of this width, reserving 

a passageway on the east side a little more than three feet wide and 36 feet long, beyond which 

the lot widened to the full 24 feet. This passageway provided access to buildings in the rear of 27 

and 25 Myrtle Street. Brown defaulted on the mortgage for this property in October 1819 (SCD 

272:16). One of William Lloyd Garrison descendants told BOAF interpreter Horace Seldon in 

an interview that William Lloyd Garrison lodged or was sheltered at some point in a home at the 

rear of this passage on Myrtle Street, or of another passage just like it nearby in the same part of 

this block. 

208. see Liberator, 3 January and 25 March 1833. 

209. Shoenfeld, “Applications and Admissions,” NEHGR 155 (July 2001): 251-272; 155 

(October 2001): 397-413; 156 (January 2002): 62-85. 

210. Hafertepe, Baylor University, e-mail to authors, 10 September 2002. 

211. In a 20 November 2002 e-mail to the authors, Benjamin scholar Earle Shettleworth states, 

“Beginning with Walter H. Kilham’s Boston after Bulfinch (1946), several Boston architectural 

guide books and histories cite Asher Benjamin as the designer of the Charles Street 

Meetinghouse and make a link to Benjamin’s West Street Church of the same period. However, 

none of these references gives a specific period source.” 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 164

 

212. In the 1844 assessor’s records, Coburn is listed at the head of Southac Street for the first 

time, rather than at his earlier Coburn Court address, and his house is assessed at $3,500. The 

assessor noted in the remarks column that year, however, “Tax on $2000,” which must indicate 

the unfinished condition of the structure. In 1845 the house was assessed at $3,800, and 

throughout the 1840s to 1854 it was valued at $4,000. The building contracts are recorded in 

SCD 499:240. Thanks to Hafertepe, e-mail to authors, 10 September 2002, who told us of the 

existence of the building contract in Earle Shettleworth, “An Index to Boston Building Contract 

Recorded in the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds, 1840-44” (1996), 7. 

213. A John Coburn, no middle initial shown, is listed as a black householder in the 1840 

Boston census in a household of three persons—one male between 36 and 55 years old, one 

female in the same age bracket, and one male less than ten years old. None of the birthdates 

listed for John P. Coburn are ever the same, and if the adult male listed in 1840 were he, he 

would have been born in 1804, earlier than all other listings. There seems at least some 

possibility that he was related to the Revolutionary soldier Nell mentioned in Colored Patriots, 

21: “Besides SALEM, there were quite a number of colored soldiers at Bunker Hill. Among 

them, TITUS COBURN, ALEXANDER AMES, and BARZILAI LEW, all of Andover. . . each 

of whom received a pension.” But Nell, it seems, would have mentioned this Coburn’s relation to 

John P. Coburn if that were so, as he tended to mention such descendants in other cases. He also 

made a point of mentioning the Massasoit Guards, of which Coburn was cofounder, in the 

beginning of Colored Patriots. See Coburn’s biographical files for more speculation on his 

origins. Quintal, Colored Patriots, 85-87, noted Titus Coburn, born about 1745, who enlisted at 

Shirley and died at Valley Forge, “most probably of smallpox,” in April 1778, as well as a 

Sampson Coburn, who joined “the eight month’s service” from Cape Ann in 1775 as a corporal 

and served at Bunker Hill, and a Smith Coburn of Dracut, who served in the same regiment at 

Sampson at Bunker Hill and returned to Dracut, where he was in 1790. 

214. Whitehill, Topographical History of Boston, 258 n. 81. Whitehill did not point out that 

Southac and North Russell do not come to a corner, much less Southac and South Russell; the 

correspondent must have meant Southac (Phillips) and Irving. 

215. Similarly, we are unaware of the source for this statement in the BOAF walking tour 

brochure about Coburn and 2 Phillips Street: “Coburn made a fortune with this [gaming house] 

venture and channeled the money directly back into the community and into the movement. He 

donated heavily to the various civil rights and abolitionist groups in the city, the most important 

of which was the Boston Vigilance Committee.” Yet his name does not appear among donors 

either to the Vigilance Committee in general or to its Legal Committee. 

216. “Meeting of the New England Freedom Association,” Liberator, 2 December 1845, quoted 

in Wesley and Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell, 146-47; Liberator, 2 February 1845. Wesley, 

“Integration versus Separatism,” 215, states that the Freedom Association remained active until 

1846, when Boston’s white abolitionists began a Committee of Vigilance and the groups merged. 

217. Coburn’s name does not appear in Francis Jackson’s Boston Vigilance Committee accounts, 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 165

 

nor is it among the “Members of the Committee of Vigilance” that appears immediately after the 

title page in Austin Bearse, Reminiscences of Fugitive-Slave Law Days in Boston (Boston: 

Printed by Warren Richardson, 1880; reprint, New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 

1969). 

218. Collison, Shadrach Minkins, 142, 147-49. 

219. Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 11. The authors are also unaware of the 

source in BOAF’s tour brochure of the statement that the Massasoit Guards “patrolled the 

neighborhood and kept the slave catchers out. The Massasoit Guards set up an elaborate spy 

network and made it their primary concern to keep Black Bostonians and fugitive slaves safe 

from slave catchers and bounty hunters.” 

220. The meeting at Putnam’s home took place on 28 October 1831 and was followed by another 

at the African meetinghouse on 7 November 1831; see the Liberator, 5 November 1831. The 

farewell interview was reported in the Liberator, 13 April 1833. 

221. The earliest Southac Street assessors’ books we consulted systematically for this project 

were 1835. 

222. Sumner bequeathed his painting Miracle of the Slave, which he had acquired in Venice, to 

Smith. See Dictionary of American Negro Biography, s. v. “Smith, Joshua Bowen.” 

223. The Dictionary of American Negro Biography states that Smith worked with “Thacker” but 

does not give a first name; the Cambridge African American History Site on line provides 

somewhat more detail about Smith’s places of employ and gives Thacker’s initials as “H. R.” No 

firsthand accounts or records of Henry L. W. Thacker’s catering business have yet been 

discovered. 

224. Bearse, Reminiscences, 10-11. 

225. Bearse, Reminiscences, 12. 

226. The account books of physician John V. De Grasse record the presence of a Cecilia Howard 

at 5 Southac Street between 1852 and 1855. She is not listed in city directories during those 

years, and she does not appear to have been a member of the Howard family into which 

DeGrasse married. 

227. The deed between Coburn and Abraham Moore for 4 Coburn Court is SCD 386:233. from 

Abraham Moore for $1,500. 

228. “On Tuesday evening, April 5th by Rev. John T. Raymond, Mr. Ira Smith Gray to Miss 

Eliza Louisa Nell, all of Boston.” National Anti-Slavery Standard 2(46): 183, 3, cited in Wesley 

and Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell, 10 n. 21. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 166

 

229. The 1820 federal census for Portland lists a black householder named Ira Gray in a 

household of seven—three males under the age of fourteen, one female in that age bracket, one 

female between ages fourteen and twenty-six, and a male and female of child-bearing ages. 

230. Louisa Gray’s death record [375:352] shows her maiden name as Nell, her age as 67, the 

cause of death chro[nic] diarrhea (an ailment she had had for five years) and paralysis, which she 

had had for six months. Her residence was listed as “Austin Farm Kendall St.” Shoenfeld, 

“Applications and Admissions to HACW,” NEHGR 156 (Jan 2002): 78: “Application Sept. 1884 

for LOUISA GRAY, 30 or 32 Kendal St. (Lenox St.), Boston. Born & lived in Boston. Is 60 yrs. 

old. Mrs. Hale of 9 Arnold St. Boston, has been several times to see about getting her in. Is 

recommended by Mrs. __, 86 Pinckney St. [blank in manuscript; 86 Pinckney St. was the address 

of Mrs. G. O. Smith, who recommended Mary Russell for admission in Nov. 1883] & by Mrs. 

Smith.” 78 n. 226: “60 to 63-year-old literate mulatto Louisa Nell Gray was the sister of wellknown abolitionist William Cooper Nell and was born in Massachusetts. She lived in ward 6 in 

1855 and 1860 and, according to surviving correspondence with her friend, Amy Post (founder 

of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1843), also lived in Geneva, New York. Her 

letters indicate she was involved in the antislavery movement and that she was a member of a 

literary society in Boston in 1865. She worked as a housekeeper (Ripley, Black Abolitionist 

Papers [note 40], 16:425, 663).” 78 n. 228: “Her husband was Maine native, Ira S. Gray, who 

held jobs as a waiter and hairdresser, and joined his brother-in-law John P. Coburn in 

establishing a private gaming house.” She was almost certainly in Geneva because her sister 

Frances had married the black hairdresser Benjamin Franklin Cleggett, who had a shop there 

after having moved there from Rochester, New York; Frances Nell met Cleggett in Rochester 

and must have traveled there with her brother William when he went to work with Frederick 

Douglass on the North Star. A householder of color named Ira Gray, presumably the male listed 

at older than forty-five, is shown in the 1820 federal census in Portland, Maine, with two males 

under the age of fourteen and one female between the age of fourteen and twenty-six and another 

over the age of forty-five. This family is not shown again in Maine censuses. Benjamin F. and 

Frances Nell Cleggett’s son Benjamin F. Cleggett Jr. lived in Boston for a time in the 1870s. 

231. George W. Williams, History of the Twelfth Baptist Church, Boston, MA, from 1840-1874, 

with a Statement and Appeal in Behalf of the Church (Boston: James H. Earle, 1874). 

232. On Grimes, see Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 188-89. Philip J. Schwarz, professor of 

history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, made making available the 

transcripts of Grimes’s case, preserved largely in Letters Received, Virginia Executive Papers, 

Library of Virginia, Richmond. I have included information from Arrest Warrant, Loudoun 

County, 20 January 1840; Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser, 2 March 1840, 2; and 

Alexandria Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, 17 March 1840, 3. According to Schwarz, evidence 

exists to document that Grimes had been involved in assisting fugitives before this incident. 

Grimes and his son and namesake, who died at the age of five in 1851, are buried in Woodlawn 

Cemetery in Everett, Massachusetts. 

233. Williams, History of the Twelfth Baptist Church. It seems likely that this Dr. Neale is the 

same Neale with whom John A. Andrew corresponded in the case of Seth Bott; see site 4. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 167

 

234. Williams, History of the Twelfth Baptist Church. Finkenbine, “Boston’s Black Churches,” 

182, states that sixty members, “including two deacons,” left after the Act passed, apparently 

based on an article in Pennsylvania Freeman, 25 August 1853. 

235. See Collison, Shadrach Minkins, 125-26; Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, 106-7; and 

Finkenbine, “Boston’s Black Churches,” 182-84. 

236. Williams, History of the Twelfth Baptist Church, has the year of Grimes’s death as 1874, 

but the burial records at Woodlawn Cemetery, made available to the authors by Carl J. Cruz of 

New Bedford, state it as 1873. 

237. See Vincent Y. Bowditch, Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (Boston, 

1902), 2:350, cited in Robboy and Robboy, “Lewis Hayden,” 598. 

238. SCD 493:30, Ward Jackson to Sinclair and Horn for $4,000. 

239. The deed was witnessed by African American lawyer and notary Robert Morris. 

240. Robboy and Robboy, “Lewis Hayden,” 598. 

241. Lewis Hayden, n.p., n.d., to Sydney Howard Gay, Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Rare Books 

and Manuscripts Division, Columbia University. Hayden’s letter to Gay was clearly provoked by 

the fact, he wrote, “that my statements concerning Henry Clay selling my wife and child and 

whipping Thomas Todd are called in question by ‘high authority.’” Earlier biographical 

treatments of Hayden, in particular Stanley W. Robboy and Anita W. Robboy, “Lewis Hayden: 

From Fugitive Slave to Statesman,” New England Quarterly 46, 4 (December 1973): 591-612, 

were apparently unaware of the existence of this letter to Gay, which in defense of Hayden’s 

assertions about Clay provides a detailed biographical statement. 

242. In a letter to Gay, Hayden describes having been out of “manacles & chains” for eighteen 

months and attending both an antislavery convention and the fair sponsored annually in early 

January by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, where he saw Delia Webster, who had 

assisted in his rescue; here he asked Gay to direct correspondence to 5 Southac Court. Lewis 

Hayden, Boston, to Sydney Howard Gay, 21 January 1846, Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Rare 

Books and Manuscripts Division, Columbia University. On his wife’s presence in New Bedford, 

see Lewis Hayden, Boston, to Harriet Hayden, New Bedford, 22 April 1847, Miscellaneous 

Collections, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester. Here Hayden asked for news “since I left 

New Bedford,” and correspondence between William Lloyd Garrison and Gay (31 March 1846) 

discussed the possibility that Hayden would settle in New Bedford. 

243. John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton 

& Co., 1864), 2:95. 

244. Still, Underground Railroad, 388. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 168

 

245. Collison, Shadrach Minkins, 98. 

246. George W. Putnam, 130 Brookline St, Lynn, 27 Dec 1893, to Siebert, Siebert Notebooks 

13, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 

247. Weiss, Theodore Parker, 2:99. 

248. Henry I. Bowditch, 12 November 1850, to “Friend Gay,” Sydney Howard Gay Papers, Rare 

Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. 

249. Bearse, Reminiscences, 8. These thirteen fugitives are probably the ones Lewis Ford 

described in an undated letter he sent to Wilbur Siebert in reply to Siebert’s Underground 

Railroad circular distributed about 1897: “Mr. Hayden had at one time 13 slaves secreted in his 

attic, in house, and as fast as they could be properly clothed they were started off north for the 

next stopping place on the Underground Railroad.” Siebert Notebooks, vol. 14. 

250. See Von Frank, Trials of Anthony Burns, 33, 64, 66-68, 118. 

251. Bearse, Reminiscences, 38-39. Bowditch lived in Brookline; presumably the fugitive’s 

destination was Bowditch’s home until he could be safely sent on to Canada. 

