Florence Historical Distict Application to CPC.pdfApplication of the Committee for Northampton, Inc.
to the Community Preservation Committee for
funding to support a nomination to the
National Register of Historic Places
African Americans, Abolition, and
Equal Rights in Northampton,
Massachusetts, 1835 – 1900
including a National Historic District
in the Village of Florence
tAblE oF coNtENts
NARRAtiVE 1
AppENDix A (Maps of the District) 5
AppENDix b (proposed scope of service) 7
AppENDix c (Dorsey-Jones narrative) 13
AppENDix D (Hill-Ross narrative) 43
AppENDix E (sample Form b’s in District) 65
AppENDix F (letters of support) 85
COMMUNITY PRESERVATION PROJECT APPLICATION COVER SHEET
I: Project Information
Project Title:
African Americans, Abolition, and Equal Rights in Northampton, 1835 – 1900
Project Summary:
We will use CPA funds to hire Larson Fisher Associates,
(http://www.larsonfisher.com/) along with historian Kathryn Grover, to provide all
the required narrative sections, property list, maps, photographs and supporting
materials for the National Register Nomination Form and participate in local and
state meetings and reviews to establish a National Historic District in Florence and
prepare a Statement of Historical Context. This nomination will ensure that the
numerous contributing elements, including the homes of Sojourner Truth and David
Ruggles, while not qualifying for standalone nominations to the National Register,
will be given the attention they deserve. In addition, Grover will prepare a thorough
Statement of Historical Context that will explore African American presence, the
movement for the abolition of slavery and for equal rights in Northampton from 1835
to 1900.
Estimated start date: June, 2019 (upon City Council’s approval) Estimated
completion date: November, 2020
CPA Program Area (check all that apply):
� Open Space x Historic Preservation
� Community Housing � Recreation
II: Applicant/Developer Information
Contact Person and or/primary applicant: Steve Strimer
Property Owner (if applicable):
Organization (if applicable): Committee for Northampton, Inc.
Mailing Address: 53 Clark Avenue #15, Northampton, MA 10160
Daytime phone #: 413-992-7408 Fax #: 413-253-7475
E-mail address & Website: stevestrimer@gmail.com www.davidrugglescenter.org
III: Budget Summary
Total budget for project: $30,000
CPA funding request: $30,000
CPA request as percentage of total budget: 100%
Applicant’s Signature: ____________________________
Date Submitted: January 24, 2019
tAblE oF coNtENts
NARRAtiVE 1
AppENDix A (Maps of the District) 5
AppENDix b (proposed scope of service) 7
AppENDix c (Dorsey-Jones narrative) 13
AppENDix D (Hill-Ross narrative) 43
AppENDix E (sample Form b’s in District) 65
AppENDix F (letters of support) 85
Narrative
CPA funding for the proposed Florence Abolition and Reform National Historic District would allow
historian Kathryn Grover and architectural historian Neil Larson to dig more deeply in the built
environment and landscapes to explore the presence of African Americans and the role played by
Florence and Northampton in the movements for the abolition of slavery and for equal rights
through the end of the nineteenth-century. (See Appendix B) We are fortunate that so many
structures and landscapes remain from the period to convey the feel of the place where all this
happened. The district will record details about the place where Sojourner Truth and Frederick
Douglass first met and where she lived for thirteen critical years; where the daring NYC UGRR
activist David Ruggles came to reinvent himself as a hydropathic doctor; where the famous writer
and Boston abolitionist Lydia Maria Child came to manufacture beet sugar as an alternative to
slave-grown sugar cane; where the formerly enslaved citizens Basil Dorsey, Thomas H. Jones,
Ezekiel Cooper, Joseph Willson, George Hodestia, and Henry Anthony all settled with their families;
where Samuel L. Hill, with the guidance of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, founded the first free
endowed kindergarten in the country; where William Lloyd Garrison sent his children to school at
the “utopian” Northampton Association; and where Charles C. Burleigh, an underappreciated giant
of abolitionism, served as speaker of the Free Congregational Society.
Under National Register criteria, cemeteries and graves are among those properties that ordinarily
are not considered eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places unless they meet
special requirements. That the Park Street Cemetery, with its numerous African-American and
Abolition Era burials will be included in the District is a way around this problem. The homes of
Sojourner Truth and David Ruggles, which would likely not qualify for the Register on their own for
reasons of architectural integrity, will be recorded in the NR along with over many other homes of
African Americans, many having been formerly enslaved, and numerous white abolitionists and
reformers. (See Appendix E, for major Form B’s for properties not included on the NR.)
The house at 191 Nonotuck Street in Florence was placed on the National Register of Historic
Places in 2005. (Appendix C) This modest structure was built by Basil Dorsey and later owned by
Thomas H. Jones, both formerly enslaved African Americans. In 2008, the Ross Homestead at 123
Meadow Street, once the seat of the Agricultural Department of the Northampton Association of
Education and Industry and a "station" on the Underground Railroad, was also placed on the
National Register. (Appendix D) These were two of only three properties statewide specifically
chosen by the Massachusetts Historical Commission to represent preserved UGRR related sites in
Massachusetts. They were included in "The Underground Railroad in Massachusetts, 1783-1865” a
wider context study for local historical commissions to use to investigate the UGRR in their
communities. For this project, the MHC employed Neil Larson of Larson Fisher Associates for the
architectural piece, and Kathryn Grover, author of The Fugitive's Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and
Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for the narrative.
We would hire Larson and Grover to provide all the required narrative sections, property list, maps,
photographs and supporting materials for the National Register Nomination Form and participate
in local and state meetings and reviews. (See Appendix B, Scope of Services) In addition, Grover
would prepare a thorough Statement of Historical Context as she had done for the Multi-property
Listing for the Underground Railroad in Massachusetts and the recent 2017 Multi-property Listing
1
"Historic Resources Associated with Chinese Immigrants and Chinese Americans in the City of
Boston." Bonnie Parsons, the architectural historian that prepared the recently dedicated Pomeroy
Terrace National Historic District nomination, has this to say in her letter of support. “The team
chosen to prepare the nomination is stellar. Neal Larson… and Kathryn Grover have set standards
for architectural and historical research in this period, standards that are now maintained by the
Massachusetts Historical Commission and the National Park Service.” Given their previous
experience and interest in Florence's unique history combined with their demonstrated expertise,
they are clearly the best choice to undertake this large project with its approximately fifty
contributing elements.
Project Location
The District currently includes approximately 45 houses and 6 landscapes in the Florence section of
Northampton. See the maps included in this packet in Appendix A. The Summary of Historical
Context will include discussion of properties remaining in Northampton proper.
Community Preservation criteria
While this project comes under Historic Preservation, it has implications for Open Space and
Recreation as well. Two large parcels in the district, the Grow Food Northampton Farm and Maine’s
Field, would gain minor protection from the intrusion of Federal Projects. Pointing to these fields as
historically significant will help make citizens aware of their long and continued use as Open Space.
The Historic District will also allow tour guides from the David Ruggles Center and Sojourner Statue
Committees to better interpret these properties on their guided tours and hence provide an
enhanced Recreational experience for townspeople and visitors.
Community needs served by the project
Researchers at the David Ruggles Center have pulled together numerous strands of history over the
years since the Sojourner Truth Statue was erected in 2002: Black History, Women’s History,
History of Communities, and Early Industry among them. Having a trained historian and talented
writer like Kathryn Grover weave these threads together in the fabric of her narrative will fill the
need for this material to be brought together in one accessible document. That nine of the houses
in the district were owned by African Americans help address the lack of such houses in our area
being represented in the National Register.
Long-term preservation of the project
The strength and weakness of a National Register designation is that it does not impose any specific
preservation restrictions on home-owners. This makes establishing a district easier for property
owners to get behind but does not insure they won’t make renovations harmful to the historical
integrity of their houses. It would help the Historical Commission to impose a demolition delay if it
came to that. By making home-owners aware of the historical importance of their houses,’
experience has shown that they are more likely to keep this in mind as they renovate.
2
Community support for the project
There is wide community support for the project as demonstrated by the letters included with this
application and commitments for many others to come. (See Appendix C) The number of events
and growing attendance at these and walking tours associated with the history of the district has
grown significantly in the ten years of the Ruggles Center’s existence. Local and regional scholars,
educators, community activists, and preservationists have all provided letters of support. I believe
we will have a good showing at the Public Comment gathering on March 20, 2019.
How will the success of this project me measured?
There are several ways, none of them with specific metrics, with which to measure the success of
the project. How complete and compelling was the Statement of Historical Context? Does the
publication of the document improve people’s understanding of what went on here? How
thorough and cogent are the listings for the individual properties? Was there be a good response
from the public at the event where we plan to “unveil” the District? Did establishing the district
help convince homeowners to do right by their houses’ historical importance? Most of all, as time
goes on, will having a National District that commemorates the strivings for social justice of these
“utopian” founders of Florence help adults and their children keep their own “eyes on the prize?”
Is ongoing maintenance and upkeep required?
No, though perhaps we would amend or edit listings as allowed.
Project Budget
The total budget for the project is $30,000—$15,000 for the District nomination and $15,000 for
the Summary of Historical Context. See Appendix B for Larson Fisher’s “Scope of Services”
3
Appendix A (Maps of the District)
5
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
1
2
3
4 5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6 7 8
2
3
1
4
12
3
4
5
6
8
9
11
12
13
14
16
1
2
3
4
5
6 7
8
1
2
1
10
15
7
Lilly Library, 19 Meadow Street, B
White/Conant/Child/Munde House, 27 Meadow Street, B
Abel Ross House, 61 Meadow Street, B
Bailey Birge House, 26-28 West Center Street, B
Francis Rosbrook House, 18 Park Street, B
William Haven House, 13 Park Street, B
James Dunn & Octavia Damon Atkins House, 115 Pine Street, No B
Amos Eldredge House, 10 Park Street, B
Samuel L. Hill/Austin Ross Homestead, 123 Meadow Street, NR Basil Dorsey/Thomas H. Jones House, 191 Nonotuck Street, NRSojourner Truth House, 35 Park Street, BDavid Mack/David Ruggles/Hannah Randall House, 47 Florence Road, B Samuel L. Hill House, 31-35 Maple Street, BFlorence Kindergarten/Hill Institute, 83 Pine Street, BGeorge W. Benson/Catherine Benson Cottage, 615 Riverside Drive, BElisha/Eliza Hammond Cottage, 26 Maple Street, B12345678Primary Elements
African-American Secondary Elements
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Henry Anthony House, 40 Spring Street, B
Basil Dorsey House II, 4 Florence Road, B
Cynthia & John Dorsey House, 15 Ryan Road, B
Laura Knowles Washington/George Hodestia House, 9 Florence Road, B
Charles Robert Dorsey House, 114 Pine Street, B
Hannah Randall House, 205 Nonotuck Street, No B
Ezekial Cooper House, 129 Nonotuck Street, B
Joseph Willson House, 133 Nonotuck Street, B
Secondary White Abolitionist Houses & Buildings
1
2
3
4
Charles C. Burleigh House, 85-87 North Main Street, B
Frances & Hall Judd House, 21 Park Street, B
Florence Congregational Church, 130 Pine Street, B
Elizabeth Powell Bond House, 71 Pine Steet, B
Tertiary Elements
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Amos Eldredge House, 10 Park Street, BIsaac S. Parsons House, 4 Park Street, BAlfred P. Critchlow House, 9 Corticelli Street, No BHiram Wells House, 32 Maple Street, BA. L. Williston House, 98 Pine Street, B Isaac S. Parsons Store, 297 Nonotuck Street, BEarly Nonotuck Silk Building, 297 Nonotuck Street, BGreenville Mfg. Boarding House, 3 Maple Street, BGeorge Hill/Leander Langdon House, 82 Nonotuck Street, No B
Sojourner Truth Memorial Statue, Pine & Park Street
The David Ruggles Center, 225 Nonotuck Street
Cosmian Hall, Park Street
Gaius Burt Cottage/NAEI dwelling, Meadow Street
Auretta Aldrich “Kindergartner” House, Pine Street
David Ruggles’ Northampton Watercure Hospital, Spring Street
Pine Tree “outdoor cathedral”, Pine Street
Sarah Askin House, Nonotuck Street
William Adam House, Nonotuck Street
Whitmarsh & NAEI Silk Mill/Williston Cotton Mill, Nonotuck Street
8910111213
Historical Landscapes
1
2
3
4
5
6
Pine Grove
“Paradise”
Park Street Cemetery
Broughton’s Meadow/NAEI Agricultural Dept./Ross Farm
Locust Grove
David Child Beet Sugar Fields
1
Sites of Former Primary and Secondary Stuctures
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
1
Remaining Foundation of Important Structure
Josiah White “Oil Mill”, Whitmarsh Silk Mill, Child Beet Sugar Factory
1
Contemporary Interpretive Sites
2
14151516Florence Abolition & Reform National Historic District
Larson Fisher Associates, Inc.
