Marblehead project will help find the history of free and enslaved people of color – Wicked Local

Marblehead Museum launches online database with key details

Leigh Blander/Special to the Marblehead Reporter| Wicked Local

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In the newspaper ad, Marblehead resident Joseph Homan offers a $2 reward for his escaped enslaved person, Jack, who ranaway on Sept. 17, 1770. Homan describes him as 6 feet tall and from Martinico, or Martinique. Its not known if Jack was ever captured.

The ad, which appeared in Salem and Boston papers, is one of the most striking items in the Marblehead Museums new project, The Free and Enslaved People of Color in Marblehead. Its an online database of people of color in Marblehead through 1900. It currently lists 45 people - about 75% of them were enslaved to Marblehead residents.

Each entry includes a narrative about the person, said Marblehead Museum Director Lauren McCormack. We take peoples history and expand upon it so its not just a name and a date but a little bit of a story about each individual and how they lived and worked in Marblehead and became part of the community.

You can see the database at https://bipocdatabase.marbleheadmuseum.org/.

A 1765 census shows that 100 people of African descent lived in Marblehead, about 2% of the population at that time. Black and African Americans now make up 1.6 % of Marblehead, according to the US Census.

Theres still a belief that perhaps there werent that many enslaved people in Marblehead. We want to show that slavery did exist, McCormack said.

Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts in 1783.

Often, we just see names on a piece of paper and maybe a date, but we dont know anything about the individual and we dont know how they contributed to the community, she said. The goal of the database was the bring people to life.

With the help of two volunteers, McCormack scoured census records, tax records, probates, wills, newspapers, and pension documents to build the database.

I want to know how people in the past lived, said volunteer Lisa Ruffino. I've always believed that the past informs the present and the future. I want to meet those people. I want to know who they were and how they lived.

The earliest entry in the database is an enslaved woman named Agnes, who is interred at Old Burial Hill. Her name appears in a written record in 1711 at the death of her enslaver.

The database includes enslaved children, too. When resident John Palmer died in 1750, his recorded inventory included four enslaved people -- among them a 15-year-old boy named Prince and a girl named Phillace (who was valued at $20).

One of the people with the most available information was Cato Prince, a Black man who lived in Marblehead from the 1750s to 1826.

He may have been born in Africa, he was likely enslaved, McCormack explained.

Prince applied for a pension in 1818. He asked several white men in Marblehead, including Nathaniel Stacy and John Prince (who may have been his enslaver or his enslavers son) to vouch for him and they do. Catos pension paid him $96 a year.

Cato had no family, was infirm and lived out his days in a poor house in town, of which there were multiple, including one near Elm Street, McCormack said.

Then theres Charles Francis, who was an old man when he was shot by a sentry at Fort Sewall who may have mistaken Francis for a spy.

Its a terrible mistake and the story makes it into the newspapers as far as Boston, McCormack said. It speaks to the state of affairs around the War of 1812 and how Marblehead was a town on edge.

The Marbleheaders who owned the most enslaved people were Jeremiah Lee and Robert Hooper (of the Lee and Hooper mansions). The towns wealthiest residents were the most likely to have enslaved people, either as household domestic workers or laborers.

In one record, Jeremiah owned three people, two men and a woman, McCormack said.

The Free and Enslaved People of Color in Marblehead is an active database that can be updated moving forward. McCormack hopes to add Indigenous people soon. She encourages anyone who is interested in getting involved and doing research to reach out to her at info@marbleheadmuseum.org.

The museum created the database software with $3,200 in funding from Mass Humanities. McCormack is excited that the software will allow them to create future databases as well.

We could do a database for Revolutionary War soldiers… or fishermen, she said.

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Marblehead project will help find the history of free and enslaved people of color - Wicked Local