252. The “servant girl Ellen” was probably Ellen Fitzgerald, white, age 30, born in Ireland; she 

was listed in Hayden’s household in the 1855 state census. 

253. The names of those DeGrasse treated listed as living as Hayden’s boardinghouse or 66 

Southac were William J. Prindell, Lloyd McCabe, Ellen White, Mrs. Elizabeth Harris, Mrs. A. B. 

Mitchel, Mrs. Easton, Mrs. Cooper, Mrs. Bond, Charles Melville, and Mrs. Cook. Thomas Loper 

is listed as a fugitive sent to Canada in 1854 in Jackson’s list at New-York Historical Society, 

and Lewis Hayden is listed as being reimbursed for — Loper’s passage to Canada on 1 

December 1854 in the Bostonian Society accounts, but he must have returned to Boston; 

DeGrasse’s accounts record having provided medical care to Loper on 25-26 April 1855 and 

again between 4 August 1855 and 3 June 1856. In February 1852 Hayden was paid for boarding 

“Mrs Cooly [sic] & child” and was paid for boarding “ Mrs Cooley & daughter” on 20 April 

1852; in 1853 Jackson’s accounts at New-York Historical indicate that the two were to be spent 

to New York, but New York was crossed out. DeGrasse provided care for the wife and daughter 

of a “Mr. Cooley” at 83 Southac Street between 23 December 1854 and 27 March 1857. And 

William Manix, a former porter who ran the boardinghouses where the Cooleys lived in 1856, 

boarded twelve fugitives between 1 August 1855 and 12 December 1856, was probably a 

fugitive, for Vigilance Committee records show him being sent to Canada in 1856. 

254. On Hayden’s contribution and Tubman’s presence in Boston, see Edward J. Renehan Jr., 

The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown (Columbia: 

University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 187-88. Tubman’s exact location is established in a 

letter from Franklin Sanborn to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Boston, 30 May 1859, Higginson 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 169

 

Papers, Boston Public Library: “You ought to see Harriet Tubman, the woman who brought 

away 50 slaves in 8 journeys made to Maryland; but perhaps you have seen her. She is the 

heroine of the day. She came here Friday night and is at 168 Cambridge Street.” Burrill Smith is 

shown at 168 Cambridge Street in the 1860 Boston directory, and Boston Vigilance Committee 

records contain an entry for him on 10 March that year “for boarding Jenny Buchanan” and in 

July 1860 “for boarding Joseph Davis & Henry Dorsey.” 

255. Joseph Hayden, listed in the Civil War Sailors Database (a partnership formed in 1993 by 

Howard University, the U.S. Department of the Navy, and the National Park Service), enlisted at 

Portsmouth, NH, on 30 November 1861. He gave his age as 22, his place of birth as Detroit 

(where the Haydens did live) and his occupation as barber. Hayden enlisted as a landsman, or 

new recruit, for three years and served aboard U.S.S. Portsmouth from 20 January to 30 June 

1863 and then on the U.S.S. Fort Gaines from 31 December 1864. There is no record in this 

database (www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/sailors.htm.) of his having been killed in action, but based on 

records in the National Archives Joel Strangis, Lewis Hayden and the War against Slavery (New 

Haven, Conn.: Shoestring Press, 1999) states that Hayden died at Fort Morgan after having 

served aboard the U.S.S. Fort Gaines in the Mississippi River. According to Strangis, Hayden 

also served aboard the U.S.S. Stockdale during the war and had enlisted in the Navy as early as 

November 1857. 

256. See Irving H. Bartlett, “Abolitionists, Fugitives, and Imposters in Boston, 1846-47.” New 

England Quarterly 55, 1 (March 1982): 99-100, 101, 102. 

257. Tax records list the black waiter Francis Giger, not listed in directories or censuses, at 81 

(then 5) Southac in 1850 and 1851; this is almost certainly Benjamin Giger, whom city 

directories show at 5 Southac in 1850 and 1852. 

258. Siebert provides no attribution for this typewritten account, filed under Suffolk County. 

The “Underground Railroad” in Massachusetts, vol. 2 (vol. 14 in series). Material Collected by 

Professor Wilbur H. Siebert, Ohio State University, Columbus, n.d. Received by Harvard 

College Library 14 June 1939. At Houghton Library, Harvard University. Unpaginated. 

Hereafter cited as Siebert Notebooks. 

259. For accounts of the Jane Johnson escape and rescue, see Still, Underground Railroad, 73-

84, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Introduction,” in Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, 

ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 2002), xliv-xlix. 

260. Still, Underground Railroad, 77; William C. Nell, South Reading and Boston, Mass., to 

Amy Kirby Post, in Wesley and Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell, 419. 

261. The tax and directory research has yet to be done to determine if he remained in this house 

until his death. 

262. A Maria Rock, widow, is listed in the 1873 Boston directory in the second ward on 8 

Stillman Street, but it is not known whether she was John S. Rock’s widow. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 170

 

263. Terranova, e-mail to authors, 23 December 2002. Thanks again are due him for the 

information on Hall’s holdings in this area and the location of the Guild boardinghouse. 

264. On Cole, see Liberator 12 February, 12 March, 13 May, 28 May, and 5 November 1831; 16 

and 25 March and 22 June 1833; for his probate records, see Stapp, Afro-Americans in 

Antebellum Boston, 174. 

265. Anne M. Boylan, “Benevolence and Antislavery Activity among African American Women 

in New York and Boston, 1820-1840,” in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The 

Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell 

University Press, 1994), 122; Clare Taylor, Women of the Anti-Slavery Movement: The Weston 

Sisters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1995), 30-41; Collison, Shadrach Minkins, 130. 

266. Katherine E. Flynn, “Jane Johnson, Found! But Is She ‘Hannah Crafts’? The Search for the 

Author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 90, 3 

(September 2002): 175-76. Flynn found these letters in the “Passamore Williamson Visitors 

Book,” MS 76710, Chester County Historical Society, West Chester, Penn. They have since been 

reprinted in Wesley and Uzelac, eds., William Cooper Nell. Flynn seems to have mistaken 1 

Southac Court for 1 Southac Street, however, in her 1857 directory listing on page 171 and on 

her map on page 173, which shows Southac Street extending to Joy Street. No persons of color 

are listed at a 1 Southac Street address in our records in the years before 1860. 

267. Flynn, “Jane Johnson,” 169-70, 172, 174, and throughout; Gates, “Introduction,” xii-xiii. 

268. Life of Isaac Mason As a Slave (Worcester, Mass., 1893), 55. The Mason narrative is 

available online at http://docsouth.unc.edu/mason/mason.html. 

269. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 31 October 1850; Hinks, To Awaken, 76 n. 33, 78-79. 

270. Rev. Steven Allen and Rev. W. H. Pilsbury, History of Methodism in Maine, 1793-1886

(Augusta, Maine: Charles E. Nash, 1887), 1:289, quoted in Patricia J. Thompson and Stephen 

Pentek, “A Brief Overview of African American History in the New England Conference,” New 

England Conference of the United Methodist Church Commission on Archives and History 

website. 

271. Patricia J. Thompson, NEC Historian, with research assistance from Stephen Pentek, 

Archivist, Boston University School of Theology; H. H. Price, researcher and writer, Visible 

Black History, Portland, ME; Amber Meisenzahl, African American Museum, Boston, MA, in 

“New England Conference’s First Black Pastor Was an Anti-Slavery Activist” (Paper, n.d.). 

Thanks to Beth Bower for sending me an electronic version of this manuscript. 

272. It is possible, though not documented, that Snowden’s daughter Isabella married into the 

family of Israel Holmes. The kinship of her husband Henry has not been ascertained. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 171

 

273. See [Francis Jackson], “The Boston Vigilance Committee Appointed at the Public Meeting 

in Faneuil Hall October 21st 1850 to assist Fugitive Slaves. Treasurers Accounts”. (Facsimile 

reprint, Bostonian Society, n.d.), entry for 16 November 1850: “Isabella S. Holmes (Father 

Snowden’s daughter)” paid for boarding James Dale, wife & child 2 weeks; Henry Garnet, 

George Johnson, David Brown 2 wks 5 days; Henry Richard 1 wk; Ely Baney 1 week 5 days; 

Catherine Jones 1 wk 5 days; Henry Williams 3 days; Henry Lewis; George Newton; on the 

arrest of Snowden’s sons, see “Arrests for Carrying Concealed Weapons,” Liberator, 11 April 

1851. 

274. Sources disagree on the date of his ordination. J. Marcus Mitchell, “The Paul Family,” OldTime New England 53, 3 (Winter 1973): 73, puts it at 1804 based on a communication with the 

New Hampshire Historical Society; Horton, “Generations of Protest,” 245, sets the date at 1 May 

1805, the source apparently being First Baptist Church Records, 25 July 1805 or Baptist 

Magazine XVI (1831). 

275. Mitchell, “Paul Family,” 73-77; Horton, “Generations of Protest,” 245. 

276. Liberator,10 Apr 1833; Mitchell, “Paul Family”; Horton, “Generations of Protest,” 247; 

Boylan, “Benevolence and Antislavery Activity,” 129. 

277. Biographical Encyclopaedia of Massachusetts of the Nineteenth Century (New York: 

Metropolitan Publishing and Engraving Co, 1879), 17. 

278. Jones had stowed away on the brig Roleson in Pensacola about 1 May 1859 and was 

discovered and put in irons by the brig’s mate John Orlando while at sea. The Roleson reached 

Hyannis on 8 May, and while Orlando left the vessel to speak to Roleson Captain Gorham 

Crowell, who had been in Massachusetts during the voyage, Jones escaped, somehow reached a 

passing boat and had nearly reached shore when Crowell and Orlando caught up with him in 

another boat and took him back to the Roleson. The two immediately found the schooner 

Elizabeth B., docked at Hyannis, and, it is said, paid its captain $500 to take Jones to Norfolk the 

next day. No one on shore knew what had happened until the Roleson reached Boston the next 

day. Crowell and Orlando were arrested, indicted with the Roleson’s owner in Barnstable County 

Superior Court, but acquitted at trial on 15 November 1859. See Samuel May, The Fugitive Slave 

Law and Its Victims, rev. and enlarged ed. Anti-Slavery Tracts, No. 15, new ser. (New York: 

American Anti-Slavery Society, 1861), 118-19. 

279. The Rev. Opal Adams, telephone conversation with authors, 19 November 2002, states that 

the church was found by Noah Cannon on Belknap Street on 25 November 1833; Richard R. 

Wright Jr., Centennial Encyclopedia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: 

Book Concern of the AME Church, 1916), gives both dates of founding and both locations for 

the church in Boston. That the church was at West Centre Street by 1841 is clear from W. C. N. 

(no doubt William C. Nell), “Case of Lucy Faggins,” Liberator, 16 July 1841, stating that 

Faggins, an enslaved girl of sixteen years who had been brought north to New Bedford by a man 

who had hired her services, had been brought after her Boston hearing on a writ of habeas corpus 

“to the Rev. Mr. Cannon’s chapel in West-Centre street.” Wright stated that the church occupied 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 172

 

buildings on West Cedar, Cambridge, and North Russell Streets before it moved to Anderson 

Street. According to Wayman, Cannon was born near Cannon Ferry, Delaware, about 1786, and 

was minister at Washington, D. C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. He died in 

September 1850, at Canonsburg, a town in Canada apparently named for him. See A. W. 

Wayman, Cyclopaedia of American Methodism (Baltimore: Methodist Episcopal Book 

Depository, 1882), 23, 31-32, and Wayman, My Recollections of African M. E. Ministers, 

or Forty Years’ Experience in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: 

A. M. E. Book Rooms, 1881), chap. 3, which describes Wayman’s experiences with Cannon as a 

Methodist circuit rider on Maryland’s eastern shore, apparently in the late 1820s. 

280. John T. Jenifer, the son of John H. Jenifer or Jenovar, born in Washington, D. C., and living 

in New Bedford by 1856, was in San Francisco by 1862 and was among the organizers of the 

California Conference of the Union Bethel AME Church in 1865. He was living in Chicago at 

the time of his father’s death in 1889. See Pacific Appeal, 8 November 1862, and Delilah L. 

Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles, Calif., 1919), 159. 

281. Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace, 57 n. 3, stated Smith came to Boston in 1848, but his 

obituary states that he came to Boston when he was twenty, which would have been about 1840; 

tax records show a John J. Smith on Southac Street between 1840 and 1845, and the receipt 

between Sumner and Smith clearly establishes the latter in Boston in 1844. See “Recent Deaths: 

John J. Smith,” Boston Evening Transcript, 5 November 1906, 3. Thanks to Edith Walker, 

Smith’s great-great-granddaughter, for making this obituary available to us; Edith Walker, 

interview with authors, 16 November 2002, West Roxbury, Mass. 

282. Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace, 57, 57 n. 3. 

283. The receipt shows that Sumner paid Smith $12.75 for having been shaved fifty-one times at 

a quarter a shave, a quarter for one haircut, and thirty-seven cents for “honeing three razors,” for 

a total bill of $13.37. A note at the bottom left reads, “during my illness.” 

The authors thank Edith Walker for sharing her photocopy of this receipt. 

284. Collison, Shadrach Minkins, 132-33, 153. 

285. Family history holds that Charles Sumner somehow purchased 86 Pinckney, “on the white 

side of Pinckney Street,” for Smith; the deed research, outside the time frame of this study, has 

not been conducted. Walker interview. 

286. The 1860 city directory lists Hillard’s law office at room 9, 33 School Street. 

287. See Anne-Marie Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American 

Enlightenment, 1811-1851 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), for an excellent 

treatment of the evolution of Sumner’s antislavery position and his relationship with Hillard. 

288. “Address of Mr. Nell,” 7. 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 173

 

289. G.S.H. [George S. Hillard], Boston, 2 June 1854, to “My dear Sumner,” Sumner Papers, 

Houghton Library, Harvard University. 