Historic Preservation and Planning Services
P.O. Box 1394 Woodstock, N.Y. 12498
845-679-5054 www.larsonfisher.com SCOPE OF SERVICES HISTORIC RESOURCES ASSOCIATED WITH AFRICAN AMERICANS, ABOLITION AND EQUAL RIGHTS IN THE CITY OF NORTHAMPTON, 1835-1900 PROJECT OBJECTIVES The purpose of the project will be to study historic resources associated with the African American presence in the City of Northampton. The project will develop a context for identification, evaluation, and registration of historic resources and will survey properties associated with the city’s African
American community and the abolition and equal rights movements over a period of more than 60 years, with special reference to Northampton’s Florence neighborhood as it evolved over this period. The project will identify properties that may be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places under this context and will develop a National Register Nomination Form for a “Florence Abolition and Equal Rights National Historic District” in Florence under the context. This project will be undertaken in cooperation with local partners, including the Northampton Historical Commission (NHC) and the David Ruggles Center (DRC), and the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC), which will certify the documentation meets National Park Service (NPS) standards. A fully developed context of African Americans, Abolition and Equal Rights in Northampton, 1835-1900, will enable preparation of future nominations to the National Register of Historic Places for
properties, either individually or within historic districts. The specific project goals will include:
1. Development of a context statement that will form the basis for a National Register Multiple Properties documentation form and that identifies Associated Property Types and Registration
Requirements for historic resources in the City of Northampton associated with African Americans and abolitionists, with special reference to the Florence neighborhood; and 2. One National Register nomination for a historic district in Florence, the proposed boundaries of which are provided on the attached map. The project candidate is familiar with African American and Abolitionist history in Northampton as well as the requirements of the National Register program and particularly the Multiple Property Documentation Format. METHODOLOGY The context portion of the project must use National Register criteria and methodology. The context statement will be developed following NPS Multiple Property Format, according to guidelines in the NR Bulletin “How to Complete the National Register Multiple Property Documentation Form.” The project
will identify properties associated with the context, will define appropriate areas of significance, and will explain how the resources retain integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and/or association. The project will identify architecturally and historically significant resources
Appendix B (proposed scope of services)
Larson Fisher Associates, Inc.
Historic Preservation and Planning Services P.O. Box 1394
Woodstock, N.Y. 12498 845-679-5054 www.larsonfisher.com SCOPE OF SERVICES HISTORIC RESOURCES ASSOCIATED WITH AFRICAN AMERICANS, ABOLITION AND EQUAL RIGHTS IN THE CITY OF NORTHAMPTON, 1835-1900 PROJECT OBJECTIVES The purpose of the project will be to study historic resources associated with the African American presence in the City of Northampton. The project will develop a context for identification, evaluation,
and registration of historic resources and will survey properties associated with the city’s African American community and the abolition and equal rights movements over a period of more than 60 years, with special reference to Northampton’s Florence neighborhood as it evolved over this period. The project will identify properties that may be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places under this context and will develop a National Register Nomination Form for a “Florence Abolition and Equal Rights National Historic District” in Florence under the context. This project will be undertaken in cooperation with local partners, including the Northampton Historical Commission (NHC) and the David Ruggles Center (DRC), and the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC), which will certify the
documentation meets National Park Service (NPS) standards. A fully developed context of African Americans, Abolition and Equal Rights in Northampton, 1835-
1900, will enable preparation of future nominations to the National Register of Historic Places for properties, either individually or within historic districts.
The specific project goals will include: 1. Development of a context statement that will form the basis for a National Register Multiple
Properties documentation form and that identifies Associated Property Types and Registration Requirements for historic resources in the City of Northampton associated with African Americans and abolitionists, with special reference to the Florence neighborhood; and 2. One National Register nomination for a historic district in Florence, the proposed boundaries of which are provided on the attached map. The project candidate is familiar with African American and Abolitionist history in Northampton as well
as the requirements of the National Register program and particularly the Multiple Property Documentation Format. METHODOLOGY The context portion of the project must use National Register criteria and methodology. The context statement will be developed following NPS Multiple Property Format, according to guidelines in the NR
Bulletin “How to Complete the National Register Multiple Property Documentation Form.” The project will identify properties associated with the context, will define appropriate areas of significance, and will explain how the resources retain integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and/or association. The project will identify architecturally and historically significant resources 7
Larson Fisher Associates, Inc. Page 2
associated with the theme of African Americans, Abolition, and Equal Rights in Northampton, 1835-
1900, with special reference to the Florence neighborhood. The context will discuss how these resources
meet Criteria A, B, C, and/or D of the National Register of Historic Places.
The National Register program recognizes ethnic and cultural diversity within communities and seeks to
identify cultural resources associated with the history of minority social and cultural groups and
individuals who have played a role in the history of those communities.
The National Register nomination component of the project must use National Register criteria and
methodology. The nomination form will be developed following the NPS Multiple Property Format,
according to guidelines in the NR Bulletin “How to Complete the National Register Nomination Form.” It
will refer to the context as an associated property type that meets the registration requirements and the
criteria for listing under the context. This component of the project will document the resource to the
standards of NPS and will result in a completed nomination form.
PRODUCTS
Complete Statement of Historic Context for African Americans, Abolition, and Equal Rights in
Northampton, 1835-1900, with special reference to the Florence neighborhood, with Statement
of Associated Property Types and Registration Requirements in both hard copy and electronic
and including all supporting technical documentation, in duplicate, to NPS standards.
List of properties recommended for National Register listing under the context.
National Register nomination for a historic district in Florence eligible under the context, to
standards of MHC and NPS.
Presentation of nomination to the MHC State Review Board and at a public community meeting
at dates to be determined.
WORK PROGRAM
The project will consist of five phases over a 52-week period. Project personnel will meet with NHC,
DRC and MHC representatives to review project progress and products at the end of each phase.
Meetings will be held at the MHC offices in Boston unless another location is determined. The work to
be carried out during each phase, and products due at the end of each phase, are described below. The
project will begin once a contract is signed and will end within the following year.
PHASE I (8 weeks)
Tasks:
Meet with NHC, DRC and MHC to discuss project methodology, appropriate contexts,
period and areas of significance, property types, assessment of property type significance
and identification of registration requirements.
Formulate a preliminary property list.
Review existing information in local repositories and at MHC, particularly survey records
already prepared for properties in Northampton.
Review examples of other contexts developed for similar themes both in Massachusetts
(available through MHC MACRIS database) and in other states (available through NPS
NR website).
Begin to conduct research for preparation of Statement of Historic Context for.
8
Larson Fisher Associates, Inc. Page 3
Products:
Outline of Statement of Historic Context for African Americans, Abolition, and Equal Rights
in Northampton, 1835-1900.
Outline of Statement of Associated Property Types for African Americans, Abolition, and
Equal Rights in Northampton, 1835-1900 including Significance Statements and
Registration Requirements.
Preliminary list of potentially eligible properties, including districts.
PHASE II (24 Weeks)
Tasks:
Conduct research and prepare draft Statement of Historic Context for African Americans,
Abolition, and Equal Rights in Northampton, 1835-1900 according to NPS guidelines.
Material to be investigated will include a study of recent literature relating to the history
of Abolitionism during the period of significance.
Develop Statements of Associated Property Types for properties associated with African
Americans, Abolition, and Equal Rights in Northampton, 1835-1900. Property types may
include buildings or districts that are significant under Criteria A, B, C, and/or D and
retain integrity to convey a documented association with some aspect of the context.
Property types may also include buildings or districts associated with the context that
meet one or more of the Criteria Considerations.
Prepare draft Significance Statements and Registration Requirements for properties
associated with the African Americans & the Abolition Movement in Northampton,
1800-1900.
Provide preliminary documentation for historic district in the Florence neighborhood.
Meet with NHC, DRC and MHC to discuss draft products.
Products:
Draft Statement of Historic Context for African Americans, Abolition, and Equal Rights in
Northampton, 1835-1900.
African Americans & the Abolition and Reform Movements in Northampton, 1835-1900,
including Significance Statement and Registration Requirements.
PHASE III (6 Weeks)
Tasks:
Prepare final Statement of Historic Context for African Americans, Abolition, and Equal
Rights in Northampton, 1835-1900, to NPS standards.
Prepare final Statement of Associated Property Types for African Americans, Abolition, and
Equal Rights in Northampton, 1835-1900, including Significance Statement and
Registration Requirements to NPS standards.
Prepare final list of properties recommended for National Register listing under the
context.
Products:
Statement of Historic Context for African Americans, Abolition, and Equal Rights in
Northampton, 1835-1900, in duplicate (one each for NHC and MHC), in electronic and
hard copy, to NPS standards.
9
Larson Fisher Associates, Inc. Page 4
Statement of Associated Property Types for African Americans, Abolition, and Equal Rights
in Northampton, 1835-1900, including Significance Statement and Registration
Requirements, in duplicate (one each for NHC and MHC), in electronic and hard copy to
NPS standards.
Final list of recommended properties associated with the context African Americans,
Abolition, and Equal Rights in Northampton, 1835-1900, in duplicate (one each for NHC
and MHC), in electronic and hard copy.
PHASE IV (16 Weeks)
Tasks:
Prepare draft National Register Nomination Form for a historic district in the Florence
neighborhood determined eligible by MHC under the context, to NPS National Register
program standards.
Products:
Draft National Register Nomination Form for an “Abolition and Equal Rights Historic
District” in the Florence neighborhood.
PHASE V (8 Weeks)
Tasks:
Finalize National Register Nomination Form for “Florence Abolition and Equal Rights
National Historic District” based on review of NHC, DRC and MHC.
Prepare presentation of historic district for the MHC State Review Board
Products:
Completed National Register Nomination Form
Presentation to MHC State Review Board, and at a public community meeting
NOTE: Context, National Register nomination, and National Register amendment will be
submitted to the National Park Service for listing in the National Register of Historic Places
within one year of project completion.
PAYMENT SCHEDULE
Phase I 8 weeks $ 3,000
Phase II 24 weeks $10,000
Phase III 6 weeks $ 2,000
Phase IV 16 weeks $10,000
Phase V 8 weeks $ 5,000
TOTAL 62 weeks $30,000
10
Larson Fisher Associates, Inc. Page 5
IDENTIFICATION OF APPLICANT
Larson Fisher Associates, Inc. (LFA) is the applicant for this project. We are a New York State
corporation based in Woodstock, New York, with corporate registration in Massachusetts. Our
firm provides field services and consultation to governmental agencies, municipalities,
organizations, and individuals regarding the documentation, assessment, preservation and
management of historic resources. Neil Larson and Jill Fisher are the principals and co-owners of
the firm. LFA often works in association with Kathryn Grover, an independent historian, and
will do so on this project if awarded to us. For more information about our firm and its principals
and associates, please visit www.larsonfisher.com.
Approach to Project
LFA has written scores of National Register nomination and has specialized in preparing them
for downtown historic districts to facilitate community awareness and economic revitalization.
We also have a reputation of for writing detailed but accessible narratives interpreting the
significance of vernacular architecture in local and regional contexts and revealing the nuanced
histories of people and places. We also have been awarded a number of projects to update
existing National Register nominations to address changing scholarly contexts for
underrepresented architecture and cultural diversity.
National Register projects expand people’s knowledge about their community’s architectural and
cultural history and raise their consciousness about the importance of this history in their daily
lives. In that way they can promote the development of more inclusive and more broadly
supported preservation planning. National Register nominations can be tremendous catalysts for
community efforts to appreciate their built environment, to manage growth, and to protect if not
enhance a particular quality of life.
Applicant Qualifications
Neil Larson will be the responsible for tasks requiring the identification, assessment and
interpretation of historic architecture and also for the completion of the necessary forms and
reports emanating from the project. He has worked in the field of historic preservation for over
35 years. Larson is a 36CFR61 certified architectural historian who specializes in preparing
nominations to the National Register of Historic Places, as well as conducting historic resource
surveys and planning historic preservation projects. In addition to having been employed by the
New York State Historic Preservation Office for nine years, where he became intimately familiar
with national and state historic preservation programs, he has also served as a town historian,
worked for county historical societies, sat on boards of local preservation groups, and consulted
with local governments and preservation organizations. Academically, Larson holds a Master’s
Degree from University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, one of
America’s most prestigious museum programs, where he learned valuable skills for identifying
and analyzing historic architecture and objects. He has built on this training with extensive field
experience with all types, periods and forms of architecture.
During his long career, Larson has written scores of National Register nominations, and over the
past decade he has worked on numerous National Register projects in Massachusetts in places
such as Boston, New Bedford, Worcester, Mendon, Millville, Montague, Great Barrington and
Pittsfield. Included in these are a number of Main Street or downtown historic districts. He also
has prepared many MHC Area Forms for potential historic districts in survey projects throughout
Massachusetts.
11
Larson Fisher Associates, Inc. Page 6
Neil Larson’s resume and a list of National Register nominations he has completed are attached.
Kathryn Grover will research and write the historical contexts for the overview and historic
district required by the project. She has been an independent researcher, writer, and editor in
American history for nearly twenty-five years. Grover focuses on the study of communities and
neighborhoods as geographical and social entities and how people of differing racial, ethnic, and
class backgrounds navigate these territories. She has published books in ethnic and African
American history— Make a Way Somehow: African American Life in a Northern Community
(Syracuse University Press, 1994), The Fugitive's Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism
in New Bedford, Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), and The Brickyard:
The Life, Death, and Legend of an Urban Neighborhood (Donning for Lynn Museum, 2004)—as
well as numerous exhibition catalogs. A resident of New Bedford for sixteen years, Grover has
participated in numerous projects for New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park—the
walking tour brochure Underground Railroad: New Bedford (1999); the historical narratives for
the National Historic Landmark nominations of the Nathan and Polly Johnson House (1999),
Frederick Douglass’s first home in the free states, and the Rotch-Jones-Duff or William Rotch Jr.
House (2003-4); “Back of the Mansions,” a geographical and demographic study of the city’s
racially and economically diverse South Central neighborhood in the antebellum period (2005-
6); and an ethnohistorical study of African American, West Indian, and St. Helenian whaling
crew and tradespeople between 1825 and 1925 (2008-10; publication forthcoming). Grover
undertook the historical research and writing of the Historic Resource Study of the African
American “north slope” of Beacon Hill for Boston African American National Historic Site
(2001-2), prepared a study of whaling and kinship ties between African Americans on Nantucket
and in New Bedford (2004-5), and contributed entries to Places of the Underground Railroad: A
Geographical Guide (2011).
Grover has a master’s degree in American history from Boston University and a master’s in
journalism from the University of Michigan and formerly worked as a writer, editor, and
publications director for New Hampshire Historical Society and the Strong Museum.
Kathryn Grover’s resume is attached.
As a joint venture Grover and Larson have collaborated on more than a dozen National Register
nominations, over twenty intensive-level surveys, and two nominations to the National Park
Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. They also have written the state-wide
context for Historic Resources associated with the Underground Railroad in Massachusetts and
the context statements for Historic Resources Associated with Chinese Immigrants and Chinese
Americans in Boston and for the African American presence on College Hill in Providence.
12
Appendix C (dorsey/Jones narrative)
13
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 1
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
8. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE
Summary
The Dorsey-Jones House is historically significant as the home of two notable fugitives from
American slavery, Basil Dorsey and Thomas H. Jones. The escapes of both men are fully
documented and were well known in their own time, and both participated in events that are
significant in the history of the Underground Railroad. While in national terms Jones was by far the
more prominent in abolitionist circles, Dorsey affiliated himself in Florence with the founders of a
utopian community that opposed the slave system in word and deed and that both sheltered and
otherwise assisted fugitives from that system. The Dorsey-Jones House meets National Register
Criteria A and B at the state level in the significance areas of social history and ethnic heritage for
its association with African-American history and the Underground Railroad. The property fulfils
the Registration Requirements defined in the Underground Railroad in Massachusetts Multiple
Property Submission for Property Type #3, a dwelling in which fugitives lived in Massachusetts.
The Dorsey-Jones House retains sufficient integrity of location, design, setting, materials,
workmanship, feeling, and association to convey its significance under the context. Its period of
significance is from 1849, when Basil Dorsey purchased the property on which he soon built the
house, to 1859, to when the Jones family sold it. No other Massachusetts property associated with
Jones is known to survive.
Basil Dorsey’s Escape from Slavery
Basil Dorsey (ca. 1810-72) escaped from Maryland to New York with the assistance of Robert
Purvis, one of the most prominent black abolitionists in the United States. Purvis credited Joshua
Leavitt, the western Massachusetts native who edited the abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator,
with managing Dorsey’s move to Massachusetts. It seems highly probable as well that David
Ruggles, the African American journalist and fugitive assistant who lived in Florence by 1842, also
aided in Dorsey’s flight from bondage.
(continued)
14
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 2
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Dorsey himself left no direct account of his escape, and those narratives that exist differ in
important respects. The account of Purvis, involved with Dorsey from the moment his presence in
Pennsylvania became known, found its way into print at least twice, once in 1883 and again in
1898. These too differ: the former, recorded in a letter to historian R. C. Smedley, appears to be
somewhat more reliable. With three of his brothers, Dorsey escaped from the district of Liberty in
Frederick County, Maryland, on the Pennsylvania border, in the summer of 1836. Accounts of the
brothers’ origins vary, but it appears that once promised and then denied their freedom they chose to
escape.1 At that time, enslaved persons were an increasing minority of the population of Liberty and
Frederick County at large. As the county and the rest of northern Maryland focused on growing
wheat and corn—which, unlike tobacco cultivation, did not require full-time labor—the population
of free people of color rose swiftly. Between 1790 and 1850 the number of free blacks in Frederick
County rose from 213 to 3,760 persons, or 1665%; over that time the number of enslaved persons
increased from 3,641 to 3,913, or only 7.5%. In Liberty by 1850, only 376, or 34%, of 1,103 black
residents remained enslaved.2 In light of these changing demographic circumstances the Dorseys
must have regarded the broken promise as especially staggering.
(continued)
1“Basil Dorsey,” Hampshire Gazette 81, 36, 2 April 1867, stated that Dorsey’s grandfather was English and his
grandmother a black Marylander. The Gazette continued that Dorsey’s owner, “Tom Saulers,” had agreed to sell him
his freedom for $350, but that after Dorsey had found someone to be his bondsman Saulers refused to honor the
agreement. The newspaper set the date of escape at 14 May 1836, a date it might easily have derived from Dorsey
himself. Purvis, in R. C. Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of
Pennsylvania (Lancaster, PA: Office of the Journal, 1883), 356, stated that the Dorsey brothers were all said to have
been the children of their master, whom he did not name, and “and after his death, finding themselves slaves, when
they had been promised their freedom, they took ‘French leave,’”meaning “unauthorized departure.” Swarthmore
College dean Elizabeth Powell Bond stated that among her papers was the bill of sale (a “printed” copy) for Dorsey,
which asserted that he was a “mulatto man named Ephraim Costly, otherwise and now called Basil Dorsey, aged about
forty-three years, a slave for life” and born a slave of Sabrick Sollers, of Frederick County and owned by him until he
died, after which he became the property of Thomas Sollers, a son of Sabrick, “and is now a fugitive from service from
said State of Maryland.” Bond cited in Edward H. Magill, “The Underground Railroad,” Friends Intelligencer 55
(1898): 277. 2Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 2-5, 12-13; “Beneath the Underground: The Flight to Freedom
and Communities in Antebellum Maryland / An Archives of Maryland Electronic Publication http://mdslavery.net/html.
15
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 3
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
In 1867, safely settled in Florence, Dorsey himself may have told the Northampton (Massachusetts)
Hampshire Gazette that he traveled at night from Liberty to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, then
eastward to Harrisburg, and further east to Reading. No evidence has surfaced to date that Dorsey’s
escape from Maryland was assisted, but his route suggests his reliance on places of known
Underground Railroad activity.3 The Gazette stated, “He found employment in Bristol, Penn.”
Purvis stated that between Reading and Bristol, however, the brothers went to Philadelphia, where
they added the Christian names Basil, Thomas, Charles, and William to their existing Dorsey
surname. Their presence there was brought to his attention. Purvis brought all but Thomas Dorsey
to his farm at Bristol in Bucks County, found nearby farms on which Charles and William could
work, and himself employed Basil. Basil’s wife Louisa, who was free, arranged with her brother-in-
law to come to Philadelphia in August, and then came on to Bristol.
Dorsey’s situation soon became known in the abolitionist community when Louisa Dorsey’s
brother-in-law betrayed him to his claimant Thomas Saulers (or Sollers) in Maryland, whereupon
Saulers, several associates, and a local constable seized him while he was plowing in one of
Purvis’s fields and jailed him in Bristol. Purvis followed upon learning of the seizure, arranged
counsel both locally and in Philadelphia, helped Charles and William Dorsey escape their pursuers,
and rallied the local African American community to be present at Basil Dorsey’s upcoming trial
and assist in “liberating him” should the court decide to return him to slavery. Just before the trial,
when friends offered to purchase his manumission, Dorsey refused; “if the decision goes against
me,” Purvis quoted him to have said, “I will cut my throat in the Court House, I will not go back to
slavery.” On the grounds that the plaintiff’s evidence that slavery was the law of Maryland was not
an authoritative compilation of state law, Dorsey’s counsel won a dismissal of the case, and Purvis
drove Dorsey to his mother’s house in Philadelphia. “I afterwards accompanied him to New York,
and placed him in the hands of Joshua Leavett, the editor of The Emancipator, who sent him to
Connecticut to find employment on his father’s farm.”4
(continued)
3Christopher Densmore, curator, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, e-mail to Steve Strimer, Florence
(MA) History Project, forwarded to Kathryn Grover, 4 February 2004. 4Purvis quoted in Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad, 356-61. “Basil Dorsey,” Hampshire Gazette, states
that “gentlemen connected with the Anti-Slavery Standard sent him [Dorsey] to Northampton,” but the National Anti-
Slavery Standard, the newspaper to which the Gazette must refer, did not begin publication until 1840, four years after
Dorsey’s escape.
16
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 4
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Purvis erred slightly in one particular: Leavitt’s father’s farm was in Franklin County,
Massachusetts, in the northwestern uplands of the state. Leavitt (1794-1873) had been born on his
grandfather’s farm in Heath and graduated from Yale in 1814. Though trained as a lawyer, he
returned to Yale to the divinity school, from which he graduated in 1825, and in 1831, the same
year William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator, Leavitt became editor of the Evangelist. An
early opponent of slavery, he helped form the New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. With such
men as Elizur Wright and the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan—born in nearby Northampton in
1786 and 1788, respectively—Leavitt was also a leader in the American Anti-Slavery Society,
founded the same year.
The Dorseys and Leavitts in Western Massachusetts
Leavitt had experienced antiabolitionist hostility firsthand on two occasions about the same time. In
July 1834, a New York City mob destroyed black homes and churches and the home of Lewis
Tappan; it is said that Leavitt’s home was threatened as well. In October 1835, Leavitt and his
brothers Roger Hooker and Hart Leavitt attended a state convention in Utica, New York, sponsored
by the Utica Anti-Slavery Society, that was similarly marred by antiabolitionist violence. These
events helped Leavitt convert his father Roger (1771-1840) and mother Chloe Maxwell Leavitt
completely to abolitionism.5 In 1837 Joshua Leavitt became editor of The Emancipator, an
abolitionist newspaper based in New York, his brother Roger Hooker Leavitt (1805-85) became
president of the Franklin County Anti-Slavery Society in 1836 and vice-president of the
Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1838 and 1839, and his father—who by 1840 had moved
from Heath just southeast to neighboring Charlemont, where his sons lived—agreed in that year to
run for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts on the ticket of the Liberty party, the new national
antislavery party that his son Joshua had had a hand in forming.6
5 Library of Congress, Joshua Leavitt Family Papers, MMC-0893, Library of Congress, and Hugh Davis, Joshua
Leavitt, Evangelical Abolitionist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), cited in Roger Hooker and
Keziah Leavitt House Network to Freedom Application (hereafter cited as Leavitt NTF nomination). Thanks to Bambi
Miller, Tyler Memorial Library, Charlemont, MA, for sharing this application. On the New York City and Utica riots,
see Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (London
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 85-92, 113-22. 6Roger Leavitt is shown with eight persons in his household in Heath in the 1830 federal census but in Charlemont in
the 1840 census, where he is enumerated in his own household just after his son Roger H. In 1840 he is shown as
between sixty and seventy years old, which would tally with the date of birth stated in other sources; the only other
person in the household is female, aged sixty to seventy, presumably his wife.