290. James S. Freeman Clark, Antislavery Days (New York: John W. Lowell Co., 1883), 83. 

291. “Old Passages of Boston’s ‘Underground Railroad’ Uncovered,” Boston Evening 

Transcript, 31 March 1926, part 3, Siebert Notebooks, vol. 14. 

292. Still, Underground Railroad, 169. The identity of the Doctor is unknown. 

293. Still, Underground Railroad, 336-46. 

294. Still, Underground Railroad, 590-91. 

295. Where she stopped with them is unclear. In 1855 and 1860 the Garrisons are listed as living 

at 14 Dix place, which is off Washington street at number 579. 

296. Still, Underground Railroad, 584. 

297. Mayer, All on Fire, 319. On the Latimer incident, which he terms “the first of the famous 

Boston fugitive slave cases,” see Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace, 58-59. By 1854 Latimer and 

his wife were living in Boston on Oswego Street, he was working as a paper hanger, and in 1855 

the Vigilance Committee was paying the rent on their house. No child is mentioned in the 

committee record of 1855. Latimer later moved to Lynn, Mass., and in 1893, when he was 

seventy-three years old, was living in a house at 102 Marianna Street. See “Two Good 

Men/Sketch of the Lives of John B. Tolman and S. Silsbee: Reminiscences of the Underground 

Railroad, Etc/A Benefactor to His Craftsmen and Others,” Lynn Daily Evening Item, 19 

December, year not shown [but probably 1892], and George W. Putnam, 130 Brookline St, 

Lynn, 27 Dec 1893, to Siebert, in Siebert Notebooks, vol. 14. 

298. Mayer, All on Fire, 341-42. 

299. Mayer, All on Fire, 381. 

300. According to a 16 October 1854 list of Boston primary schools by district compared to the 

1846 “Plan of Boston Comprising a Part of Charlestown and Cambridge” by George G. Smith, 

Sarah Roberts probably walked from the northwestern end of Andover Street down Minot Street. 

By doing so she would have walked by the end of Wall Street, which in 1854 had no less than 

six schools on it; in 1847 perhaps it had fewer. When she reached Leverett Street she would have 

turned left and would probably have passed the end of Spring Street Place, which in 1854 had 

two primary schools on it. Sarah Roberts might then have walked down Leverett Street until it 

turned into Lynde Street near Cambridge Street or might have crossed to its parallel street just 

west, Chambers Street, which at Cambridge Street became Belknap Street. She would have 

walked south up Belknap to the Smith Street schoolhouse. If she had been at the southeastern 

end of Andover Street, it does not appear that she would have crossed the ends of any of the 
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 174

 

streets where seventh or eighth district primary schools were located in 1854. Thanks to Kristin 

Swett of City of Boston Archives and Records Management for sending us the list of primary 

schools and their locations. 

301. “Address of Mr. Nell,” 7. 

302. Francis Jackson, Boston, 4 July 1854, to Hon. Charles Sumner, Sumner Papers. 

303. Charles Sumner, “The Crime against Kansas,” in The Works of Charles Sumner (Boston: 

Lee & Shepard, 1870-73), 4:125-29. 

304. John S. Rock, 60 Southac Street, Boston, to Charles Sumner, 6 June 1856; and John S. 

Rock, 83 Southac Street, Boston, to Charles Sumner, 19 June 1860, Sumner Papers. 

305. Wesley and Uzelac, eds., William C. Nell, 46-47. 

306. Thomas L. Doughton at the Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies at the College 

of the Holy Cross, Worcester, is working on the African American population in the North End 

in the eighteenth century. Doughton, telephone conversation with Kathryn Grover, 5 September 

2002. 

307. See note 187. 
Annotated Bibliography 

A Charge, Delivered to the Brethren of the African Lodge, of the Twenty-fifth of June, 

1792, in 

Charlestown, by the Right Worshipful Prince Hall. (Boston: Bible and Hart, 

Cornhill, 

1792) Reprint. In Hayden, Lewis. Caste among Masons: Address before Prince 

Hall 

Grand Lodge of free and Accepted Masons of the State of Massachusetts, at the 

Festival of St. John the Evangelist, December27, 1865. Boston: Edward S.

Coombs, 1866.57-62.

A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, on the Twenty-fourth of June, 1797, at 

Menotomy, by the Right Worshipful Prince Hall. (Boston: for the Members of 

Said Lodge, 1797). Reprint. In Hayden, Lewis. Caste among Masons: Address 

before Prince Hall Grand Lodge of free and Accepted Masons of the State of 

Massachusetts, at the Festival of St. John the Evangelist, December 27, 1865. 

Boston: Edward S. Coombs, 1866.63-70. 

Hall's last published address 

Abajian, James de T. Blacks in Selected Newspapers, Census, and Other Sources: An 

Index to Names and Subjects. 3 vols. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977, 1985. 

Indexes the Liberator, the NationaJ Anti-Slavery Standard, and other antislavery 

and abolitionist newspapers, but is not comprehensive 

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro -American 

Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 

1986. 

With Davis and Gates, a useful discussion of narratives of black experience with 

a very good bibliography organized alphabetically 

Bartlett, Irving H. "Abolitionists, Fugitives, and Imposters in Boston, 1846-47." New 

England Quarterly 55, 1 (March 1982): 97-110. 

Includes a verbatim transcription of the records of Boston's first Committee of 

Vigilance 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 175
Bearse, Austin. Reminiscences of Fugitive-Slave Law Days in Boston. Boston: Printed by 

Warren Richardson, 1880. 

Descriptive account of Boston Vigilance Committee agent who ran excursion 

boat as 

cover for Lightering fugitives from larger vessels moored in Boston harbor 

Benjamin, Asher, and Daniel Raynerd. The American Builder's Companion. 1806. 

Reprint. New York: DaCapo Press, 1972. 

Bentley, William. The Diary of William Bentley, D.D. 4 vols. Salem, Mass.: Essex 

Institute, 1905-14.3:372-73, 4:522-23. 

Contains firsthand descriptions of Prince Saunders and Rev. Thomas Paul 

The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, A Fugitive from Slavery. Written by Himself. 

New Bedford: Press of Benjamin Lindsey, 1847. 

Blackert, R. J. M. "The Odyssey of William and Ellen Craft." In Beating against the 

Barriers: 

Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History. Baton 

Rouge: 

Louisiana State University Press, 1986. 

Bowditch, Vincent Y. Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch. Boston, 

1902 

See 2:349 on meeting of Fairbank and Hayden 

Bower, Beth Anne. "The African Meeting House, Boston, Massachusetts: Summary 

Report of Archaeological Excavations, 1975 - 1986." Museum of Afro American 

History, Boston, Massachusetts, n.d. 

Bower, Beth Anne, and Byron Rushing. "The African Meeting House: The Center for the 

19~ Century Afro-American Community in Boston." Archeological Perspectives 

on Ethnicity in America. Vol.1. New York, 1980. 

Bower, Beth Anne. "The Development of the Coburn Court Block, 1780-1850." Museum

of Afro-American History, Boston, 1979. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 176
Boylan, Anne M. "Benevolence and Antislavery Activity among African American 

Women in 

New York and Boston, 1820-1840." In The Abolitionist Sisterhood, Women's 

Political Culture in Antebellum America. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin and John 

C. Van Home. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. 

Bradley, James W., Arthur J. Krim, Peter Stott, and Sarah Zimmerman. "Historic and 

Archaeological Resources of the Boston Area: A Framework for Preservation 

Decisions." Boston: Massachusetts Historical Commission, 1982. 

Brown, William Wells. Narrative of William W Brown, A Fugitive Slave. Boston, Mass.: 

Anti-slavery Office, 1847. Reprint: Chicago: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1970. 

Brown, William Wells. The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His 

Achievements. Boston: J. Redpath, 1863. 

Chamberlain, Allen. Beacon Hill: Its Ancient Pastures and Early Mansions. Boston: 

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925. 

Clarke, J. S Freeman. Antislavery Days. New York: John W. Lowell Co., 1883. 

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Collison, Gary. Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen. Cambridge, Mass., 

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York: 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 177
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914. Reprint. New York: Arno Press and the New 

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Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Slave's Narrative. Oxford and 

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Excerpts from the narratives of enslaved persons, followed by analytic essays and 

an excellent bibliography organized chronologically 

Detwiller, Frederick C. "African Meeting House, Smith Court, Boston: An 

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Antiquities, 1975. 

Dorman, Frank A. Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts, 1742-1998. Boston: New 

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Fairbank, Calvin. How the Way was Prepared. Chicago, 1890. 

Finkleman, Paul. "Prelude to the Fourteenth Amendment: Black Legal Rights in the 

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Forbes, George W. "Biographical Sketches of Eminent Negroes." Mimeo Typescript. 

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Gordon, Edward W. "Beacon Hill/North Slope Cultural Resources Area Survey." Final 

Report, Massachusetts Historical Commission, 26 November 2001. 

Very little pre- 1870s deed, tax, directory, and census analysis on African 

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Hayden, Lewis. Caste among Masons: Address before Prince Hall Grand Lodge of free 

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Evangelist, December27, 1865. Boston: Edward S. Coombs, 1866. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 178
Hayden, Lewis. Masonry among Colored Men in Massachusetts. Boston, 1871. 

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Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University 

Press, 1997. 

Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. Black Bostonians: Family Life and 

Community Struggle in the Antebellum North. New York and London: Holmes & 

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Contains some factual errors and is incompletely documented 

Horton, James Oliver. Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community. 

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Hurd, Linda, ed. Tremont Temple Baptist Church: A Light in the City for 150 Years. 

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BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 179
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 441 (January 

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Kaplan, Sidney, and Emma Nogrady Kaplan. The Black Presence in the Era of the 

American 

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An excellent collection of short essays with a difficult scholarly apparatus 

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York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. 

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and its Predecessor, the Home for Aged Colored Women. Boston: Grimes-King 

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Mitchell, Guy. Historical Sketch Book: Tremont Temple Baptist Church. Boston: 

Tremont Temple, 1954. 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 180
Mitchell, J. Marcus. "The Paul Family," Old-Time New England 53, 3 (Winter 1973): 73-

77 

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Several 

 Distinguished Persons. To Which is Added a Brief Survey of the Conditions and 

Prospects of Colored Americans. Boston: Published by Robert F. Wallcut, 1855. 

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1988. 

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Proceedings: Agreeably to Previous Notice, a Meeting of the Colored Citizens of Boston 

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BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 181
Roberts, Robert. The House Servant's Directory, or a Monitor for Private Families. 

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History, Boston, 22 December 1978. 

An early, detailed study of property ownership in the Joy Street area, Rosebrock's 

work was accomplished without the aid o feither the MHS database or 

Terranova's much more detailed research into deeds and tax records. The latter 

work, much but not all of which is reported in this study, is a substantial 

corrective to Rosebrock's account. 

A Schedule of the Buildings and Their Occupancy on the Principal Streets and Wharves 

of the City of Boston (Boston, 1877). 

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Settlement of the Town to the Present Period; with Some Account of its Environs. 

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BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 182
Snow, Caleb H. A History of Boston. Boston, 1828. 

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By a Member of the African Society in Boston. (Boston: for the Members of the 

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Stapp, Carol Buchalter. Afro-Americans in Antebellum Boston: An Analysis of Probate 

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Staudenraus, Philip. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: 

Columbia University Press, 1961. 

Still, William. The Underground Railroad. 1871. Reprint. Chicago: Johnson Publishing 

Company, 1970. 

Compiled from notes Still wrote down as fugitives told him their stories at the 

office of Philadelphia's Vigilance Committee, this book is the best published 

source on the eastern "branch" of the Underground Railroad. Many of its details 

can be documented in the corresponded of other fugitive slave activists. 

Taylor, Anne-Marie. Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American 

Enlightenment5 1811-1851. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 

Thernstrom, Stephan. The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American 

Metropolis, 1880-1970. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973. 

Thomas, Lamont D. Paul Cuffe: Black Entrepreneur and Pan -Africanist. Urbana and 

Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 

Thorndike, S. Lothrop. The Past Members of the Union Club of Boston and a Brief 

Sketch of the History of the Club. 1893. 

Thwing, Annie Haven. The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, 1630-1822. Boston: 

Marshall Jones Company, 1920. 

Von Frank, Albert J. The Trial of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 183
Boston. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. 

Ward, David. "Nineteenth Century Boston: A Study in the Spatial Aspects of Urban 

Growth." 

Ph.D. diss., U of Wisconsin, 1973. 

Weinhardt, Carl J. Jr. The Domestic Architecture of Beacon Hill, 1800-1850. Boston: 

Reprinted from the Proceedings of the Bostonian Society Annual Meeting, 1958. 

Wesley, Charles H. Prince Hall: Lifer and Legacy. Washington, D.C., 1977. 

Wesley, Dorothy Porter. "Integration versus Separatism: William Cooper Nell's Role in 

the Struggle for Equality." In Courage and Conscience: Black & White 

Abolitionists in Boston. Edited by Donald M. Jacobs. Bloomington: Indiana 

University Press for the Boston Athenaeum, 1993. 

Wesley, Dorothy Porter, and Constance Porter Uzelac, eds. William Cooper Nell, 

Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist: 

Selected Writings, 1832-1874. Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 2002. 

White, Arthur. "Blacks and Education in Antebellum Massachusetts: Strategies for Social 

 Mobility." Ph.D. diss., SUNY Buffalo, 1971. 

White,Arthur 0. "Price Saunders: An Instance of Social Mobility among Antebellum New 

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 Betknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968. 

Whitehill, Walter Muir. "Report on the North Slope to the Boston Historical 

Conservation Committee." 1963. 

 

Wiggins, Rosalind Cobb, ed. Captain Paul Cuffe's Logs and Letters, 1808-1817: A Black 

Quaker's “Voice from within the Veil.” Washington, D.C.: Howard University 

Press, 1996. 