17
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 5
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
About the same time that Dorsey was sent to Charlemont, other fugitives were assisted to that place.
Historian and journalist Sylvester Judd (1789-1860), onetime editor and publisher of the Hampshire
Gazette, wrote in his notebook, “June 1, 1838. Bought pair of second hand pantaloons—gave $2.25.
Gave 50 cents to aid in transporting runaway slaves to Charlemont.” James Crafts, born in Whately
(north of Northampton on the Connecticut River) in 1817, recalled Charlemont as a stop on at least
one fugitive’s passage north. In 1896 he told Underground Railroad memorialist Wilbur Siebert that
Osee Monson of his town “was always credited with the honor of being the leader in assisting the
poor black men to escape” and recalled a specific instance of Monson having “just returned from a
trip to Charlemont where he had conveyed a black man who had been at his house.” Two persons,
though both young at the time, attested the Leavitt family’s role in fugitive assistance. In 1895,
Roger Leavitt’s granddaughter told Siebert that Leavitt was “a whole souled Abolitionist, & did all
he could to help the slaves to freedom” though she averred that she could provide no specific details
of his assistance—not surprising in view of the fact that she was born about 1833 and her
grandfather died in 1840. In an undated letter to the Ashfield Historical Society, Caroline Blake, the
daughter of George Abell of Goshen (diagonally between Northampton at the southeast and
Charlemont at the northwest), wrote, “The fugitive slaves were cared for in our home and helped on
their way. I was too young to remember all about what happened but it was always understood that
a resting place was at Mr. [Hosea] Blake’s and Mr. Leavit’s. This was carried on with the greatest
secrecy, because of the personal danger, not only to the slave but also to those who harbored them.”
Caroline Abell Blake was nineteen years old in 1850 and living then in her father’s Goshen home.7
(continued)
7Entry for 1 June 1838, Sylvester Judd Notebook, Number 1, June 1833-June 1841, page 201, Forbes Library,
Northampton, MA. Judd was one of the original members of the Old Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society. Thanks to Steve
Strimer of the Florence History Project for this information and citation. Mrs. Wm. (Mary Leavitt) Hillman, East
Charlemont, Mass., 30 December 1895, to Wilbur H. Siebert, in The “Underground Railroad” in Massachusetts, vol. 1.,
“Material Collected by Professor Wilbur H. Siebert, Ohio State University, Columbus, n.d. Received by Harvard
College Library 14 June 1939,” Houghton Library, Harvard, unpaginated (hereafter cited as Siebert Notebooks).
Hillman was the daughter of Hart Leavitt. The 1850 federal census establishes her age. James M. Crafts, Orange, MA,
24 July 1896, to Siebert, Siebert Notebooks; Caroline P. Blake, Amherst, June 4, no year, to “Mr. Howes,” collections
Ashfield Historical Society; the 1880 census was used to determine her age. Thanks to Steve Strimer for a photocopy of
the Blake letter.
18
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 6
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Dorsey’s presence in Charlemont is corroborated in other sources. Charlemont records list the birth
in that town of Charles Robert Dorsey to Basil and Louisa Dorsey on 29 August 1838. They also list
the names and dates of birth of two of the couple’s children born in Maryland and then living
there—Eliza, born 3 November 1834, and John Richard, born 18 May 1836. If the Hampshire
Gazette’s record of Dorsey’s date of escape is correct, Dorsey left Maryland four days before his
son John was born. Charlemont vital statistics also record the death of Louisa Dorsey scarcely two
months after the birth of Charles, on 7 November 1838. Joshua Leavitt may have sent Dorsey to his
father’s Charlemont home, as Purvis recalled, but he probably worked, if not lived, on Roger Hart
Leavitt’s adjacent farm. About two weeks after Louisa Dorsey died, Joshua Leavitt wrote to his
brother, “I feel for Mr. Dorsey in his bereavement and trust that you will do all that Christian
benevolence requires in his care.” No record so far known indicates in which home the Dorsey
family lived in Charlemont, and though they remained in Charlemont until 1844 the 1840 a census
records no people of color in either the Roger or Roger Hart Leavitt households.8 That he was in
Charlemont in 1839 is indicated by the accounts of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, which
list “B. Dorsey 50c” under contributions from Charlemont that year.9
Purvis’s accounts do not offer specific details on the Dorsey family’s route to Charlemont, but the
Hampshire Gazette in 1867 stated that he came first to Northampton to the home of Haynes K.
Starkweather on South Street; it seems probable that Joshua Leavitt had directed him there. Leavitt
had been admitted to the bar in Northampton and had married a woman from that town; no doubt he
had numerous connections there, not the least of whom were the Tappans. Starkweather took the
Dorseys straightaway to the home of Captain Samuel Parsons—“whose heart,” the Gazette wrote,
“always beat in sympathy with the fugitive”—and after a “a day or two” there Parsons took the
family by wagon from Northampton to the Charlemont home of Roger Hooker Leavitt. The
newspaper stated that Basil Dorsey lived there with his three children “about five years,” his wife
having died there, and in January 1844 he moved to Florence.10
(continued)
8A man by the name of Basil Dorsey is not enumerated in Massachusetts in the 1840 federal census. 9Joshua Leavitt Family Papers, MMC-0893, Library of Congress, cited in Leavitt NTF nomination; Massachusetts Anti-
Slavery Society Papers cited in ibid. 10“Basil Dorsey,” Hampshire Gazette.
19
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 7
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
That David Ruggles may have collaborated with Leavitt in Dorsey’s escape seems likely. The
Gazette stated that Dorsey had met Ruggles in New York City, and that Ruggles and Leavitt knew
each other is clear: Ruggles had been a subscription agent for the Emancipator since 1833 and a
correspondent since 1834. Dorsey must have come along the Connecticut Valley to Northampton. It
is also known that Ruggles had used this route to move other fugitives northward at this time. In the
fall of 1838 James Lindsay Smith of Northumberland County, Virginia, escaped with two friends by
sailboat, then on foot to New Castle, Delaware, and then on to Philadelphia. Assistants there sent
him “with a letter directed to David Ruggles” of the New York Vigilance Committee, and Ruggles
in turn sent Smith off with “two letters, one to a Mr. Foster, in Hartford; and the other to Doctor
Osgood, in Springfield.” Smith took a steamboat to Hartford and another to Springfield, where he
found his way to the home of Samuel Osgood, pastor of Springfield’s First Congregational Church.
By 1842 he moved to Norwich, Connecticut, David Ruggles’s native place, where he lived the rest
of his life. Probably in 1839 or 1840, William Green, a fugitive from Maryland’s Eastern Shore,
was taken aboard a vessel by a willing captain to Philadelphia, sent on to New York where he
stayed at a boardinghouse until constables came looking for him, and then was somehow helped to
escape from that place to the home of Ruggles, who sent him on the same route to Osgood’s
Springfield home. When Green published a narrative of his life in 1853, he was still living in
Springfield.11
Where the Dorsey family lived in Northampton between 1844 and 1849 is not yet known. That he
purchased goods from the store of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI)
between 1843 and 1847 is known from its account books,12 and it is at least possible that he lived
with one of the NAEI’s founders, George W. Benson Jr. Benson was the brother-in-law of William
Lloyd Garrison and son of one of the founders of the 1789 Providence (Rhode Island) Society for
Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.13 In 1841 he had moved to the Lonetown section of
11James Lindsay Smith, Autobiography of James L. Smith, Including, Also, Reminiscences of Slave Life, Recollections of
the War, Education of Freedmen, Causes of the Exodus, etc. (Norwich, Conn.: Press of the Bulletin Company, 1881);
Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green (Formerly a Slave), Written by Himself (Springfield: L. M. Guernsey,
1853). 12NAEI Laborer’s Book, 1843-47. The association store accounts begin on page 110 of this volume. Thanks to Steve
Strimer for this information. 13The name under which the society applied for a charter was the “Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition of
Slavery, for the Relief of Persons unlawfully held in Bondage, and for improving the condition of the African race.”
Folder 1, Series B, Austin Collection of Moses Brown Papers, Archives of New England Yearly Meeting of Society of
Friends, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence.
20
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 8
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Northampton from Brooklyn, Connecticut, and with associates had purchased the assets of the
Northampton Silk Company, which New York capitalist Samuel Whitmarsh had begun in
Northampton in 1829; Whitmarsh had moved the company to Broughton’s Meadow in outlying
Lonetown in 1834. A year before Benson’s move, abolitionists Lydia Maria Child and her husband
David had moved to the Broughton’s Meadow area so that David could continue to experiment with
the cultivation of sugar beets, a deliberate attempt to develop an alternative to sugar grown and
processed by slave labor. By 1852, the Lonetown district was renamed Florence in honor of the
Italian silk-producing city.14 The NAEI, which Benson and others incorporated in 1841, saw silk in
the same light, as an alternative to cotton cultivated by the slave-labor system, in which northern
textile mills were deeply complicit. Radical abolitionists of the day patronized free labor stores, ate
confections made with “free sugar,” and wore linen stockings.
The Northampton Association and Fugitives in Florence
Founded about the same time as such other Massachusetts utopian communities as Hopedale,
Fruitlands, and Brook Farm, the Northampton Association was dedicated to nonresistance,
manufacture, nondenominationalism, temperance, education, and equal rights “without distinction
of sex, color, or condition, sect or religion.”15 In 1842, the year of its founding, Lydia Maria Child
left her husband David in Florence to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York, and
there she learned of the difficult situation of David Ruggles. Abandoned by several leading black
abolitionists in New York City after a libel and monetary dispute in 1839, Ruggles was nearly blind
and physically broken by other ailments. On 15 November 1842 David Lee Child went before the
NAEI to ask that Ruggles be admitted as a member. The association resolved that Benson should
invite him “to come amongst us and remain with us” until the members had a chance to come to
know him “and his circumstances.” Ruggles was soon afterward admitted. About 1845, with the
assistance of Northampton’s Payson Williston and his son J. Payson Williston, Ruggles purchased
the “oil-mill house” where David Lee Child had processed sugar beets and converted it to a water
(continued)
14Charles A. Sheffield, The History of Florence, Massachusetts, 1657-1894, Including a Complete Description of the
Northampton Association of Education and Industry (Florence, MA: n.p., 1895), 14, 23. 15Christopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995), 15-29.
21
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 9
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
cure, believed to be the first hydropathic hospital in the United States. Florence was equally well if
not better known for its water cure, which endured until the late 1860s, long after the NAEI
dissolved in 1846.16
Benson also had a direct connection with once-enslaved New Yorker Sojourner Truth (Isabella Van
Wagenen), a resident of Florence from 1843 through about 1857. In the former year Truth visited
the association and, though not impressed at first glance, was persuaded to stay overnight. She came
to feel that in the Northampton Association, her amanuensis wrote, “all was characterized by an
equality of feeling, a liberty of thought and speech, and a largeness of soul, she could not have
before met with, to the same extent, in any of her wanderings.” Truth worried, as she had
perennially, about supporting herself, especially now that “labor, exposure and hardship had made
sad inroads upon her iron constitution, by inducing chronic disease and premature old age.” Yet, her
narrative notes, she was somewhat less anxious in Florence, for she “remained under the shadow of
one,* who never wearies in doing good, giving to the needy, and supplying the wants of the
destitute.” This “one,” the asterisk explains, was George W. Benson.17 She too became an NAEI
member, and at some point between 1846 and 1850, when she was able to purchase her own home
in Florence with the assistance of NAEI founder Samuel L. Hill, Truth lived in Benson’s home.
In early May of the same year that Truth settled in Florence, the fugitive Stephen C. Rush was
accepted as a one-week visitor to the association. Five days later he was “unanimously invited to
consider the Community his home for the present.” William Lloyd Garrison, who with his family
was spending that summer in Florence in a small cottage near the association, identified Rush as a
fugitive in his Liberator after that year’s West Indian Emancipation celebration. “He said that he
was induced to run away by hearing of Latimer’s case; and that as Massachusetts had given succor
and protection to George Latimer, he thought he would try his luck in the same manner,” Garrison
wrote, “He was also induced the more readily to escape, by hearing his master and other
slaveholders cursing the abolitionists, of whom he formed a high opinion from that circumstance.”
By early November 1843, after undergoing what seems to have been six months of probation, Rush
(continued)
16Hill, “Florence.” 17Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850; reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 72-73.
22
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 10
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
was admitted a member of the Northampton Association. Active, with Ruggles, in local antislavery
meetings in 1844, Rush left the NAEI and Florence in April 1846; nothing more is yet known of
him.18
The Benson family had been involved in issues of racial equality since the early 1830s. From his
retirement home in Brooklyn, Connecticut, Benson’s father, though in his early eighties, was
reelected president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1834. The year before, he had
played a central role in the defense of Prudence Crandall in nearby Canterbury when townspeople
violently attempted to close the school she had opened for young women of color. At that point, the
Reverend Samuel J. May, also of Brooklyn and well documented for his fugitive assistance in
Connecticut and upstate New York, began his Underground Railroad work. According to
Connecticut Underground Railroad historian Horatio Strother, the Crandall affair also impelled the
Benson family to begin to raise money to support fugitive escapes.19
By 1845 the silk manufacturing venture was on shaky ground, and, with other investors, Benson
acquired the factory as well as ninety acres of land and half of the company’s debt. He incorporated
a new venture, Bensonville Manufacturing Company, and with the help of the brothers Samuel and
J. Payson Williston, the latter a well-known abolitionist and reputed fugitive assistant, converted the
operation to cotton manufacturing. Benson stayed with the company only until 1848, but it is
possible that Basil Dorsey worked for Benson by 1845. The Hampshire Gazette stated that after the
Dorsey family’s move to Northampton, Basil Dorsey “worked for Mr. Benson, a brother-in-law of
(continued)
18Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998),
322-24; Liberator, 2 August 1843. 19On May, the Bensons, and fugitives in Brooklyn, see Horatio Strother, The Underground Railroad in Connecticut
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 134: “The Brooklyn agents who raised the funds for this refugee
included George Benson, a man named Whitcomb, and others. They were working in the tradition established by the
Reverend Samuel J. May, who as early as 1834 was receiving fugitives at this town and sending them across the state
line to Uxbridge or Worcester.” Strother’s reference, somewhat puzzling given the dates in the quote, are “First Annual
Report of the Board of Managers of the New England Anti-Slavery Society” (Boston, 1833), 13-14; and W. Sherman
Savage, “The Controversy over the Distribution of Abolition Literature, 1830-1860” (Washington, 1938), 9. Thanks to
Steve Strimer for this information.
23
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 11
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
William Lloyd Garrison.” The newspaper noted that Dorsey worked “as a teamster, first as an
employee of the cotton-mill company, and latterly as a general jobber. He has always done the
teaming for the cotton mill.”20
In the fall of 1846 Bensonville Manufacturing Company plotted house lots on the hill northeast of
its factory on the Mill River in Florence, and on 12 November 1849 the company, through Samuel
Williston, its president, sold Basil Dorsey lot 12 in Bensonville for thirty-five dollars.21 The house
was standing by the time the federal census was taken in August 1850. At that time Dorsey and his
family—his second wife Cynthia and their three children—shared their household with fifty-year-
old Jacob Benson, his thirty-two-year old wife Eliza—both, like Dorsey, born in Maryland—and
their one-year-old daughter, born in Massachusetts.22
Presumably because the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had stimulated a rash of captures
and arrests of known and presumed fugitives, Dorsey’s friends then raised funds to purchase his
freedom. The Hampshire Gazette noted the action was “against the wishes of many of his friends,
who didn’t like to buy with money that freedom which God had endowed all men with; but as he
sometimes visited Boston, Providence, and other cities, in his teaming business, it was feared he
might, when away from home be made a subject for the fugitive slave law, and be hurried back to
slavery. So it was deemed best to pay the price demanded and thus make his freedom secure.” The
Gazette stated that the purchase occurred in 1850 for two hundred dollars, Dorsey himself
contributing fifty dollars. But Swarthmore College dean Elizabeth Powell Bond, who spoke at
(continued)
20Clark, Communitarian Moment, 159; “Basil Dorsey,” Hampshire Gazette. Arthur G. Hill, son of NAEI founder
Samuel L. Hill, wrote of Dorsey, “He brought the cotton bales from the Northampton railroad station and took thither
the finished cloth for shipment to the outer world. He had a powerful pair of lungs and on the road from Northampton
with a load of bales, he would commence yelling at the eastern slope of Nonotuck St. when the people at the mill would
open doors and prepare to receive his load.” A. G. Hill, “Florence the Mecca [sic] Sanctuary of the Colored Race,”
Arthur G. Hill Papers, Forbes Library, Northampton. Hill had crossed out “mecca,” evidently feeling “sanctuary” the
more appropriate descriptor. 21Hampshire County Deeds 115:360 and 130:464-65. 22It is tempting to speculate, as Strimer of the Florence History Project suggests, that the Bensons too were fugitives
assisted by George Benson, and that they adopted his surname in recognition of that fact.
24
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 12
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Dorsey’s funeral, stated in the 1890s that she found among her papers “the printed bill of sale”
between Thomas Sollars and the Philadelphia attorney George Griscom for Dorsey, in the amount
of 150 dollars, signed on 14 May 1851.23 Griscom must then have manumitted Dorsey through the
Maryland courts.
The family was living in the Bensonville house when, on 1 March 1852, Dorsey sold the land and
the buildings on it to Selah B. Trask for eight hundred dollars.24 On the same day he bought from
Trask other Florence property, on South Street (now Florence Road) between the house David
Ruggles had lived in until his death in 1849 and the home of Henry Anthony, a man of color who
had lived in Florence since as early as 1840.25 Trask himself lived in Dorsey’s former Bensonville
house for scarcely two years before selling it, on 1 April 1854, to Mary Jones, wife of Thomas H.
Jones. Trask also held a mortgage bond on the property through 1 April 1858.26
The Jones Family in Florence
A stevedore working in the port of Wilmington, North Carolina, Thomas H. Jones (1806-90)
arranged for the escape of his free wife and her enslaved children and then his own escape in 1849,
thirteen years after Basil Dorsey escaped from Maryland. Jones, born to enslaved parents and raised
on a plantation near Wilmington, was about nine years old when he was sold to a storekeeper in
(continued)
23See Edward H. Magill, “The Underground Railroad,” Friends Intelligencer 55 (1898): 181. Bond stated here that she
“found among her papers the printed report of her discourse on the occasion,” meaning Dorsey’s funeral, “and in it I
found the printed bill of sale.” Christoper Densmore, curator of Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, did
not find this report in Bond’s papers, though he stated that a more thorough review of the collection may uncover it. See
Densmore e-mail to Strimer. Thanks to Steve Strimer for a photocopy of the Magill article. 24Hampshire County Deeds 142:488-89. 25Henry Anthony was a well-known fiddler in Florence. He and his family may have been the “fugitives from injustice”
living in the “shantee” on the farm Lydia Maria Child’s father bought her in June 1840. Child described the
Thanksgiving fiddle playing of “their colored man” and mentioned his wife and child in a letter to Anna Loring on 20
December 1840. In the spring of 1841 the Childs moved into this shanty, and Anthony’s deed for property adjacent to
Dorsey’s is recorded soon afterward. Hill, “Florence,” also mentions Anthony’s fiddle playing. The 1850 census lists a
Maryland birthplace for Anthony. Massachusetts native Hannah Randall, age forty-seven, lived in the Ruggles house,
which had been moved from its original location. Randall worked at Ruggles’s water cure, still in operation. 26Hampshire County Deeds 154:22-23.
25
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 13
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Wilmington. He then worked as a clerk and in domestic service. Jones married and had three
children, but his family was taken from him when his wife’s mistress moved to Alabama. Bereft
and then himself again sold after 1829, Jones took a second wife, Mary R. Moore, who had three
children of her own. He managed to raise the money to purchase and then free his new wife, but in
1849 he learned that plans were afoot to sell the children. Working with a white lawyer, Jones tried
to push the North Carolina legislature to pass a special act to emancipate them. When his efforts
failed, in mid- to late June 1849 he somehow arranged for Mary and her children—all but her son
Edward—to be sent by coastwise vessel to the Brooklyn, New York, home of Robert H. Cousins, an
African American porter living on Jay Street. Born in Virginia, Cousins’s wife Sarah had been born
in North Carolina, and in his home in 1850 was the 74-year-old Elizabeth Jones, also born in North
Carolina.27
Then, in August of the same year, Jones paid the steward of the turpentine brig Bell eight dollars to
stow him away. At sea the brig’s captain discovered him, but rough weather prevented returning
Jones until the vessel was near New York. When the captain went ashore to arrange Jones’s
rendition and the mate aboard was otherwise occupied, Jones fabricated a rude raft and escaped
from the Bell. Though the mate set out after him, a friendly vessel rescued Jones and brought him to
Cousins. “The Sabbath after my arrival in Brooklyn, I preached in the morning in the Bethel: I then
came on to Hartford,” Jones wrote in his narrative, issued in numerous editions under several
slightly different titles. “A gentleman kindly paid my passage to that place, and sent me an
(continued)
27Thanks to Jim Driscoll of the Queens (NY) Historical Society for the information that Cousins was black. Driscoll’s
search of the Hearnes’ Brooklyn City Directory for 1853-54 found that Cousins then had a clothing store and barber
shop at 9 Linden Row and was living at 9 Jay Street, the same address at which he was listed in the 1850-51 city
directory. Driscoll notes that this section of Brooklyn was an African American neighborhood and the home of the
Bridge Street African American church, to which Cousins was connected, as well as the Concord Street Baptist Church,
also African American. The 1850 census shows five others within several households of Cousins with North Carolina
birthplaces. In a 11 July 1849 letter to his wife reprinted in his several narratives, Thomas H. Jones wrote, “Tell brother
Robert H. Cousins that he must pray for me; for I long to meet him one time more in this world.” Jones had a sister
named Sarah, but his narratives state that she was the last sibling to be sold away from his family and that he did not
know where she was. His narratives do not state the name of his mother but imply that she died before he left North
Carolina. In the record of his third marriage, in 1867 in New Bedford, MA, Jones stated that his parents were Tony and
Grace Kirkwood, though at the time of his fourth marriage in 1882 he stated his parents names as Henry and Grace with
no surname. Thanks to Carl J. Cruz of New Bedford for this marriage data.
26
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 14
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
introduction to a true-hearted friend. I stayed in Hartford twenty-four hours; but finding I was
pursued, and being informed that I should be safer in Massachusetts than in Connecticut, I came on
to Springfield, and from thence to Boston, where I arrived, penniless and friendless, the 7th of
October.”28
By preaching and receiving contributions at several Boston churches, Jones was able to bring his
family there, and by 1850 he and his family moved to Salem. He had preached at least once at the
Free Evangelical Church in Danvers, adjacent to Salem, and the town was home to the family of
John, Charles Lenox, and Sarah Remond, well-known African American abolitionists. The 1850
Salem census enumeration shows Thomas Jones, age forty-four, with his wife Mary, seven-year-old
daughter Mary C., five-year-old son John, and three-year-old son Alexander. The 1851 Salem city
directory lists the Rev. Thomas Jones at 10 High Street Court—the African American section of
town popularly known as “Roast Meat Hill.” In the census Thomas and Mary Jones claimed
Massachusetts as the place of birth for the entire family, though they were all born in North
Carolina; the subterfuge, certainly not uncommon among documented fugitives, must have
stemmed from Jones’s continued anxiety over the possibility of pursuit.29
The threat Jones perceived remained high and was no doubt elevated after the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850. In May 1851 he left his family in Salem and escaped to the
Canadian Maritimes, where he presented a series of antislavery lectures in New Brunswick and
Nova Scotia and drummed up subscriptions for Garrison’s Liberator. “Quite free from terror, I now
feel that my bones are a property bequeathed to me for my own use,” he wrote to his friend and
supporter, the abolitionist Daniel Foster, shortly after his arrival in Canada, “and not for the
servitude or gratification of the white men, in that gloomy and sultry region, where the hue of the
(continued)
28Thomas H. Jones,The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years. Written by a Friend,
as Given to Him by Brother Jones (Worcester, MA: Henry J. Howland, 1857), 47. 29Jones often gave census enumerators different information about his place of birth. In 1860 he (or his wife) told
Worcester enumerators he didn’t know where he was born. In 1880, then a widower living in New Bedford, he stated he
was born in Virginia. In records of his third and fourth marriages he stated his birthplace as North Carolina. Jones did
not state a place of birth in any of the three narratives surveyed in this research. Peter Ripley et al., eds., The Black
Abolitionist Papers, vol. 2, Canada, 1830-1865 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992),
134 n.4, states that Jones was born to slave parents outside Wilmington, NC.