Wilkie, Janet Riblett. "Social Status, Acculturation and School Attendance in 1850 

Boston. "Journal of Social History 2, 2 (Winter 1977): 179-192. 

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BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 184
 1874,with a Statement and Appeal in Behalf of the Church. Boston: James H. Earle, 

1874.

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1994. 

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Associates of the South End House. Boston, 1898. 

Woods, Robert A. Americans in Process: A Settlement Study by Residents and Associates 

of the South End House. Boston & New York, 1902. 

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African American National Historic Site, Boston Massachusetts." National Park 

Service, North Atlantic Regional Office, Boston, 1992. 

Manuscript Collections

Houghton Library, Harvard University Wendell Phillips Papers 

Charles Sumner Papers

Wilbur H. Siebert Notebooks 

These notebooks are apparently the foundation of Wilbur Siebert's 

publications, principally The Underground Railroad from Slavery to 

Freedom (1898) and, his 1935 monograph "1'he Underground Railroad in 

Massachusetts." They comprise a mix of letters answering a circular 

Siebert sent to persons and descendants of persons believed to have been 

active in the Underground Railroad, transcripts of interviews with such 

persons, reminiscences in the form of newspaper clippings, and 

correspondence with local librarians. Some of this material is trustworthy 

and capable of being corroborated by other sources, and much of it is 

hearsay. The notebooks should be used with caution. The notebooks are 

organized by state; Massachusetts material is in notebooks 13 and 14. 

Boston Public Library, Weston Family Papers 

Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Sydney Howard Gay Papers 

Avery Art and Architecture Library, Columbia University Richard Upjohn Papers 

BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 185
BOAF HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY / 31 DECEMBER 2002 186

Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Kroch Library, Cornell University James 

Miller McKim Papers, May Antislavery Collection 

Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston DeGrasse-Howard Papers Home for Aged 

Colored Women Records 
APPENDIX A 

Chain of Title Forms

Deed research with respect to this project was completed at the Registry of Deeds on New 

Chardon Street and at the Massachusetts State Archives on Columbia Point. The most 

recent transfer was identified and then traced back to 1800 when possible. The Chain of 

Title Forms have been paginated to show the earliest transfers on the first page. The last 

transfer on each page indicates the earliest transfer, so the forms should be read from top to 

bottom, right to left. 

Deeds are filed with the Registry of Deeds in two formats. The first is a Liber/Folio format, 

where the deed has been recorded in a particular volume and on a particular page. This is the 

most common format. The second is a registered land document (RLD), where the original 

Certificate of Title has been issued a decree from the Suffolk County Land Court. This 

format transfers the property as a specific certificate. A new certificate is issued each time 

the property is transferred to a new owner. This format was developed for properties that 

had complicated transfer histories and was designed to clarify ownership of the property. 
Site 1—David Walker House 

Site 1—David Walker House 

Leonard & George Black/James W. Stewart House 

81 Joy Street (4 Belknap Street) 

81 Joy Street (4 Belknap Street) is a five-story, three-bay brick building originally constructed 

in August 1825 with later construction, circa 1900, encompassing the earlier structure. The 

north elevation shows the side gable roof and indicates that the original building may have 

been two or three stories in height. It is not known when the structure was enlarged. The 

sidehall entry has a nine-window paneled door. The window to the north of the entry 

resembles a palladian window or a former storefront, having a center window and two 

smaller flanking windows. The upper stories on the building have distinct lintel styles on 

each floor: they are dog-ear style on the second floor, splayed lintel with a keystone on the 

third, decorated with a cornice on the fourth, and flat on the fifth. The modillion cornice at 

the roofline is also decorated with dentils and other decorative moldings. The double-hung 

windows on the façade are primarily 6/6 lights. 
Site 1—David Walker House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 81 Joy Street (4 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): David Walker House, Leonard Black 

House, George H. Black House, James W. Stewart House 

Grantor: Charles Allen 

Grantee: Elias A. Perkins 

Transfer Date: 01/24/1879 

Consideration: $15,000 

Liber/Folio: 1446/85 

Property is width of block between 

Hancock and Joy Streets

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

 

 PAGE 1 
Site 1—David Walker House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 81 Joy Street (4 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): David Walker House, Leonard Black 

House, George H. Black House, James W. Stewart House 

Grantor: Joseph J. Mulhern, John W. 

Corcoran and George Alpert, Receivers 

of Conveyancers Title Insurance & 

Mortgage Co. 

Grantee: Same (Foreclosure on 

Thomas A. Ryan) 

Transfer Date: 03/19/1937 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5653/247

Grantor: Aaron Hoffman 

Grantee: Morris Hoffman 

Transfer Date: 02/25/1915 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 3864/143

Grantor: Esther Winisky 

Grantee: Thomas A. Ryan 

Transfer Date: 03/13/1925 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4656/171

Grantor: Bessie Hoffman 

Grantee: Aaron Hoffman and Louis 

Cherinsky 

Transfer Date: 08/04/1914 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 3827/333

Grantor: Max H. Jacobs & Bertha 

Jacobs and Samuel Reamer & Lena 

Reamer 

Grantee: Esther Winisky 

Transfer Date: 06/30/1920 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4236/184

Grantor: Ellen E. Learned, executrix of 

last will of Anna C. Brackett 

Grantee: Bessie Hoffman 

Transfer Date: 07/31/1914 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 3827/332

Grantor: Morris Hoffman 

Grantee: Bertha Jacobs and Lena 

Reamer 

Transfer Date: 06/30/1920 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4236/183

Grantor: Elias A. Perkins 

Grantee: Samuel E. Brackett 

Transfer Date: 04/17/1880 

Consideration: $15,000 

Liber/Folio: 1489/435

 

 PAGE 2 
Site 1—David Walker House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 81 Joy Street (4 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): David Walker House, Leonard Black 

House, George H. Black House, James W. Stewart House 

Grantor: Mary Lou Thomas 

Grantee: David L. Thomas, Jr., trustee 

of First Joy Nominee Trust 

Transfer Date: 07/14/1994 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 19221/130

Grantor: John E. Bennett & Alvan 

Brody, trustees of Joy Investment Trust

Grantee: Bradley R. Cook 

Transfer Date: 03/15/1972 

Consideration: $80,500 

Liber/Folio: 8518/593

Grantor: Kathryn Hayward 

Grantee: Mary Lou Thomas 

Transfer Date: 03/22/1993 

Consideration: $98,300 

Liber/Folio: 18125/267

Grantor: Alexander Kantor and Sarah 

Kantor, under will of Rose Kantor 

Grantee: John E. Bennett and Alvan 

Brody, trustees of Joy Investment Trust

Transfer Date: 06/03/1969 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8287/519

Grantor: Kathryn Hayward 

Grantee: David L. Thomas, Jr. 

Transfer Date: 12/25/1986 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 13248/248 

Conveys 1⁄4 interest

Grantor: George Alpert, Receiver of 

Realty, Inc., Suffolk County 

Grantee: Rose Kantor 

Transfer Date: 09/18/1940 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5880/141

Grantor: Bradley R. Cook 

Grantee: Mary Lou Thomas and 

Kathryn Hayward 

Transfer Date: 08/20/1980 

Consideration: $162,000 

Liber/Folio: 9510/83

Grantor: George Alpert, Receiver of 

Conveyancers Title Insurance & 

Mortgage Co. 

Grantee: George Alpert, Receiver of 

Realty Inc. 

Transfer Date: 12/30/1939 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5840/168 (185)

 

 

PAGE 3 

Site 2—John T. Hilton House 

73-75 Joy Street (12 Belknap Street) 

73-75 Joy Street (12 Belknap Street) is a 3 1⁄2-story, two-bay sidehall-entry vernacular Federal 

brick townhouse constructed circa in 1826. This building shares a partition wall with 71 Joy 

Street. A slate-covered dormer with three double-hung 6/6-lights windows pierces the gable 

roof. Each door of the two-door entry has a brownstone or painted limestone lintel. The 

second door may have led to a passageway to the alley. Its current use is unknown. There 

are few sills under the double-hung, primarily 1/1-light windows. At the roofline are brick 

dentils and a one-brick belt course near the roofline of the building. A brick end chimney is 

located on the north face of the building. An iron fire escape covers the façade of 73-75 Joy 

Street, as well as a portion of 71 Joy Street. An entry to the basement exists on the façade of 

the building as well. 
Site 2—John T. Hilton House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 73 Joy Street (12 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): John T. Hilton House, Anthony F. Clark 

House, Jonas W. Clark House, Charles V. Caples House, George B. Holmes House 

Grantor: Charles V. Caples 

Grantee: Anthony F. Clark 

Transfer Date: 07/29/1836 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 408/116

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Shipley W. Wilson, clerk 

Grantee: Charles V. Caples, trader 

Transfer Date: 11/25/1833 

Consideration: $2,000 

Liber/Folio: 374/223

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Charles V. Caples, trader & 

Hosah Caples, wife 

Grantee: Shipley W. Wilson, clerk 

Transfer Date: 11/21/1833 

Consideration: $2,000 

Liber/Folio: 374/139

Hosah Caples was the widow of George B. 

Holmes and died by 1840 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Henry Broomfield Rogers 

Grantee: George B. Holmes 

Transfer Date: 08/17/1825 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 302/196

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

 

 PAGE 1 
Site 2—John T. Hilton House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 73 Joy Street (12 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): John T. Hilton House, Anthony F. Clark 

House, Jonas W. Clark House, Charles V. Caples House, George B. Holmes House 

Grantor: Eddy K. Carleton and Alice R. 

Carleton (Rounds) 

Grantee: Nora A. Jeffers 

Transfer Date: 10/25/1921 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4325/458

Grantor: Benjamin T. Rounds 

Grantee: William J. Rounds 

Transfer Date: 03/28/1877 

Consideration: $3,200 

Liber/Folio: 1373/270

Grantor: Elvira Rounds, widow of 

Benjamin T. Rounds 

Grantee: Alice R. Rounds, widow of 

Henry J. Rounds 

Transfer Date: 04/13/1888 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 1819/405

Grantor: Frances J. Weedman, widow; 

Frances H. Clark, widow; and Jonas 

W.V. Clark, sometimes called Jonas W. 

Clark, Jr. 

Grantee: Benjamin T. Rounds 

Transfer Date: 12/08/1875 

Consideration: $3,200 

Liber/Folio: 1305/117

Grantor: William J. Rounds 

Grantee: Henry J. Rounds 

Transfer Date: 07/01/1887 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 1780/527

 Conveys an undivided one half interest in 

two parcels 

Grantor: Fanny Clark, widow 

Grantee: Frances J. Weedman, widow 

Transfer Date: 12/08/1875 

Consideration: $900 

Liber/Folio: 1305/116 

Grantor: William J. Rounds 

Grantee: Henry J. Rounds 

Transfer Date: 11/21/1883 

Consideration: $3,000 

Liber/Folio: 1618/611

Conveys an undivided one half interest in 

two parcels 

Grantor: Anthony F. Clark 

Grantee: Jonas W. Clark 

Transfer Date: 09/25/1849 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 604/29

 

 PAGE 2 
Site 2—John T. Hilton House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 73 Joy Street (12 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): John T. Hilton House, Anthony F. Clark 

House, Jonas W. Clark House, Charles V. Caples House, George B. Holmes House

Grantor: Harry F. Folkins, Paul M. 

Folkins & Richard P. Folkins 

Grantee: Annlinnea Terranova and 

Michael P. Terranova 

Transfer Date: 06/25/1993 

Consideration: $220,000 

Liber/Folio: 18317/158

Grantor: Elizabeth F. McVay 

Grantee: Nora A. Jeffers and Sophie 

Hanrahan 

Transfer Date: 08/22/1930 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5205/314 

Parcel runs between Joy and Hancock 

Streets

Grantor: Evelyn C. Meyer 

Grantee: Harry F. Folkins, Paul M. 

Folkins & Richard P. Folkins 

Transfer Date: 10/19/1949 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 6554/118

Grantor: Nora A. Jeffers 

Grantee: Elizabeth F. McVay 

Transfer Date: 08/22/1930 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5205/313 

Parcel runs between Joy and Hancock 

Streets

Grantor: Harry F. Folkins 

Grantee: Evelyn C. Meyer 

Transfer Date: 10/19/1949 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 6554/117

Grantor: John W. King 

Grantee: Nora A. Jeffers and William 

Jeffers 

Transfer Date: 11/24/1925 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4745/183

Grantor: Sophie M. Hanraham 

Grantee: Harry F. Folkins 

Transfer Date: 09/08/1943 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 6056/548

Grantor: Nora A. Jeffers 

Grantee: John W. King 

Transfer Date: 11/24/1925 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4745/182

 

 PAGE 3 
Site 3—Robert Roberts House 

71 Joy Street (14 Belknap Street) 

71 Joy Street (14 Belknap Street) is a 3 1⁄2-story, two-bay vernacular Federal brick townhouse 

constructed circa 1840-41. This building shares a partition wall with 73-75 Joy Street. An 

asphalt-covered dormer with three double-hung 6/6-lights windows pierces the gable roof. 

The sidehall entry, on the western face of the building, has a nine-light glazed door. Another 

entry is located on the passageway to the south that separates 69 Joy from 71 Joy. 