27
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 15
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
skin has left my race in thraldom and misery for ages.” In 1852 he and his wife learned that her son
Edward’s freedom could be purchased for 850 dollars, at which point Mary began a fund-raising
campaign in and around Boston, and Jones turned the full energy of his lecturing effort to that
cause. His wife and one of her children joined him in Nova Scotia for a time, but by the time Jones
returned to the United States in 1854 Mary Jones had already entered into a contract with Trask for
the purchase of Basil Dorsey’s former property..30
Unlike Basil Dorsey, who was a relatively permanent and long-lived fixture in Florence, Jones’s
presence in Florence as elsewhere to that point was intermittent. “Rev. Thomas H. Jones made this
his headquarters during the intervals between his preaching and lecturing tours,” Arthur G. Hill
recalled. “He lived on Nonotuck Street, second house from Cross Hill. He had in his lectures,
handcuffs, yokes, chains, whips and gags as exhibits of the cruelty of the slaveholder.”31 Like
Dorsey, Jones shared the Nonotuck Street dwelling with another family, identified in the state
census as Thomas Washington, an African American farmer born in Maryland, and Laura
Washington, born in Connecticut. Jones and his family left Florence in 1859 and settled in
Worcester. In 1865 Mary Jones and her sons John and Alexander may have been in Boston’s fifth
ward. But by 1867, Mary evidently having died, Thomas Jones and possibly some of the children
moved to New Bedford, where directories list him as a lecturer and minister until his death in
1890.32
30C. Peter Ripley et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 2, Canada, 1830-1865 (Chapel Hill and London:
University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 133-35. Jones’s letter to Foster was published in the Liberator, 30 May
1851.The date of Mary Jones’s bond with Trask is 1 November 1853; Hampshire County Deeds 154:22-23. 31Hill, “Florence.” 32 In 1861 Thomas H. Jones is listed in the Worcester directory as living at 13 Austin Street; in 1862 the directory
showed him at 18 Chandler Street. A block apart, the streets run parallel to Park Avenue in the city’s seventh ward. In
the 1865 Boston census, a Mary Jones with sons of the correct names and ages is shown running a boardinghouse; see
fifth ward, household 236, family 374, Massachusetts state census. On 7 September 1867, Thomas H. Jones married
Mrs. Anna Campbell in New Bedford; it is listed as a second marriage for both, though it was technically Jones’s third.
Jones was listed as sixty years old, from North Carolina, and the son of Tony and Grace Kirkwood. Campbell was
thirty-three, from Virginia, and the daughter of Matton (?) and Nancy; no surname was shown in the record. George B.
Richmond of the city’s YMCA stated in a letter dated 20 November 1869 that he had known Jones for the “past two
years”; see Thomas H. Jones, The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years. Written by
a Friend, As Related to Him by Brother Jones (New Bedford: E. Anthony & Sons, 1885). On 20 December 1882 Jones
married again to Lavina Russell Leslie of Boston, born in Bridgetown Nova Scotia. It was her second marriage. Jones’s
will names her as his widow and his other heirs as a son William H. Moore of Wilmington, NC, a son Alexander A.
Jones of Dixon, IL, and a daughter Mary Catherine Bond of Newport, RI. There is no mention of John, who may have
predeceased him, and it may be that William Moore was “Edward,” the son whom the Joneses tried to purchase from
slavery; it is not known whether their efforts succeeded or failed. Jones’s will is Probate #6717, Bristol County Register
of Probate, New Bedford, MA. Lavina Jones died at age 85 at her niece’s hosue in Onset, MA, in late August 1924.
Thanks again to Carl Cruz for the information on Jones’s last two wives.
28
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 16
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Role of Florence in the Underground Railroad
Northampton, of which Florence is a part, was a demographic anomaly in the general African
American experience in Massachusetts. In general, people of color, before and after the Civil War,
gravitated to the commonwealth’s largest port cities, not to its inland cities or its smaller towns. In
1855, 3,768 people of color were listed as living in Boston and New Bedford combined and made
up, respectively, 3.7 and 8.1 percent of each city’s total population. Thirty-eight percent of the
state’s black population lived in these two cities in 1855. Away from the coast, only 282 people of
color lived in Lowell and Worcester, whose economies were largely based on manufacturing;
industrial jobs were virtually unavailable to blacks throughout the 19th and well into the 20th
century. The population of Lowell, with 37,554 people one of the largest cities in the state, was only
0.2 % black; Worcester, at 22,286, was 0.9 % of color. Nearly 3.0 % (399 persons) of the 1855
population of Springfield (13,788 in 1855) was black. Northampton at that time was home to 5,819
people, of whom 124, or 2.1 %, were people of color.33 Westfield and Greenfield, towns of roughly
similar population size in the Connecticut River Valley, together counted only thirty-six persons of
color among their residents in 1855.
Springfield’s relative attraction may be explained by its size and corresponding economic
prominence in the Connecticut River corridor coupled with the existence of a both an active group
of white fugitive assistants, organized as the Emigrant Aid Society, and the militant United States
League of Gileadites, which the famed John Brown organized in 1852 among African Americans to
help fugitives avoid recapture. Northampton, however, was small and not commercially significant
in relative terms, nor was it formally organized for fugitive assistance. Northampton’s A. G. Hill
believed Florence was a “sanctuary” to people of color because of its liberal sentiments:
(continued)
33Francis DeWitt, comp., Abstract of the Census of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Taken with References to
Facts Existing on the First Day of June 1855, with Remarks on the Same (Boston: William White, 1857).
29
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 17
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
The North and the South of the United States battled long over the right to hold the
colored people in slavery. Many people, politicians, statesmen and clergymen alike
weakly knuckled to the arrogance of the South, while the colored fugitives from
barbaric treatment found little comfort or safety in Northern towns or cities. . . . When
the Bensonville associates reached their field of cooperative labors, each of them
feeling that the brotherhood of man included all of whatever color or shape of head,
early made it known that here at any rate was a house of refuge for the ill-treated
wanderer whether from Southern slavery or Northern barbarity. Many residents of
color therefore soon made this their home and were fraternally greeted and guarded.34
Hill was speaking only of Florence; Northampton itself was not esteemed among abolitionists.
When Lydia Maria Child moved there in 1838, she called the “state of abolition” in the town
“lifeless enough.” In a letter later the same year to the abolitionist lecturer and fugitive assistant
Abigail Kelley she wrote, “This town is a great resort for Southerners in the summer season; and
never in my life have I witnessed so much of the lofty slave-holding spirit.” Five years later, in
1843, the Hampshire Gazette noted that David Ruggles, a “black man,” had chaired a Northampton
antislavery meeting. The Gazette declared it “not in very good taste or, at any rate, was not so
regarded in this community, and we do not think it good policy to offend the taste of any
community, in any way, when there is no necessity for it.” The newspaper went on to report that “a
colored man, who has recently escaped from slavery” also addressed the meeting. “Such speeches—
if speeches they may be called—can do no good. It was mere jargon, uttered in a tone and manner
that was truly distressing. Such persons should be taught to confine themselves to the simple tale of
their history, and not attempt to exhort.”35
(continued)
34Hill, “Florence.” 35Child, Northampton, to Caroline Weston, 27 July 1838; Child, Northampton, to Abigail Kelley, 1 October 1838, in
Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880, eds. Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1982), 79-80, 89-91; Hampshire Gazette, 8 August 1843. This fugitive may have been Stephen C.
Rush, who came to Florence that year.
30
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 18
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Yet in 1843, the same year that the local newspaper looked askance at African American
participation in local antislavery meetings, the racial climate in Florence received an opposite
evaluation from a visiting schoolteacher. Sophia Foord, who came to Florence from Dedham,
Massachusetts, to teach in the NAEI’s Educational Department, wrote in May 1843 to her friend
Robert Adams, who shortly became a key fugitive assistant in Fall River, “This is becoming, or has
already become quite a depot for fugitives—one left here on Thursday & another arrived the day
following who will probably tarry a short time. He is quite intelligent, speaks of having been kindly
treated by a Mr. Adams of Providence some day last week, who it is presumed is your father.—He
says the slaves escape so frequently that their masters say the Abolitionists must have a rail road
under ground; that many more would run away were it not for the belief they are taught to cherish,
that abolitionists at the North would treat them [rest of sentence missing].”36 The arrival Foord
described was probably Stephen C. Rush. Arthur G. Hill, born in 1841 in an extant Federal-style
house in Broughton’s Meadow, recalled, “A good many passengers stopped ‘five minutes for
refreshments’ at my father’s, and conductors were often changed here. On a few trips I was either
conductor or assistant conductor. Quite a number of the through passengers temporarily took up
their abode in Florence, the balmy anti-slavery climate here proving very attractive to them.” Hill
also recalled that Josiah Henson, who like Harriet Tubman returned to the South to assist others in
their escapes from slavery, also stopped at Samuel L. Hill’s Florence home.37 Hill had also helped
Sojourner Truth buy her Florence home and put his son Arthur to the task of copying Truth’s
narrative of her life, taken down by “a kind lady in another town,” and printing it in pamphlet form.
Hill also remained in the silk business when Benson had turned to cotton. He developed “machine
twist,” a silk thread smooth and strong enough that home sewing machines could use it successfully,
and upon its basis the silk industry became Northampton’s largest employer through 1874.
Samuel L. Hill moved to a new home in Florence (extant on 31 Maple Street) probably by late
1845, and Austin and Fidelia Ross bought the Hill property when the Northampton Association
(continued)
36Sophia Foord, Northampton, to Robert Adams, 8 May 1843, private collection. Thanks to Steve Strimer for this
information and citation. 37A. G. Hill to Joseph Marsh, 31 January 1893, reproduced in Sheffield, History of Florence, 166. Hill appears not to
have owned what is now known as the Ross Homestead outright. The Northampton Associated owned title to the
property when Austin and Fidelia Ross bought it. Steve Strimer, e-mail to author, 4 February 2004.
31
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 19
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
collapsed in 1846. From the same area of northeastern Connecticut as Hill, Benson, and Ruggles,
Ross had been dismissed from the Presbyterian church in Chaplin, Connecticut because of the
strength of his antislavery sentiment, and he had come to Florence in 1845 to farm and to teach in
the NAEI school. Nineteenth-century local historian Charles Sheffield stated that the fugitive
“Wilson” lived on the Ross farm for a year and a half. This James Wilson worked as a night
watchman after 1850 at what was then known as the Greenville (formerly Bensonville)
Manufacturing Company, where Basil Dorsey continued to work as a teamster.38 A. G. Hill
remembered him:
Before the decision of Justice Taney and its results, Wilson a fugitive arrived here. He
decided to remain here, became a laborer, lived on Nonotuck St., got together a little
money tramped back to Virginia to try to rescue his son from slavery. After a few
months he appeared with his son. Leaving him he went back to get his daughter. He
was captured and kept in slavery again for several months. He again escaped and
arrived here with his daughter when the three started for Canada to happily breathe the
air of freedom.39
The Williston family were probably not the only ones to hire fugitives in Florence. According to
Sheffield, apparently based in part on the reminiscence of A. G. Hill, A. P. Critchlow employed
fugitives in his factory, which produced cases for daguerreotypes. One, whose name was given only
as “French,” worked there until his claimant or an agent named King came to the water cure seeking
him. Critchlow stayed with French at the factory for a few nights until the pursuant left Florence to
look for French elsewhere.40
Hill noted that the 1857 Dred Scott Case – in which U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney
declared that African Americans “had no rights which the white man is bound to respect” –
(continued)
38 “The Leading Citizens of Hampshire County, Massachusetts,” Biographical Review (Boston: Biographical Review
Publishing Company, 1896), 364. Strimer of the Florence History Project states that Wilson was a member of the NAEI. 39Hill, “Florence.” 40 Arthur G. Hill, Florence, Mass., 31 January 1893, to Mr. Marsh, Siebert Notebooks; Sheffield, History of Florence,
167. Sheffield, 220, also stated that Critchlow “connected with the local station of the underground railroad.”
32
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 20
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
“frightened the fugitives who had been drawn here by the anti-slavery sentiment of the palce, so that
they soon after migrated to Canada in which country the Dred Scott decision had no power. This
place then became a station on the so-caller under-ground railroad for transporting the fugitives to
Canada,” Hill wrote. There may have been a decline in the overall black population of
Northampton between 1855 and 1860, but there was a slight increase between1855 and 1865, from
108 to 125 persons. In addition, the proportion claiming to have been born in a slave state rose as
well, from 5.6 % of all persons of color in the town to 11.1 %. In truth, their numbers are small.