Brownstone lintels and sills frame the double-hung 6/6-light windows. At the roofline are 

brick dentils, and a one-brick belt course runs near at roofline. An iron fire escape covers a 

portion of the façade of 71 Joy Street, as well as a portion of 73-75 Joy Street. 
Site 3—Robert Roberts House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 71 Joy Street (14 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): Robert Roberts House 

Grantor: William J. Rounds 

Grantee: Henry J. Rounds 

Transfer Date: 11/21/1883 

Consideration: $3,000 

Liber/Folio: 1618/611 

Conveys an undivided one half interest in 

two parcels 

Grantor: John H. Roberts 

Grantee: Robert Roberts 

Transfer Date: 11/18/1841 

Consideration: $450.00 

Liber/Folio: 476/261 

Robert Roberts already owned one half 

interest 

Grantor: Wendell T. Coburn 

Grantee: William J. Rounds 

Transfer Date: 08/15/1878 

Consideration: $2,400 

Liber/Folio: 1429/233

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

Grantor: Peter L. Freeman 

Grantee: John P. Coburn 

Transfer Date: 01/23/1866 

Consideration: $75.00 

Liber/Folio: 871/147

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

Grantor: Robert Roberts, stevedore 

Grantee: Peter L. Freeman, gentleman 

Transfer Date: 09/06/1859 

Consideration: $1,800 

Liber/Folio: 763/161

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

 

 PAGE 1 
Site 3—Robert Roberts House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 71 Joy Street (14 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): Robert Roberts House

Grantor: George S. Chaletzky 

Grantee: Joan E. Walsh 

Transfer Date: 10/30/1958 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7352/84

Grantor: William Jeffers and Nora A. 

Jeffers 

Grantee: Alice E. Pendleton 

Transfer Date: 05/02/1923 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4465/322

Grantor: Robert Finkelstein and 

William J. DePiano, Trustees 

Grantee: George S. Chaletzky 

Transfer Date: 07/11/1958 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7324/56

Grantor: Alice R. Carleton (Rounds) 

Grantee: William Jeffers and Nora A. 

Jeffers 

Transfer Date: 10/25/1921 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4325/458

Grantor: Robert Finkelstein and 

William J. DePiano 

Grantee: Robert Finkelstein and 

William J. DePiano, Trustees 

Transfer Date: 03/01/1954 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 6942/391

Grantor: Elvira Rounds, widow of 

Benjamin T. Rounds 

Grantee: Alice R. Rounds, widow of 

Henry J. Rounds 

Transfer Date: 04/13/1888 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 1819/405

Grantor: William H. Sullivan, executor 

of the will of Alice E. Pendleton 

Grantee: Robert Finkelstein 

Transfer Date: 05/01/1953 

Consideration: $12,000 

Liber/Folio: 6864/571

Grantor: William J. Rounds 

Grantee: Henry J. Rounds 

Transfer Date: 07/01/1887 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 1780/527

Conveys an undivided one half interest in 

two parcels 

 

 PAGE 2 
Site 3—Robert Roberts House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 71 Joy Street (14 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): Robert Roberts House 

Grantor: Katharina Kirsch 

Grantee: Annlinnea Terranova and 

Michael P. Terranova 

Transfer Date: 01/29/2002 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 27885/128

Grantor: Stanley Shulman and Janet 

Shulman 

Grantee: Max Cutler and Rae Cutler 

Transfer Date: 09/14/1970 

Consideration: $107,500 

Liber/Folio: 8389/141

Grantor: Stanley Shulman 

Grantee: Katharina Kirsch 

Transfer Date: 07/19/1976 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8882/675

Grantor: John K. Jacobs and Elizabeth 

K. Jacobs 

Grantee: Stanley E. Shulman and 

Janet Shulman 

Transfer Date: 02/29/1968 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8186/236

Grantor: Rae Cutler 

Grantee: Stanley Shulman 

Transfer Date: 10/26/1973 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8670/650

Grantor: Grace McClary and Grace 

Galvin 

Grantee: John K. Jacobs and Elizabeth 

K. Jacobs 

Transfer Date: 09/15/1959 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7425/325

Grantor: Max Cutler 

Grantee: Rae Cutler 

Transfer Date: 10/24/1973 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8670/648

Grantor: Joan E. Walsh 

Grantee: Grace McClary and Grace 

Galvin 

Transfer Date: 05/28/1959 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7398/135

 

 PAGE 3 
Site 4—George Putnam/Robert Johnson House 

69 Joy Street (16 Belknap Street) 

69 Joy Street (16 Belknap Street) is a vernacular Federal three-story, two-bay brick building 

constructed circa 1826-27. The main entry, located on the northern face of the building, has 

a brick arch and wooden six-panel door. The center entry is located on a passageway 

between 69 Joy and 71 Joy, as described in deed transfers of the property. An undated twostory clapboard covered addition with deck has been built onto the east face of the building, 

with entry and windows. Wood window casings surround double-hung windows with 6/6 

lights. Though it looks almost flat from the street, the roof appears to have a slight gable. 
Site 4—George Putnam (Putman) / Robert Johnson House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 69 Joy Street (16 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): George Putnam (Putman) / Robert 

Johnson House 

Grantor: John Cook and James Ayres 

Grantee: Daniel D. Rogers 

Transfer Date: 02/06/1808 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 224/210

Two parcels with new brick houses on each 

lot on Hancock Street 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

Grantor: Royal Makepeace, merchant 

Grantee: Daniel D. Rogers 

Transfer Date: 02/06/1808 

Consideration: $4,000 

Liber/Folio: 224/211 

May be mortgage for the above 

transfer

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

 

 PAGE 1 
Site 4—George Putnam (Putman) / Robert Johnson House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 69 Joy Street (16 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): George Putnam (Putman) / Robert 

Johnson House

Grantor: David S. Grant 

Grantee: William H. Sullivan 

Transfer Date: 11/01/1939 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5820/479

Grantor: Sarah E. Williams 

Grantee: William J. Rounds 

Transfer Date: 12/22/1910 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 3504/200

Grantor: William H. Sullivan and May 

L. Sullivan 

Grantee: David S. Grant 

Transfer Date: 11/01/1939 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5820/478

Grantor: Charles W. Johnson and 

Annie L. Edmunds 

Grantee: Sarah E. Williams 

Transfer Date: 01/20/1904 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 2944/559

Grantor: Louise Allen Hobbs Atkins 

Grantee: William H. Sullivan and May 

L. Sullivan 

Transfer Date: 06/29/1929 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5111/593

Grantor: George Putman [sic], 

hairdresser 

Grantee: Robert Johnson, trader 

Transfer Date: 06/06/1853 

Consideration: $2,000 

Liber/Folio: 648/217

Grantor: John F. Sullivan, trustee 

under the decree of the Probate Court 

on the petition E. Edith Rounds, et al 

Grantee: Louise Allen Hobbs 

Transfer Date: 02/11/1925 

Consideration: $6,000 

Liber/Folio: 4653/226

Same property conveyed to William J. 

Rounds, by Sarah E. Williams 

Grantor: Henry B. Rogers 

Grantee: George Putnam, hairdresser 

Transfer Date: 03/26/1828 

Consideration: $439.13 

Liber/Folio: 326/266 

Henry Rogers is the heir of Daniel D. 

Rogers 

 

 PAGE 2 
Site 4—George Putnam (Putman) / Robert Johnson House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 69 Joy Street (16 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): George Putnam (Putman) /Robert 

Johnson House 

Grantor: Sabra Loomis 

Grantee: Robert P. Wood and Richard 

R. Crane 

Transfer Date: 11/07/1984 

Consideration: $172,500 

Liber/Folio: 11244/295

Grantor: Stanley E. Shulman and Janet 

Shulman 

Grantee: Max Cutler and Rae Cutler 

Transfer Date: 09/14/1970 

Consideration: $107,500 

Liber/Folio: 8389/141

Grantor: Stanley Shulman 

Grantee: Sabra Loomis 

Transfer Date: 04/01/1975 

Consideration: $45,000 

Liber/Folio: 8777/308

Grantor: John K. Jacobs and Elizabeth 

K. Jacobs 

Grantee: Stanley E. Shulman and 

Janet Shulman 

Transfer Date: 02/29/1968 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8186/236

Grantor: Rae Cutler 

Grantee: Stanley Shulman 

Transfer Date: 10/26/1973 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8670/649

Grantor: William M. Baxter 

Grantee: John K. Jacobs and Elizabeth 

Kinsman Jacobs 

Transfer Date: 06/30/1959 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7405/406

Grantor: Max Cutler 

Grantee: Rae Cutler 

Transfer Date: 10/24/1973 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8670/647

Grantor: William H. Sullivan 

Grantee: William M. Baxter 

Transfer Date: 11/28/1955 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7111/208

 

 PAGE 3 
Site 4—George Putnam (Putman) / Robert Johnson House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 69 Joy Street (16 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): George Putnam (Putman) / Robert 

Johnson House 

Grantor: Ingrid J.M. van Steeg-Gras 

and Martinus J. van-Steeg 

Grantee: Sean O’Donnell and Allison 

O’Donnell 

Transfer Date: 10/12/2001 

Consideration: $850,000 

Liber/Folio: 27203/309

Grantor: Steven M. Bauer 

Grantee: Jonathan R. Craft 

Transfer Date: 05/08/1997 

Consideration: $375,000 

Liber/Folio: 21395/50

Grantor: Martinus J. van-Steeg 

Grantee: Ingrid J.M. van-Steeg 

Transfer Date: 01/07/2000 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 24626/289

Grantor: Steven M. Bauer and Sarah 

E.C. Moynihan 

Grantee: Steven M. Bauer 

Transfer Date: 05/24/1991 

Consideration: $18,500 

Liber/Folio: 16881/40

Grantor: Jonathan Craft and Janet Ann 

Craft 

Grantee: Martinus J. van-Steeg 

Transfer Date: 09/17/1999 

Consideration: $670,000 

Liber/Folio: 24261/210

Grantor: Dale Koppel and Donald E. 

Carey 

Grantee: Steven M. Bauer and Sarah 

E.C. Moynihan 

Transfer Date: 06/15/1987 

Consideration: $437,500 

Liber/Folio: 13785/300

Grantor: Jonathan Craft 

Grantee: Jonathan and Janet Ann 

Craft 

Transfer Date: 09/11/1997 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 21797/45

Grantor: Robert P. Wood and Richard 

R. Crane 

Grantee: Dale Koppel and Donald E. 

Carey 

Transfer Date: 08/15/1985 

Consideration: $235,000 

Liber/Folio: 11839/226

 

 PAGE 4 
Site 5—Coffin Pitts House 

67 Joy Street (18 Belknap Street) 

67 Joy Street is a four-story three-bay brick building constructed circa 1900. This building 

may encompass an earlier structure built prior to 1835. Attached is a copy of the 1835 

Surveyor’s plan of the site, filed with the Registry of Deeds, showing a brick house on the 

property at the time that Coffin Pitts purchased 18 Belknap Street. The sidehall entry has an 

arch with keystone over the doorway. The doorway has a plain fanlight over the metal 

replacement door. The first story has a bricked in “storefront,” now with two windows. 

The painted limestone lintels and sills frame double-hung windows that are 1/1 lights and 

were most likely replaced in the twentieth century. The second and third story windows 

have corniced lintels with scrollwork; flat lintels with scrollwork are found on the fourth 

story. The modillion cornice at the roofline is also decorated with dentils and other 

moldings. Two brick corner pilasters extend from the cornice to the first story, as a 

decorative treatment. 
Site 5—Coffin Pitts House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 67 Joy Street (18 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): Coffin Pitts House 

Grantor: Louisa Gilmore 

Grantee: David Milton 

Transfer Date: 02/26/1900 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 2667/157

Grantor: Royal Makepeace 

Grantee: Charles Barrett 

Transfer Date: 07/20/1808 

Consideration: $2,500 

Liber/Folio: 226/146 

Property extends block width between 

Hancock and Belknap streets 

Grantor: Charles C. Pitts and Tresa A. 

Taylor 

Grantee: Louisa E. Gilmore 

Transfer Date: 01/02/1897 

Consideration: $2,000 

Liber/Folio: 2446/558

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

Grantor: Louisa E. Gilmore 

Grantee: Charles C. Pitts and Tresa A. 

Taylor 

Transfer Date: 05/07/1895 

Consideration: $2,000 

Liber/Folio: 2274/398 

James F. Gilmore (Louisa’s husband 

signs deed with his mark) 

Louisa has a life estate

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

Grantor: Charles Barrett, esquire 

Grantee: Coffin Pitts, clothesman 

Transfer Date: 03/12/1835 

Consideration: $1,500 

Liber/Folio: 388/173

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

 

 PAGE 1 
Site 5—Coffin Pitts House 

Chain of Title Form

Property Street Address: 67 Joy Street (18 Belknap Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): Coffin Pitts House 

Owner: S.P. and L. Company 

RLD: 359/ 124 

Cert. No. 72724 

Date: 07/02/1964 

Owner: Fannie Jacobs 

RLD: 25/163 

Cert. No. 5963 

Date: 02/05/1914 

Owner: Sol Freedman 

RLD: 341/105 

Cert. No. 69105 

Date: 01/26/1962 

Owner: Louis Jacobs 

RLD: 6/134 

Cert. No. 1634 

Date: 09/19/1907 

Owner: Rose Freedman 

RLD: 73/35 

Cert. No. 15435 

Date: 06/12/1923 

Owner: Hyman A. Appleton 

RLD: 3/200 

Cert. No. 800 

Date: 04/14/1905 

Owner: Harry Uchenick 

RLD: 63/86 

Cert. No. 13486 

Date: 11/16/1921 

Owner: Bessie Comman 

RLD: 2/345 

Cert. No. 570 

Date: 12/08/1903 

Owner: Mary Gilman 

RLD: 56/130 

Cert. No. 12130 

Date: 07/15/1920 

Owner: David Milton 

RLD: 1/82 

Cert. No. 82 

Date: 02/26/1900 

Owner: Charles Segal 

RLD: 46/32 

Cert. No. 10032 

Date: 06/25/1918 

 

 PAGE 2 


Site 6—James Scott/William C. Nell House 

3 Smith Court 

3 Smith Court is a three-story, five-bay Federal clapboard house with two two-story 

clapboard covered ells off the east and west faces of the main block. This structure was 

originally constructed in 1799; the ells were constructed at a later date. Set back from the 

street, the wide but shallow building has clapboarding on its front and sides, while in the rear 

it is supported by a windowless brick wall—a construction style, Terranova notes, common 

to several North Slope houses dating before 1805, all of which are facing side alleys.1

 Wood 

lintels and sills frame the double-hung 6/6-light windows. Exterior shutters have been 

mounted at the windows. The center hall main entry has a four-panel wood door with two 

bull’s eye glass windows. The doorway is framed with pilasters. A brick foundation sits 

under the main block; the ells have a wood frame foundation. The basement level has a 

door entry on the west ell. A door entry and vestibule is found on the first story of the east 

ell. 

 

1 Terranova, email to authors, 16 November 2002. Terranova notes that other examples

of this style are found on Joy Court, Holmes Alley, and on the north side of Pinckney 

Street. 
Site 6—James Scott House/William C. Nell House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 3 Smith Court 

Name of Property (all known names): William C. Nell House, James Scott House 

Grantor: James Scott 

Grantee: Thomas P. Taylor and Henry 

H.G. Scott 

Transfer Date: 10/01/1874 

Consideration: $4,000 

Liber/Folio: 1260/276

Witnessed by William I. Bowditch 

Grantor: Benejah Brigham 

Grantee: William Lancaster 

Transfer Date: 01/04/1802 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 199/295

Grantor: Joanna A. Stanford 

Grantee: James Scott, Dealer in 

Clothing 

Transfer Date: 05/26/1865 

Consideration: $5,000 

Liber/Folio: 859/174

Stanford is Powars daughter 

Grantor: Jeduthan Wellington, yeoman 

Grantee: William Lancaster and 

Benejah Brigham, bricklayers 

Transfer Date: 02/03/1799 

Consideration: $300 

Liber/Folio: 191/157

Grantor: William Lankaster 

Grantee: Joseph Powars 

Transfer Date: 01/06/1814 

Consideration: $800 

Liber/Folio: 243/159

Conveys another piece of the parcel 

Grantor: Elizabeth Carnes, formerly 

Elizabeth Fennecy 

Grantee: William Lancaster and 

Benejah Brigham 

Transfer Date: 06/01/1798 

Consideration: $170 

Liber/Folio: 190/40

Grantor: William Lankester [sic], 

bricklayer 

Grantee: Joseph Powars, trader 

Transfer Date: 10/11/1809 

Consideration: $1,000 

Liber/Folio: 230/152

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

 

 PAGE 1 

Chain of Title Form 
Site 6—James Scott House/William C. Nell House 

Property Street Address: 3 Smith Court 

Name of Property (all known names): William C. Nell House, James Scott House 

Grantor: Kenneth Keniston 

Grantee: Kenneth Keniston and 

Suzanne Berger Keniston 

Transfer Date: 09/22/1993 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 20676/55

Grantor: William B. Snow, Jr., trustee 

under the will of Elinor K.B. Snow 

Grantee: Margaret H. Bauer 

Transfer Date: 05/05/1949 

Consideration: $9,750 

Liber/Folio: 6516/324

Grantor: Mark B. Mitchell and Sarah L. 

Mitchell 

Grantee: Kenneth Keniston 

Transfer Date: 06/16/1975 

Consideration: $87,800 

Liber/Folio: 8793/549

Grantor: Bruce Snow, William B. Snow, 

Jr., Elinor Snow Weed and Wallace M. 

Snow 

Grantee: Margaret H. Bauer 

Transfer Date: 04/29/1949 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 6516/325

Grantor: John J. Stanton, et al, 

executors under the will of Margaret H. 

Bauer 

Grantee: Mark B. Mitchell and Sarah L. 

Mitchell 

Transfer Date: 07/16/1969 

Consideration: $42,750 

Liber/Folio: 8308/163

Grantor: R. Adelaide Washington, sole 

devisee under will of Caroline W. Taylor

Grantee: Elinor K.B. Snow 

Transfer Date: 05/05/1924 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4570/155

Grantor: John C. McCarthy, trustee of 

Byam Realty Trust 

Grantee: John J. Stanton, et al, 

executors under the will of Margaret H. 

Bauer 

Transfer Date: 07/11/1969 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8297/80

Grantor: James Scott 

Grantee: Thomas P. Taylor 

Transfer Date: 11/22/1876 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 1355/186

Conveys interest as sole heir of his son 

Henry H.G. Scott, deceased intestate 

 

 PAGE 2
Site 7—George Washington House 

5 Smith Court 

5 Smith Court is a three-story, two-bay vernacular Federal clapboard structure constructed 

circa 1825-35. Wood planks surround the 6/6-light windows. There is a one-step run to the 

sidehall entry on the façade. Narrow cornerboards edge the building. The upper stories of 

the façade have two bays, while the first story is three bays. The east elevation is three bays 

with a door entry on the first story. The roof of the building is not gabled but has a slight 

pitch toward the façade. 
Site 7—George Washington House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 5 Smith Court 

Name of Property (all known names): George Washington House 

Grantor: Samuel D. Parker, unmarried 

Grantee: George Washington, labourer 

Transfer Date: 04/25/1849 

Consideration: $1,000 

Liber/Folio: 600/36

Grantor: Theodore Phinney 

Grantee: Peter Mitchell & Timothy 

Phillips 

Transfer Date: 09/09/1799 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 192/192

Grantor: Peter Wilcox, labourer 

Grantee: Samuel D. Parker 

Transfer Date: 10/31/1815 

Consideration: $600 

Liber/Folio: 249/117

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Nilos Phillips (Timothy Phillips 

original owner) 

Grantee: Peter Wilcox 

Transfer Date: 06/21/1803 

Consideration: $40.00 

Liber/Folio: 206/10 

Grants Peter Wilcox Phillip’s right in 5 

Smith Court which is held in common 

and undivided with Peter Mitchell

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Peter Mitchell, assistant sugar 

boiler 

Grantee: Peter Wilcox, labourer 

Transfer Date: 11/13/1802 

Consideration: $150.00 

Liber/Folio: 203/104 

Conveys to Wilcox all that certain 

undivided half a lot or parcel of land 

situated in Boston

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

 
 

Site 8—Joseph Scarlett Tenant House 

7 Smith Court 

7 Smith Court is a vernacular Federal two-story three-bay shiplap clapboard-covered 

structure constructed between 1802 and 1811. The sidehall entry has a transom and 

fanlights, with a one-step run into the building. The trim around the door entry has a beaded 

moulding. Double end chimneys are found on the west edge of the building. A parapet wall 

tops the façade wall above the cornice. Beaded wood trim surrounds the 6/6-light windows. 

An oriel window with brackets had been added to the second story on the façade of the 

building. The western elevation has three bays and an entry on the basement level. The 

structure has a brick foundation. 

 
Site 8—Joseph Scarlett Tenant House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 7 Smith Court 

Name of Property (all known names): Joseph Scarlett House 

Grantor: John A. Bates, gentleman; 

Mary Leach Sampson, widow; Henry 

Bates, sailmaker; and Joseph L. Bates, 

trader 

Grantee: Joseph Scarlett, chimney 

sweeper 

Transfer Date: 06/15/1857 

Consideration: $800 

Liber/Folio: 719/135

Elihu Bates was grantors’ father 

Grantor: Theodore Phinney 

Grantee: Peter Guss 

Transfer Date: 08/12/1799 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 192/135

Grantor: Amos Binney, administrator 

of estate of Lydia Tuckerman 

Grantee: Elihu Bates, merchant 

Transfer Date: 10/05/1811 

Consideration: $570 

Liber/Folio: 239/267

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Joseph Blaney 

Grantee: Lydia Tuckerman & ux 

Transfer Date: 08/07/1802 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 202/58

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Peter Guss 

Grantee: Joseph Blaney 

Transfer Date: 08/03/1802 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 202/38

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

 

 PAGE 1 
Site 8—Joseph Scarlett Tenant House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 7 Smith Court 

Name of Property (all known names): Joseph Scarlett House

Grantor: Barbara T. Nelson, aka 

Barbara T. Waterman 

Grantee: John J. Lisiewski and Eva J. 

Lisiewski 

Transfer Date: 04/10/1953 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 6859/430

Grantor: William H. McEachern 

Grantee: Rose S. Sullivan, Margaret B. 

Sullivan and Julia S. O’Connor Parker 

Transfer Date: 01/04/1922 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4337/16

Grantor: Effie V. Jordan 

Grantee: Barbara T. Waterman 

Transfer Date: 02/08/1946 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 6202/265

Grantor: Rose Jacobvitz 

Grantee: William H. McEachern 

Transfer Date: 04/06/1921 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4285/238

Grantor: Charles A. Parker 

Grantee: Effie V. Jordan 

Transfer Date: 03/08/1929 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5084/346

Grantor: N. Thomas Merritt, Jr. 

Grantee: Rose Jacobvitz 

Transfer Date: 01/09/1906 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 3108/617

Grantor: Rose Sullivan, Margaret B. 

Sullivan and Julia S. O’Connor Parker 

Grantee: Charles A. Parker 

Transfer Date: 04/12/1928 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4995/357

Grantor: Arthur E. Austin (estate of 

Joseph Scarlett) 

Grantee: N. Thomas Merritt, Jr. 

Transfer Date: 11/05/1904 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 3002/243

 

 PAGE 2 
Site 8—Joseph Scarlett Tenant House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 7 Smith Court 

Name of Property (all known names): Joseph Scarlett House 

Grantor: Brenda Case Scheer, aka 

Brenda C. Lightner 

Grantee: Martin L. Crimmins, IV and 

Jessica Perles Crimmins 

Transfer Date: 09/23/1996 

Consideration: $376,000 

Liber/Folio: 20898/292

Grantor: M. Mark Klein, trustee of 

Endurance Realty Trust 

Grantee: Joseph H. Hastings and 

Joseph A. Gautreau 

Transfer Date: 06/10/1964 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7855/9

Grantor: Sanford Kaye and Mary A.M. 

Kaye 

Grantee: Brenda C. Lightner 

Transfer Date: 04/11/1988 

Consideration: $275,000 

Liber/Folio: 14611/124

Grantor: Eva J. Anopol 

Grantee: M. Mark Klein, trustee of 

Endurance Realty Trust 

Transfer Date: 09/01/1962 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7678/38

Grantor: Pranab K. Das and Phyllis J. 

Das 

Grantee: Sanford Kaye and Mary A.M. 

Kaye 

Transfer Date: 03/31/1976 

Consideration: $47,000 

Liber/Folio: 8859/326 

Kayes’ lived at 69 Joy Street

Grantor: Beverly Litwalk 

Grantee: Eva J. Anopol 

Transfer Date: 12/03/1958 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7361/472

Grantor: Stuart H. Hastings and 

Joseph A. Gautreau 

Grantee: Pranab K. Das and Phyllis J. 

Das 

Transfer Date: 05/04/1967 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8116/12

Grantor: John J. Lisiewski and Eva J. 

Lisiewski 

Grantee: Beverly Litwalk 

Transfer Date: 12/03/1958 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7361/471

 

 PAGE 3 
Site 9—Holmes Alley House 

7A Smith Court 

7A Smith Court is a vernacular Federal three-story, five-bay clapboard-covered structure 

constructed in 1799 that is located on Holmes Alley. The center entry has an Italianateperiod hood added at a later date and a one-step run up to the building. Wood frames, 

splayed lintels, and flat sills frame the 6/6-light windows. In addition, wood shutters frame 

the windows on the first story. The windows over the door entry are smaller than the 

remaining windows. The structure has a brick foundation. 
Site 9—Holmes Alley House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 7A Smith Court 

Name of Property (all known names): Joseph Scarlett House 

Grantor: Rose S. Sullivan, Margaret B. 

Sullivan and Julia S. O’Connor Parker 

Grantee: Charles Parker 

Transfer Date: 04/12/1928 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4995/357

Grantor: Josephine St. P. Ruffin, 

guardian of Anna R. Moore, an insane 

person and child of Jacob J. Moore 

Grantee: Rosa Jacobvitz 

Transfer Date: 05/20/1909 

Consideration: $200 

Liber/Folio: 3366/205

One undivided 1⁄2 interest under will of 

Joseph Scarlett 

Grantor: William H. McEachern 

Grantee: Rose S. Sullivan, Margaret B. 

Sullivan and Julia S. O’Connor Parker 

Transfer Date: 01/04/1922 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4337/16

Grantor: Thomas Haskell 

Grantee: Joseph Scarlett 

Transfer Date: 07/17/1863 

Consideration: $850.00 

Liber/Folio: 831/9

Grantor: Rose Jacobvitz 

Grantee: William H. McEachern 

Transfer Date: 04/12/1921 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4286/83

Grantor: Charles Bowers, administrator 

of the estate of David Beal 

Grantee: Thomas F. Haskell, carpenter 

Transfer Date: 01/18/1844 

Consideration: $463.86 

Liber/Folio: 515/132

Grantor: Virginia J. Moore, unmarried 

Grantee: Rosa Jacobvitz 

Transfer Date: 05/20/1909 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 3366/204

One undivided 1⁄2 interest under will of 

Joseph Scarlett 

Grantor: Charles Cushing 

Grantee: David Beal 

Transfer Date: 06/10/1833 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 381/59

 

 PAGE 1 
Site 9—Holmes Alley House 

Chain of Title Form

Property Street Address: 7A Smith Court 

Name of Property (all known names): Joseph Scarlett House 

Grantor: Dorothy Margaret Leef 

Grantee: Lawrance O’Connor and Mary 

Lovely O’Connor 

Transfer Date: 07/31/2001 

Consideration: $685,000 

Liber/Folio: 26782/65

Grantor: Winthrop K. Deane and Mary 

J. Deane 

Grantee: David M. Thomas and Helen 

M. Thomas 

Transfer Date: 03/23/1959 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7383/330

Grantor: Dorothy Margaret Leef, Cotrustee and John J. Roche, Co-trustee 

Grantee: Dorothy Margaret Leef 

Transfer Date: 11/04/1999 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 24461/140, 142

Grantor: Margaret Sanderson 

Grantee: Winthrop K. Deane and Mary 

J. Deane 

Transfer Date: 12/02/1952 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 6831/106

Grantor: Charles N. Leef and Dorothy 

M.P. Leef 

Grantee: Charles N. Leef 

Transfer Date: 11/30/1992 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 17902/318

Grantor: Canton Institution for Savings

Grantee: Margaret Sanderson 

Transfer Date: 01/02/1939 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5767/76

Grantor: David A. Thomas and Helen 

M. Thomas 

Grantee: Charles N. Leef and Dorothy 

M.P. Leef 

Transfer Date: 11/20/1962 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7699/223

Grantor: Charles A. Parker 

Grantee: Canton Institution for Savings 

Transfer Date: 08/07/1936 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 5618/108

 

 PAGE 2 
Site 10—William Henry / Joseph Scarlett House 

2 Smith Court 

2 Smith Court is a vernacular Federal three-story, three-bay brick structure constructed in

1853. Originally constructed as a two-story structure, the third story was added at a later 

date.2 The sidehall entry was bricked in at an unknown time to make a smaller entry. 