Only seven persons of color stated that they were born in southern states in 1855—the cook Robert
Wright from Virginia; the barber George W. Brown, living in the same household; Henry Anthony,
of Maryland; Basil Dorsey, who lived about a quarter-mile down the road from Anthony; Thomas
H. and Mary Jones, who lived in Dorsey’s former home with their two children, the latter of whom
did not claim southern birthplaces; and the Maryland-born farmer Thomas Washington, who lived
with his wife in Jones’s household. Sojourner Truth was nearby. The Dorsey - Jones House
represents what, at least at this stage of Underground Railroad research, an uncommon artifact—a
dwelling built for one fugitive and occupied by two in a small Massachusetts community dedicated
to and shaped by a commitment to racial equality and distinguished by its location on a documented
path of fugitive movement.
Moreover, a number of properties associated with Florence’s fugitives and Underground Railroad
activists survive, while others may be extant and are being researched. The home and farm of
Austin and Fidelia Ross, in which they lived from 1845 into the 1890s and where Samuel L. and
Arthur G. Hill also lived, is extant at 123 Meadow Street. The house to which the Hill family
moved in 1845, which A.G. Hill occupied until 1926, survives at 31 Maple Street. The house to
which Basil Dorsey and his family moved in 1852, and where they remained for the next twenty
years stands on 4 Florence Road; further, at 47 Florence Road, is the home David Ruggles occupied
from 1846 to 1849 and where (though the building was moved from its original site) the African
American water cure employee Hannah Randall and her family lived from 1856 to 1882. The house
Sojourner Truth lived in from 1850 to 1857 is actually enclosed in a two-story home on Park Street;
its stone foundation, timber frame and floor joists remain in their original locations. Henry
Anthony, quite possibly one of the “fugitives from injustice” living in the now-destroyed “shantee”
to which the Childs moved when they first settled in Florence in 1841, lived in a house that still
stands at 48 Spring Street.
(continued)
33
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 21
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Research needs to establish whether other properties in Florence have sound associations with the
Underground Railroad. The home of George W. Hodestia and his wife Laura, at 9 Florence Road,
for example, is extant; his gravestone states that he was “born a slave in Maryland,” but shether he
was a fugitive is not yet known. A dwelling at 615 Riverside Drive may have been where George
W. Benson lived from 1841 to 1850 and also where Sojourner Truth stayed before she bought her
Florence Home. The homes of abolitionists Seth Hurd, Elisha Hammond (who painted the well-
known portraits of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, the former in Florence, in
1844), and Hall Judd – all of whom have been legendarily connected to the Underground Railroad –
survive, but specific instances of fugitive assistance have so far not been uncovered for these
individuals.
Later history of Dorsey-Jones House (1859-present)
After Thomas H. and Mary Jones had moved to Worcester, they sold the property to Lee Claflin of
Hopkinton, Middlesex County for 500 dollars in 1859.41 Claflin’s identity is unknown as well as
his real estate interests in Florence. Four years later Claflin sold the house and lot to A. Lyman
Williston for 1100 dollars.42 Williston was the overseer of the Greenville Manufacturing Company,
successor to the Benson concern, and he was re-consolidating the old Bensonville subdivision into a
single large parcel to provide the setting for a new villa he was constructing on Pine Street at the top
of the hill. It was his grandfather and father, Payson and J. Payson Williston, respectively, who
helped David Ruggles purchase the oil mill house for his water cure enterprise in 1845. A map of
Florence published in 1873 depicts the large Williston house and barn along Pine Street and the
Dorsey – Jones House on Nonotuck Street amid a row of cottages labeled as owned by the
Greenville Manufacturing Company.43 A lithographic birds-eye view of Florence published in 1879
pictures the large Gothic-revival villa and barn along with a dwelling that appears to be the Dorsey
– Jones House with a small barn of its own.44 The depiction also indicates that most of the
dwellings identified along Nonotuck Street on the 1873 map had been cleared from the scene.
Although it was evidently protected from this fate, it is apparent from the existing conditions in the
house that no particular alterations were made to it at this time.
(continued)
41 Hampshire County Deeds, 188:77 (18 August 1859). 42 Hampshire County Deeds, 213:189 (1 June 1863). 43 F. W. Beers, Atlas of Hampshire County, Mass. (1873). 44 Galt and Hoy, Map of Florence, Mass. (1878).
34
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 22
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
By 1881 Williston had moved to Round Hill, and he sold the property to Mary S. Mann in 1884.45
She was the daughter of Samuel L. Hill, who with George W. Benson was a founder of the
Northampton Association of Industry and Education. By the time the next map of Florence was
published in 1895, Williston’s mansion had been damaged by fire and relocated to the north side of
Pine Street where it was renovated into a new residence and sold. The large barn was demolished.
The remaining dwellings on Nonotuck Street were not affected. Mary S. Mann died with the larger
property containing the Dorsey – Jones House still in her possession around 1904. In that year, her
son Samuel H. Mann conveyed his half interest in the property to his brother Charles A. Mann, who
in 1919 sold it to the Nonotuck Silk Company, more or less restoring it to the factory.46 At some
point during the next five years, the business was renamed the Corticelli Silk Company.
Northampton directories indicate that the Dorsey – Jones House (191 Nonotuck Street) was rented
to a variety of tradesmen and factory workers during this period. No one name remained associated
with the house for long. There does not appear to be any significant changes made to the house for
or by these tenants before 1925 when the Corticelli Silk Co. platted a new subdivision of the Mann
estate.47 The old lots laid out for Bensonville in 1846 were voided and new, larger lots created.
The Dorsey – Jones House was contained in Lot No. 33 of the new plan. The small barn pictured
on earlier maps had been removed. This lot was sold to John P. Burke, an employee of the Pro-
Phy-Lac-Tic Brush Company, and his wife Evelyn Burke in 1925.48 It is suspected that hot-water
heat and electricity was installed in the house, a bathroom created in the pantry in the east end of the
kitchen wing, and the dining room refurbished either by the Corticelli Silk Co. to improve the house
for the sale or by the Burkes themselves. In 1930 the Burkes sold the house to Emma M. Cantin.49
She was employed as a clerk at the Corticelli Silk Company. According to the city directories for
the period, Cantin continued to live with her parents (her father was also employed by the company)
and rented the house to at least three tenants; of longest duration was Francis R. Wilkinson, a
brushmaker at Pro-Phy-Lac-Tic.
(continued)
45 Northampton Directory, 1881; Hampshire County Deeds, 387:437 (15 May 1884). 46 Hampshire County Deeds, 579:253 (15 February 1904); 752:361 (17 November 1919). 47 Hampshire County Plan Book 5, page 10. 48 Hampshire County Deeds, 818:35 (18 August 1925); Northampton Directory. 49 Hampshire County Deeds, 863:35 (5 May 1930).
35
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 23
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Havelock J. Purseglove, Jr. and his wife, Anne, bought the property from Cantin in 1942.50 In 1944
when Purseglove returned home from the Second World War, they quickly replaced the old six-
over-six vertical sliding sashes of windows in the principal rooms of the house with one-over-one
sashes. They laid oak flooring in the front parlor and entranceway and removed the old balustrade
and replaced risers and treads on the stairs. Havelock J. Purseglove, Jr. died unexpectedly from a
war-related illness shortly after these improvements were completed in 1945.
A decade later, his widow made substantial changes to the kitchen wing. The kitchen was expanded
into the old wood shed by enlarging the opening in the interior partition between them and by
enclosing a portion of the porch, demolishing a portion of the front exterior wall, to create a pantry.
At the same time the rear wall of the old pantry space behind the wood shed was pushed out to
enlarge the bathroom that had already been added there. New windows were installed, and porches
were constructed in the front and rear of the wing. Then the entire house was sided with wide
aluminum clapboards to conceal the alterations. This was reputedly the first instance of aluminum
siding in Florence. The small porch that had sheltered the main entrance of the house since its
construction was removed when the siding was installed, and a concrete deck extending across the
entire width of the upright section was built.51
Anna J. Purseglove purchased Lot No. 34 to the east of her property in 1954, and she partitioned it
and sold the eastern half to her neighbor in 1969.52 She sold the house and lots to Russell G.
Andrus of Northampton in the same year.53 Andrus was responsible for installing the sheet
paneling in the entrance passage and the new surfaces on the walls, floor and ceiling of the rear
chamber on the ground floor. In this latter action, demolished the partition creating the closet on the
north wall of that room and blocked the doorway from the rear chamber into the parlor, creating a
bookcase on the parlor side to disguise it.
The present owner, Richard Costello of Hadley purchased the property from Andrus in 2001.54
(continued)
50 Hampshire County Deeds, 970:7 (24 September 1942). 51 Personal communication with Havelock J. Purseglove, III, 13 January 2004. 52 Hampshire County Deeds, 1161:315 (23 February 1954); 1558:651 (29 August 1969) and Plan Book 17, page 64. 53 Hampshire County Deeds, 1558:67 (29 August 1969) 54 Hampshire County Deeds, 6325:48 (15 August 2001).
36
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 24
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
He has gutted the kitchen wing in anticipation of renovating the house for tenants. He has learned
of the historic significance of the property and is now consulting with preservationists to plan the
further rehabilitation of the building.
Integrity
The alterations to the wing section of the house, the removal of the decorative porch over the main
entrance, and the containment of original wood clapboard siding, corner boards, and friezes under
aluminum siding have deprived this house of the luster of its original exterior finishes. Yet the
distinctive form of the Upright-and Wing dwelling type is still clearly discernable, and its image
outwardly conveys the modest but respectable economic and social status the two fugitives and their
integration into the community. Restrained Greek Revival-style embellishments are also adequately
visible to associate this house with the period of significance and the level of workmanship invested
in affordable houses of the era.
The interior plan and extant finishes provide distinguishing features that reinforce the associative
integrity of the house to the notable individuals and the period of significance. The interior plan
and finishes are sufficiently intact to indicate the living patterns and quality of life chosen by Basil
Dorsey when he contracted to build the house. The progressive aspects of the plan were intended to
improve the living conditions of the laboring class evincing the modern dimension of the
antislavery movement and the outlook of at least one fugitive. The feeling of Dorsey’s presence in
the house is palpable even with the damage done to the kitchen wing.
Archaeological Significance
Historic archaeological resources described above may contribute important information associated
with African-American history and the Underground Railroad in Massachusetts. Important
information may also exist related to the social, cultural, and economic lives of Basil Dorsey and
Thomas H. Jones, both Fugitive slaves and later occupants of the house. Comparative study of
architectural features of the house combined with archaeological evidence of construction features,
(continued)
37
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 8 Page 25
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
renovations to the house, and evidence of stables and/or outbuildings may identify spatial and
structural characteristics similar to those in other areas of Massachusetts or the American South.
The evidence indicated above might be used to characterize fugitive built and occupied dwellings in
the Massachusetts and possibly northeastern region. The absence of stables and/or outbuildings on
maps before and after 1895 may result from the lack of these representations on those maps. The
stables and/or outbuildings illustrated on the 1895 map of Florence may also indicate the structures
are unrelated to fugitive occupancy of the house and period of significance.
Detailed analysis of the contents of occupational related features may also contribute important
social, cultural, and economic information related to the Dorsey-Jones occupancy of the house and
fugitive occupancy of residential buildings in general. Cultural artifacts and macro-fossil evidence
may exist that indicate associations with West African culture or the American South. In addition
to material artifacts, evidence of dietary habits and pathologies may also exist. The information
described above may help identify characteristics of fugitive occupied dwellings independent of
documentary sources.
(end)
38
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 9 Page 1
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
9. Major Bibliographical References
“Basil Dorsey.” Hampshire Gazette 81, 36, 2 April 1867.
Beers, F. W. Atlas of Hampshire County, Mass. 1873.