Brownstone lintels and sills frame the double-hung 2/2-light windows. At the cornice, a 

dog-tooth course has been used as a decorative treatment. A six-step run leads to the entry 

door. 

 

2 An engraved woodcut made in 1851 that primarily depicts the African Meeting House

shows at far right a small frame house where William Henry’s house would have been. 

It is shown in this view as one and a half stories with its gable end to the street and a 

center chimney. Rosebrock, “Historical Account of the Joy Street Block,” 22.
Site 10—William Henry/Joseph Scarlett House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 2 Smith Court 

Name of Property (all known names): William Henry/Joseph Scarlett House 

Grantor: Samuel E. Sewall 

Grantee: Dexter Bowker, carpenter 

Transfer Date: 05/19/1846 

Consideration: $475 

Liber/Folio: 562/105 

“one undivided third part” 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: John Cutts Smith, gentleman 

Grantee: Samuel E. Sewall 

Transfer Date: 11/06/1844 

Consideration: $1.00 

Liber/Folio: 533/1 

“one undivided third interest” 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Francis Henry, son of William 

Henry 

Grantee: John Cutts Smith 

Transfer Date: 08/06/1844 

Consideration: $1.00 

Liber/Folio: 533/1 

“grants all his right, title, interest; and 

estate in and to lands and tenements in 

Boston which descended to me from my 

late father William Henry” 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

 PAGE 1
Site 10—William Henry/Joseph Scarlett House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 2 Smith Court 

Name of Property (all known names): William Henry/Joseph Scarlett House 

Grantor: Samuel A.B. Abbott 

Grantee: Mary Power, wife of Henry J. 

Power 

Transfer Date: 07/19/1899 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 2622/389

Grantor: Dexter Bowker, carpenter 

Grantee: Joseph Scarlett 

Transfer Date: 10/20/1852 

Consideration: $400 

Liber/Folio: 638/234

Grants Scarlett one undivided third part of 

2 Smith Court 

Grantor: William A. Prescott 

Grantee: Samuel A.B. Abbott 

Transfer Date: 10/23/1878 

Consideration: $2,500 

Liber/Folio: 1438/1

Grantor: Samuel S. Sewall 

Grantee: Joseph Scarlett 

Transfer Date: 09/08/1852 

Consideration: $400 

Liber/Folio: 637/117 

Grants Scarlett one undivided third part of 

2 Smith Court 

Grantor: Joseph Scarlett 

Grantee: William A. Prescott 

Transfer Date: 05/01/1878 

Consideration: $4,000 

Liber/Folio: 1418/41

Grantor: Susanah T. Henry, 

singlewoman 

Grantee: Joseph Scarlett, laborer 

Transfer Date: 08/21/1852 

Consideration: $175 

Liber/Folio: 636/91

Grants Scarlett one undivided third in 2 

Smith Court 

Witnesses by Robert Morris, JP 

Grantor: Joshua Bennett, gentleman 

Grantee: Joseph Scarlett, trader 

Transfer Date: 03/03/1854 

Consideration: $80 

Liber/Folio: 659/86 

Grantor: Augustine Henry, son of 

William Henry 

Grantee: Samuel E. Sewall 

Transfer Date: 11/18/1851 

Consideration: $30.00 

Liber/Folio: 626/248 

“one undivided third part” 

 

 PAGE 2 
Site 13—George Middleton/Lewis Glapion House 

5 Pinckney Street 

5 Pinckney Street is a vernacular Federal 21⁄2 -story, four-bay clapboard house with a dormer 

window at the roofline. This structure was originally constructed 1786-91; the dormers were 

most likely added at a later date. The double-hung 6/6-light windows have wooden lintels 

and sills. The center-hall main entry appears to have had a double-door entry, which has 

been reduced to a single six-panel wooden door and louvered door. While the house has 

four bays, the windows on the first floor are not equal in size. The window west of the entry 

door is larger than the two windows east of the entry door. The cornice is plain fascia board 

up into the roofline. The roof and dormer are both covered with slate shingles. A brick 

chimneystack is found at the eastern edge of the structure. Two wooden steps run up to the 

entry door. 

Site 15—Second John P. Coburn House 

2 Phillips Street 

2 Phillips Street is a 3 1⁄2 - story, three-bay Federal brick townhouse constructed 1843-46 for 

John P. Coburn, an African-American entrepreneur, and designed by Asher Benjamin. The 

sidehall entry has a painted stone lintel and a five-step run to the doorway. The double-hung 

windows have painted lintels and sills and are primarily 6/6 lights. The brick double 

chimneys are connected by a parapeted gable and are located at the east and west ends of the 

building. A pedimented dormer window pierces the roofline. Brick has been used to form a 

slightly projecting cornice, topped by a dog-tooth course. A decorative iron balconet crosses 

the front of the façade. 
Site 15—John P. Coburn House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 2 Phillips Street (2 Southac Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): John P. Coburn House (Second) 

Grantor: Salvatore R. Onessimo, Albert 

J. Onessimo, & Josephine Sciarrillo, 

Trustees of the Staniford Realty Trust 

Grantee: Peter Kinder 

Transfer Date: 01/18/1963 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7715/522

Grantor: Elizabeth Branch 

Grantee: Thomas Jackson 

Transfer Date: 03/03/1824 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 289/82

Grantor: Ralph E. Hunt & Ruth E. Hunt 

Grantee: Salvatore R. Onessimo, 

Albert J. Onessimo & Josephine 

Sciarrillo, Trustee of the Staniford 

Realty Trust 

Transfer Date: 08/01/1960 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7494/486

Grantor: Isaac Peirce 

Grantee: Peter Branch 

Transfer Date: 08/21/1793 

Consideration: $30 

Liber/Folio: 177/17

Grantor: Edwin D. Brooks, Sr. & Moses 

Williams, Trustees under the will of 

Charles A. Kennedy 

Grantee: Ralph E. Hunt & Ruth E. Hunt 

Transfer Date: 07/06/1956 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7166/66

Holders of mortgage of Wendell T. Coburn 

from 1880 

Grantor: Henry Roby, &al 

Grantee: Isaac Peirce 

Transfer Date: 05/18/1793 

Consideration: £ 45 

Liber/Folio: 176/12

Grantor: Samuel E. Sewall, 

Administrator under will of Amy 

Jackson 

Grantee: John P. Coburn 

Transfer Date: 04/30/1841 

Consideration: $1,000 

Liber/Folio: 467/129

Coburn won bid on houses at auction 

Grantor: William Cock 

Grantee: Joseph Roby &al 

Transfer Date: 05/08/1734 

Consideration: £ 183 

Liber/Folio: 48/217

 

 PAGE 1 
Site 15—John P. Coburn House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 2 Phillips Street ( 2 Southac Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): John P. Coburn House (Second) 

Grantor: Gerrit Schuurman & Douglas 

Friend 

Grantee: The 2 Phillips Street 

Condominium 

Transfer Date: 07/22/1985 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 11746/215

Grantor: Harold G. Richardson 

Grantee: Susan A. Monzani, Louise F. 

Monzani, & Joanne V. Davis d/b/a 2 

Phillips Street Partnership 

Transfer Date: 08/01/1980 

Consideration: $150,000 

Liber/Folio: 9492/69

Grantor: Steven M. Glovsky & Susan 

G.L. Glovsky 

Grantee: Gerrit Schuurman & Douglas 

Friend 

Transfer Date: 07/22/1985 

Consideration: $423,000 

Liber/Folio: 11746/213

Grantor: Richard Procaccini 

Grantee: Harold G. Richardson 

Transfer Date: 12/24/1972 

Consideration: $70,000 

Liber/Folio: 8595/710

Grantor: Joanne V. Davis, Susan M. 

Swig, & Louise M. Clough 

Grantee: Steven M. Glovsky & Susan 

G.L. Glovsky 

Transfer Date: 03/20/1984 

Consideration: $247,000 

Liber/Folio: 10828/132

Grantor: Lawrence L. Burckmyer 

Grantee: Richard Procaccini 

Transfer Date: 04/04/1968 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 8195/305

Grantor: Susan A. Monzani, Louise M. 

Clough, & Joanne V. Davis 

Grantee: Two Phillips Street 

Condominium 

Transfer Date: 11/30/1981 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 9880/351 

Never became a Condominium 

Grantor: Peter N. Kinder 

Grantee: Lawrence L. Burckmyer 

Transfer Date: 09/06/1963 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 7777/387

 

 PAGE 2 
Site 16—Site of Henry L.W. Thacker House 

5 Phillips Street 

5 Phillips Street is a four-story, three-bay brick townhouse constructed circa 1890-1910. The 

sidehall main entry has a six-panel wooden door. Above the door is a twelve-pane transom 

with diamond-shaped pane in center. An entrance to the basement level has been numbered 

5A. The upper stories on the building have distinct lintel styles on each floor: they are dogear on the first floor, splayed with a keystone on the second, splayed with a flat-faced 

keystone on the third, and decorated with a cornice on the fourth. The modillion cornice at 

the roofline is also decorated with dentils and egg-and-dart moldings. Fleur-de-lys molding 

is found on the fascia of the building. The double-hung windows on the façade are primarily 

1/1 lights. 
Site 16—Henry L.W. Thacker House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 5 Phillips Street (formerly Southac) 

Name of Property (all known names): Henry L.W. Thacker House 

Grantor: Mary C. Forbes, widow of 

William W. Forbes 

Grantee: Jennie Cohen and Eva 

Krinsky 

Transfer Date: 09/27/1905 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 3073/593

Grantor: William Taylor 

Grantee: Theodore Strong 

Transfer Date: 07/06/1820 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 268/117

Grantor: Amelia Thacker 

Grantee: William W. Forbes 

Transfer Date: 04/11/1871 

Consideration: $2,500 

Liber/Folio: 1042/255

Thacker daughter of Henry L.W. Thacker 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Henry Wood 

Grantee: Henry L.W. Thacker 

Transfer Date: 10/10/1833 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 373/72

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Theodore Strong, Esq. 

Grantee: Henry Wood 

Transfer Date: 08/16/1833 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 371/213

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

 

 PAGE 1 
Site 17—John P. Coburn House/Coburn Court 

Rear of 24-28 Phillips Street 

3 Coburn Court is two stories with a raised basement. It is a three-bay, Federal brick 

townhouse built prior to 1830. The sidehall entry has an arched brick lintel and a seven-step 

run to the doorway. The wooden double-hung windows have brick lintels and stone sills 

and are primarily 2/2 lights. A brick chimney is located at the west end of the building. 

Two rows of brick project at the roofline to form a cornice. The building is partially covered 

by stucco or concrete, and structural tie rods are seen between the first and second stories. 

The raised basement has a four-panel wooden door west of the main entry and a 6/6-light 

wooden double-hung window. 
Site 17—John P. Coburn House 

Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 3 Coburn Court 

Name of Property (all known names): John P. Coburn House 

Grantor: Mary Jane Coburn, trustee 

under will of Wendell T. Coburn 

Grantee: Charles W. Glidden 

Transfer Date: 09/07/1889 

Consideration: $1.00 

Liber/Folio: 1896/377

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Abraham Moore 

Grantee: John P. Coburn, clothes 

dealer 

Transfer Date: 02/17/1835 

Consideration: $1,500 

Liber/Folio: 386/233

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Robert Robbins 

Grantee: Thomas Nudd & Abraham 

Moore 

Transfer Date: 12/13/1830 

Consideration: $1.00 

Liber/Folio: 349/268

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

 

 PAGE 1 
Site 19—Lewis Hayden House 

66 Phillips Street 

66 Phillips Street is a vernacular Federal four-story, three-bay brick structure constructed 

circa 1825-40 with a slate Mansard-style roof of a later period. The sidehall entry has two 

doors. The outer doorway has a fanlight with sidelights. The inner door has a five-pane 

transom and sidelights. The windows have brownstone lintels and sills, while the main entry 

has a brownstone lintel and a five-step run made of granite. The raised basement windows 

have brownstone lintels as well. A brick end chimney is located on the western wall of the 

building. The double-hung windows on the façade have 6/6 lights, and shutters are attached 

to the exterior face of the building on the three upper levels. A passageway along the 

western side of the building leads into the back of the property. 
Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 66 Phillips Street (formerly Southac) 

Name of Property (all known names): Lewis Hayden House 

Grantor: Norwood P. Hallowell, 

executor of will of Harriet Hayden 

Grantee: William H. Smith, guardian of 

John B. Smith 

Transfer Date: 03/01/1894 

Consideration: $4,000 

Liber/Folio: 2184/30

Grantor: Joseph F. Sinclair and 

Andrew Horn 

Grantee: William Foster 

Transfer Date: 05/26/1843 

Consideration: $4,000 

Liber/Folio: 502/180

Grantor: Edmund Jackson, executor of 

the last will of Francis Jackson 

Grantee: Harriet Hayden, wife of Lewis 

Hayden 

Transfer Date: 10/02/1865 

Consideration: $2,250 

Liber/Folio: 870/161

Deed Witnessed by Robert Morris, JP 

Grantor: Ward Jackson 

Grantee: Joseph F. Sinclair and 

Andrew Horn 

Transfer Date: 03/21/1843 

Consideration: $4,000 

Liber/Folio: 498/30

Grantor: Warren Insurance Co. 

Grantee: Francis Jackson 

Transfer Date: 10/26/1853 

Consideration: $2,250 

Liber/Folio: 653/201

Jno. Dimmock, Pres of Warren Ins. 

Witnessed by Robert Morris, JP 

Grantor: William Foster 

Grantee: Ward Jackson 

Transfer Date: 10/04/1842 

Consideration: $8,000 

Liber/Folio: 492/246

Grantor: William Foster 

Grantee: Warren Insurance Co. 

Transfer Date: 10/20/1846 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 568/261

Foreclosure on $20,000 mortgage from 

Foster to Warren Ins. Co. 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio:

 

 PAGE 1 
Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 66 Phillips Street (formerly Southac) 

Name of Property (all known names): Lewis Hayden House 

Grantor: Harry P. Chadwick 

Grantee: Edward Galiano 

Transfer Date: 08/09/1926 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4835/370

Grantor: Collector of Taxes, City of 

Boston 

Grantee: Bertha F. Kennedy 

Transfer Date: 05/15/1925 

Consideration: $9.18 

Liber/Folio: 4680/68

Grantor: Collector of Taxes, City of 

Boston 

Grantee: Harry P. Chadwick 

Transfer Date: 04/13/1926 

Consideration: $113.65 

Liber/Folio: 4782/507

Grantor: Collector of Taxes, City of 

Boston 

Grantee: Bertha F. Kennedy 

Transfer Date: 05/15/1925 

Consideration: $104.81 

Liber/Folio: 4680/66

Grantor: Collector of Taxes, City of 

Boston 

Grantee: Edward Galiano 

Transfer Date: 04/10/1926 

Consideration: $15.66 

Liber/Folio: 4777/275

Grantor: Collector of Taxes, City of 

Boston 

Grantee: George A. Richards 

Transfer Date: 01/29/1923 

Consideration: $10.87 

Liber/Folio: 4433/170

Grantor: Collector of Taxes, City of 

Boston 

Grantee: Edward Galiano 

Transfer Date: 04/10/1926 

Consideration: $118.74 

Liber/Folio: 4777/274

Grantor: Collector of Taxes, City of 

Boston 

Grantee: George A. Richards 

Transfer Date: 01/29/1923 

Consideration: $169.16 

Liber/Folio: 4433/168 

Payment of taxes assessed to William 

H. and Mary J. Smith, heirs or devisees 

as owners of land

 

 PAGE 2 
Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 66 Phillips Street (Southac) 

Name of Property (all known names): Lewis Hayden House 

Owner: John R. Gier, III and Mary E. 

Way 

RLD: 443/115 

Cert. No. 89515 

Date: 11/02/1977 

Owner: Lillian S. MacLennan 

RLD: 99/173 

Cert. No. 20773 

Date: 09/22/1926 

Owner: Bruce Macdougal and Jill O. 

Macdougal 

RLD: 434/21 

Cert. No. 87621 

Date: 04/01/1976 

Owner: Edward Galiano 

RLD: 99/166 

Cert. No. 20766 

Date: 09/21/1926 

Owner: Clarinda C. Northrop 

RLD: 379/53 

Cert. No. 76653 

Date: 06/01/1967 

Owner: Florence B. Pockwinse 

RLD: 345/24 

Cert. No. 69824 

Date: 08/01/1962 

 

 

PAGE 3 
Site 20—Site of John Sweat Rock House 

81-83 Phillips Street 

81-83 Phillips Street is a four-story brick building constructed circa 1890-1905 that appears 

to be two three-bay structures that share a partition wall. It has two entries. Both structures 

have sidehall entries. The current structure incorporated 81 Phillips Street and 83 Phillips 

Street into one property. 

81 Phillips Street is a four-story, three-bay brick structure with a sidehall entry. The doorway 

has a limestone lintel with pediment and fleur-de-lys decorative treatment. The four-panel 

wood door has six panes of glazing, as well as a twelve-pane transom with diamond-shaped 

pane in center above the door. Limestone lintels cap the double-hung windows, primarily 

6/6 lights. The upper stories on the building have distinct lintel styles on each floor: they 

are lintels with cornice and fleur-de-lys decorative treatment on the first floor, splayed lintels 

with keystone on the second, flat-face splayed lintels on the third, and lintels with cornice on 

the fourth. The modillion cornice at the roofline is also decorated with dentils. 

83 Phillips Street is a four-story, three-bay brick structure with a sidehall entry and a 

secondary basement entry located on the south face of the building along a passageway. The 

doorway has a limestone dog-ear lintel. The two-panel wood door has eight-panes of 

glazing, as well as a transom identical to 81 Phillips. Limestone lintels cap the double-hung 

windows, primarily 6/6 lights. The upper stories on the building have distinct lintel styles on 

each floor: they are dog-ear lintels on the first floor, splayed lintels with keystone on the 

second, flat-face splayed lintels on the third, and lintels with cornice on the fourth. The 

modillion cornice at the roofline is also decorated with dentils. 
Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 83 Phillips Street (Formerly Southac) 

Name of Property (all known names): John Sweat Rock House/William T. 

Manix Boardinghouse 

Grantor: Frederick Clapp, gentleman 

Grantee: Jacob Sleeper and Andrew 

Carney, gentlemen 

Transfer Date: 08/23/1849 

Consideration: $8500 

Liber/Folio: 603/62

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Ralph W. Holman 

Grantee: Frederick Clapp 

Transfer Date: 02/04/1848 

Consideration: $9,000 

Liber/Folio: 587/244 

“Two new brick dwelling houses” 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

 

 PAGE 1 
Chain of Title Form 

Property Street Address: 83 Phillips Street (formerly Southac Street) 

Name of Property (all known names): John Sweat Rock House/William T. 

Manix Boardinghouse 

Grantor: David Z. Fox 

Grantee: Isaac Sprague Jr., Louis C. 

Cornish & Elliott Henderson, trustees of 

the Sentry Hill Trust 

Transfer Date: 01/08/26 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4755/348

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Samuel Fox 

Grantee: David Z. Fox 

Transfer Date: 10/10/1925 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4731/140

Grantor: Mary C. Forbes, widow of 

William W. Forbes 

Grantee: Louis Zieman 

Transfer Date: 09/27/1905 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 3073/594

Grantor: Frances Lasman 

Grantee: Samuel Fox 

Transfer Date: 08/23/1923 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 4499/460

Grantor: Benjamin F. Brooks, Joseph A 

Laforme & Joseph Comer, under will of 

Andrew Carney 

Grantee: William W. Forbes 

Transfer Date: 07/08/1872 

Consideration: $5000 

Liber/Folio: 1116/232

Grantor: 

Grantee: 

Transfer Date: 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 

Grantor: Jacob Sleeper 

Grantee: Andrew Carney 

Transfer Date: 03/24/1854 

Consideration: 

Liber/Folio: 672/1

 

 PAGE 2 
Site 21—Thomas Paul House 

36 West Cedar Street (formerly 26 George Street) 

36 West Cedar Street is a Federal-style three-story, three-bay brick structure constructed 

circa 1815-223 that was painted at an unknown date. This building shares partition walls 

with 34 West Cedar Street on the south and 38 West Cedar Street on the north. The sidehall 

entry has a Federal-style fanlight and sidelights, an eight-paneled wooden door, and a twostep run to the door. The wooden shuttered windows have painted lintels and flat sills. 

The double-hung windows on the façade have 6/6 lights on the first and third stories and 

9/9 lights on the second story. Painted lintels are seen at the base of the façade, perhaps a 

sign of earlier-period cellar windows. A 6/6-light gable dormer window pierces the roof at 

the northeast corner of the structure. Tie rods have been used to stabilize the structure 

between each story. Two rows of brick have been laid to form a slightly projecting cornice 

at the roofline. 

 

3Boston Tax Records show Paul living on George Street in 1822, and Boston City

Directories show Paul living at 26 George Street from 1823 until 1831. Boston 

Landmarks Commission dates the structure circa 1819-1829, Colleen Meagher, 

Preservation Planner, City of Boston-The Environment Department, telephone 

conversation with authors, 19 November 2002)
Site 22—Site of John A. Andrew House 

110 Charles Street 

110 Charles Street is a four-story, three-bay brick townhouse structure constructed circa 

1890-1910 with a Federal Revival entry. The sidehall entry has inner and outer doors. The 

outer doorway has a fanlight with a sidelight. The inner door leads to a commercial space 

and residential space on the upper stories. The windows have limestone splayed lintels and 

flat sills, while the semicircular arched main entry has a limestone keystone. Brick end 

chimneys are located on the northern and southern partition walls of the building. The 

double-hung windows on the façade have 6/6 lights on the second, third, and fourth stories, 

while the first story has a commercial display window that was added at an unknown date. A 

brownstone belt course is located between the first and second stories and a limestone sill 

course at the fourth story. Brick dentils are found at the roofline of the structure. 
Site 23— Charles Street Meetinghouse /Charles Street AME Church 

62-76 Charles Street/121 Mt. Vernon Street 

The former Charles Street AME Church is a brick structure built in 1807. The five-bay front 

façade has a projecting three-bay vestibule. Three doorways are located on the façade, each 

having a Federal-style semicircular fanlight and a three-step run to the doorway. The upper 

stories of the vestibule have double-hung windows with 12/12 lights set within brick 

archways. The other two bays of the façade have brick archways and entry doors at street 

level with a triangular wooden louvered shutter over the archway and under the gable roof. 

Five bays are also found on the east and west elevations of the church. Windows along the 

eastern wall have two-story-high archways as on the façade. The first-story windows are 

double-hung 8/8-light windows, and the second-story windows have a double-hung 

semicircular arch window with 22/20 lights. A cornice is found above the second story of

the vestibule and along the roofline. The church has a brick clock tower with a wooden 

steeple. The east elevation of the Charles Street Meetinghouse/Charles Street AME Church 

bears a resemblance to the African Meeting House on Smith Court. 
Site 24—John J. Smith House 

86 Pinckney Street 

86 Pinckney Street is a vernacular Federal-style four-story, four-bay brick townhouse 

structure constructed circa 1835-454. This building shares partition walls with 31 West Cedar 

Street on the west and 84 Pinckney Street on the east. The off-center entry has a brick 

archway, Federal-style fanlight and sidelights, a six-paneled wooden door, and a three-step 

run to the door. The wooden shuttered windows have brownstone lintels and flat sills. The 

double-hung windows on the façade have 6/6 lights on the first, third, and fourth stories, 

while the second story has an oriel window, which was added at an unknown date, and two 

double-hung 6/6-light windows. The granite foundation has three windows. At the cornice, 

a dog-tooth course has been used as a decorative treatment. A dormer window pierces the 

roof at the northwest corner of the structure. An additional entry is found on the façade,

most likely leading to a basement or a passageway from an earlier period. 

 

4 Boston Landmarks Commission dates the structure to 1840, documented by the 

owner at the time of the survey. Colleen Meagher, Preservation Planner, City of BostonThe Environment Department, telephone conversation with authors, 19 November

2002. 
Site 25—George and Susan Hillard House 

62 Pinckney Street 

62 Pinckney Street is a four-story, three-bay Greek Revival-style brick townhouse 

constructed circa 1830-40. The sidehall entry has a two-paneled wooden double door with 

glazing and a five-step run to the door. A brownstone dog-ear lintel caps the door. The 

double-hung windows have primarily 6/6 lights and brownstone lintels and sills. Wooden

shutters are found at all the windows. Two wooden framed dormer windows pierce the roof 

on the façade wall of the structure. Brick has been used at the roofline to form a modest 

cornice with dentil detail. The granite foundation has window openings on the basement

level. 
Site 26—Charles Sumner House 

20 Hancock Street 

20 Hancock Street is a Federal-style four-story, three-bay brick structure constructed circa 

1810-20. This building shares partition walls with 22 Hancock Street on the south and 18 

Hancock Street on the north. The sidehall entry has a Federal-style fanlight and sidelights, a 

six-paneled wooden door, and a two-step run to the door. A Greek Revival portico, most 

likely added during the 1830s or 1840s, fronts 20 Hancock Street and its southern neighbor, 

22 Hancock Street, and is decorated with dentils at the cornice and Doric columns. Scored 

brownstone splayed lintels and flat sills surround the windows. The double-hung windows 

on the façade have 6/6 lights on the first and fourth stories and 6/9 lights on the second and 

third stories. A brownstone belt course is found above the first story of the structure. A 

moulded cornice is located at the roofline. The granite block foundation has openings for 

windows. 
APPENDIX B 

Maps 

1. The Town of Boston in New England by John Bonner, 1722 

2. William Price, A New Plan of ye Great Town of Boston in New England in America with the many 

Additionall [sic] Buildings & New Streets to the Year 1743 

3. Thomas Page, A Plan of the Town of Boston with the Intrenchments &c. of His Majesty’s Forces in 

1775 from the Observations of Lieut. Page of His Majesty’s Corps of Engineers; and from the Plans 

of other Gentlemen 

4. A New and Correct Plan of the Town of Boston, 1775 

5. Osgood Carleton, A Plan of Boston from Actual5urvey, 1796 

6. The West End, in Annie Haven Thwing, The Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston, 

1630-1822, 1920 

7. John G. Hales, Map of Boston in the State of Massachusetts, 1814 

8. George G. Smith, Plan of Boston Comprising a Part of Charlestown and Cambridge, 1835 

9. G. W. Colton, Map of Boston and Adjacent Cities, 1856 

10. Tilly Haynes, New Map of Boston, 1884 

11. Griffin M. Hopkins, Part of Ward Six; Boston, 1874