Clark, Christopher. The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge Of The Northampton
Association. Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Fields, Barbara Jeanne. Slavery And Freedom On The Middle Ground: Maryland During The
Nineteenth Century. New Haven, Ct, And London: Yale University Press, 1985.
Galt and Hoy. Map of Florence, Mass. 1878.
Hampshire County Deed and Plan Books. Hampshire Registry. Northampton, Ma.
Hampshire Gazette (Microfilm). Forbes Library, Northampton, Ma.
Hill, A. G. “Florence The Mecca Sanctuary Of The Colored Race.” Arthur G. Hill Papers, Forbes
Library, Northampton, Ma.
Jones, Thomas H. The Experience Of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was A Slave For Forty-Three Years.
Written By A Friend, As Given To Him By Brother Jones. Worcester, Ma: Henry J. Howland, 1857.
Joshua Leavitt Family Papers, Library Of Congress.
Magill, Edward H. “The Underground Railroad.” Friends Intelligencer 55 (1898): 124-25, 142-44,
159-61, 245, 276-77. Expanded And Republished As “When Men Were Sold: Reminiscences Of
(continued)
39
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 9 Page 2
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
The Underground Railroad In Bucks County And Its Managers,” A Collection Of Papers Read
Before The Bucks County Historical Society 2 (1909): 493-520.
Mayer, Henry. All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison And The Abolition Of Slavery. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1998.
Meltzer, Milton, and Patricia G. Holland, Eds. Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880.
Amherst: University Of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
Narrative Of Events In The Life Of William Green (Formerly A Slave), Written By Himself.
Springfield: L. M. Guernsey, 1853.
Northampton Association Of Education And Industry Records, 1836-1853. American Antiquarian
Society, Worcester, Ma.
Northampton Directory, 1881-1945. Forbes Library. Northampton, Ma.
Sheffeld, Charles A. The History Of Florence, Massachusetts, 1657-1894, Including A Complete
Description Of The Northampton Association Of Education And Industry. Florence, Ma: N.P., 1895.
Siebert, Wilbur, Comp. The “Underground Railroad” In Massachusetts, Vol. 1. Houghton Library,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Ma.
Smedley, R. C. History Of The Underground Railroad In Chester And The Neighboring Counties
Of Pennsylvania. Lancaster, Pa: Office Of The Journal, 1883.
Smith, James Lindsay. Autobiography Of James L. Smith, Including, Also, Reminiscences Of Slave
Life, Recollections Of The War, Education Of Freedmen, Causes Of The Exodus, Etc. Norwich,
Conn.: Press Of The Bulletin Company, 1881.
(continued)
40
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018
(8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
Section number 9 Page 3
Dorsey- Jones House
Underground Railroad in MA MPS
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Strother, Horatio. The Underground Railroad In Connecticut. Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan
University Press, 1962.
Truth, Sojourner. Narrative Of Sojourner Truth.1850. Reprint. Mineola, Ny: Dover Publications,
1997.
(end)
41
Appendix d (Hill-Ross Farm narrative)
43
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 1
Narrative Statement of Significance
Summary
The Ross Farm at 123 Meadow Street in the Florence section of Northampton, Massachusetts, meets National
Register criteria A, B, and C in the areas of architecture, and ethnic, social, and political history in association with its
role in both the abolitionist and communitarian reform movements in antebellum Massachusetts. It is specifically
significant for its association with the Underground Railroad in the Commonwealth. Between the construction of the
house in about 1825 and the Civil War, two separate occupants, Samuel Lapham Hill and Austin Ross, engaged in
documented efforts to assist fugitives from slavery. During Hill’s occupancy, from 1841 to 1845, the property also
was part of the complex of buildings and land owned by the Northampton Association for Education and Industry
(NAEI), one of three Utopian communitarian groups organized in antebellum Massachusetts. Indeed, the Ross Farm is
the only property still standing in Florence that was connected with the Association. Samuel L. Hill was a founder of
the group and embodied the remarkable fusion of antebellum Utopianism and abolitionism. In 1845 Austin Ross
purchased the farm from the Association, and he, his son, and grandson operated it for the next 80 years. Ross and his
wife, Fedelia, who came to Florence after being excommunicated from their church in Chaplin, Connecticut, for their
abolitionist fervor, were known for sheltering fugitives in their home. The house is also significant architecturally as
a distinctive example of early 19th-century farmhouse architecture that evolved in plan and design during the Ross
tenure, and as a documented example of a dwelling that harbored fugitive slaves making their way out of the south on
the Underground Railroad. The property is nominated at a state level of significance in all these categories, and it
fulfils the Registration Requirements defined in the Massachusetts Multiple Property Submission for Property Type
#1, a dwelling that harbored fugitives on the Underground Railroad. It has also been listed with the National Park
Service’s Network to Freedom.
Northampton Association for Education and Industry and the Farm at 123 Meadow Street
According to historian Christopher Clark, the Northampton Association for Education and Industry was one of 119
communal societies established in the United States in the first six decades of the 1800s and one of forty-seven
founded between 1841 and 1845.1 Created in April 1842, the NAEI had been planned since 1841, the year that the
Transcendentalist George Ripley founded the Utopian Brook Farm in West Roxbury, and Universalist cleric Adin
Ballou created the Hopedale community in Milford. The “come outers”—people who withdrew from existing forms
of civil and religious government—who founded each community aimed to develop functioning economic and social
systems devoid of the perceived corruptions of the prevailing order. Association founders identified among these evils
the increasing divergence of “intellectual and manual labor” in American society, the economic and social
(continued)
1 Christopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1995), 184.
44
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 2
inequity of the nascent industrial order, intemperance, the oppression of some at the hands of more powerful others,
and dissension in American churches over slavery and women’s rights. Yet, while abolitionists were among the
founders of each community and each evinced some measure of commitment to abolitionism and equal rights, only
NAEI articulated those commitments as among its bedrock principles.2
In large measure, the founders of NAEI shared a rejection of sectarianism and slavery, as well as of other forms of
oppression. In a reminiscence NAEI member Frances Judd characterized the founders and later members: “all were
earnest in the anti-slavery cause; many were deeply interested in non-resistance; all were temperance people and some
had suffered expulsion from the churches for their course on anti-slavery and other matters.”3 Seven of the eleven
founders were abolitionists before founding the association, and seven were from northeastern Connecticut, an early
hotbed of abolitionist sentiment.4 Chief among the founders was George W. Benson (1808-79), whose father had
been a founding member of the Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (1790); a founder and
officer of the Windham, Connecticut, Peace Society (1826); and the third president of the New England Anti-Slavery
Society (1834). Benson Sr. had turned from his birthright Baptist faith to become a Quaker, but his son disdained
religious affiliation on the grounds that it formed a “hindrance to this peoples advancement in Truth and holiness.”5
George W. Benson’s sister Helen married William Lloyd Garrison, the nation’s leader in the cause of immediate
abolition of slavery.6 Physician Erasmus Darwin Hudson (1805-80) had been active in both the Connecticut and
American Anti-Slavery Societies and had lectured against slavery with Benson; in 1842, the year NAEI began,
Hudson traveled the lecture circuit with fugitive James Lindsay Smith.7 The antislavery views of Northampton native
Hall Judd (1817-50) had triggered his excommunication from two churches, and his wife Frances Birge Judd was, if
anything, a more committed abolitionist than he was. Judd’s father Sylvester, a newspaper editor and historian, had
helped fugitives on their way north through the Connecticut Valley in 1838.8 NAEI founder Samuel Lapham Hill was
a birthright Quaker who had been excommunicated for marrying outside the Friends and joined the Baptist
(continued)
2 Clark, in Communitarian Moment, 46 and elsewhere, has made this argument, which appears to be supported by an analysis of
the founding documents of Brook Farm and Hopedale. 3 Frances P. Judd, “Reminiscences,” in Charles A. Sheffield, ed., The History of Florence, Massachusetts. Including a Complete
Account of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (Florence: by the editor, 1895), 116. 4 Ibid., 15, 26. 5 Ibid., 18. 6 Ibid., 45. 7 James Lindsay Smith, Autobiography of James L. Smith (Norwich, CT: Press of the Bulletin Company, 1881), 62-67, describes
their tour together and the reception they received in towns throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts. 8 In his notebook Judd wrote, “June 1, 1838. Bought pair of second hand pantaloons—gave $2.25. Gave 50 cents to aid in
transporting runaway slaves to Charlemont.” Sylvester Judd Notebook, Number 1, June 1833-June 1841, 201, Forbes Library,
Northampton, Massachusetts. Thanks to Steve Strimer of the Florence History Project for this information.
45
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 3
church after he moved to Willimantic, Connecticut, to oversee a cotton mill there. Hill founded that town’s Male
Anti-Slavery Society in 1836. A year earlier, after a mob attacked the church during a lecture of abolitionist Wendell
Phillips, whom Hill had invited to speak He left the faith and, according to his son, “never again allowed his great
mind and heart to be trammeled by a church creed.”9
The founders of NAEI chose Northampton in part because of their interest in silk manufacture, often characterized as
a “craze” throughout New England in the 1830s. Whether it was specifically pursued for the purpose or not, the
interest in silk manufacture is often tied to antislavery: unlike cotton, silk was a fabric produced by free, not enslaved,
labor.10 Abolitionists who supported the “free produce” movement—that is, the purchase of goods not produced by
enslaved people—customarily wore silk and linen as a protest.11 For its part, Northampton’s fertile Connecticut River
Valley location had already been chosen for an avowedly antislavery business enterprise. In the spring of 1838 the
abolitionist David Lee Child had begun to grow beets on an acre of land in the “meadows” in order to make free-labor
sugar from their roots. In 1840 he leased twenty acres of land in Florence for the same purpose. The business failed to
make a profit and thus to support Child and his wife, author and editor Lydia Maria Child, and by 1841 she had
moved to New York City to assume editorship of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. By 1847 the Childs abandoned
the beet sugar experiment altogether.12
New York merchant Samuel Whitmarsh had begun silk manufacture in 1835 on almost 300 of meadow in Florence.
Part of this property was the 100-acre farm of Gaius Burt, who had settled in so-called Broughton’s Meadow in 1798.
(continued)
9 Arthur G. Hill, “Biographical Sketch,” in Charles A. Sheffeld, ed., The History of Florence, Massachusetts. Including a
Complete Account of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (Florence: by the editor, 1895), 207; Clark,
Communitarian Moment, 41. 10 Though some sources assert that “the Association saw silk manufacture as an alternative to cotton and the slavery system that
supported its growth” (The Northampton Silk Route, brochure, Northampton Silk Project, 2002), research has so far found no
NAEI founder who overtly stated as much. Nor has any evidence been found that NAEI members voiced an objection to the fact
that George W. Benson went into cotton textiles after leaving the association. 11 Abolitionist Deborah Weston was one of them. On 3 May 1839 she wrote to her sister Anne Warren Weston from New
Bedford, “In the evening I took tea by invite at the Emersons, & as I wore my best silk gown, all the company thought very well
of me—the Holmes were there, the Tim Coffins, the Mackies & Ellis Bartlett, Mr Emerson's assistant, who is an abolitionist.”
Ms.A.9.2.11, page 95, Antislavery Collection, Boston Public Library. On linen as a free labor good, see Deborah Weston, New
Bedford, to Anne Warren Weston, 13 November 1838, Ms.A.9.2.10, page 69, BPL Antislavery Collection. 12 The Childs had earlier contemplated moving to a free-labor colony that abolitionist Benjamin Lundy hoped to establish in
Mexico. There they met George Kimball, who later told Child that “some wealthy gentlemen” in Boston would back him if he
would produce beet sugar. Child went to Europe to learn the business and upon his return partnered with one Edwin Church,
whose 1837 book on sugar beets recommended the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts as the ideal location for beet
cultivation. See various letters of Lydia Maria Child between 1836 and 1841 in Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds.,
Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 54, 72, 115, 117, 141.
46
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 4
(Burt’s farm eventually became the core of what is now known as the Ross Farm.) Burt built the first dwelling on the
property (razed in the 1870s), and his son Theodore built the existing dwelling just west of the first house in
ca.1825.13 Whitmarsh planted acres of mulberry trees on the tract, and built a brick factory for the manufacture of
“sewing silk” (thread) and, later, various types of ribbons and silk vesting.14 Later in the year Whitmarsh
incorporated the enterprise as the Northampton Silk Company. In 1841 they sold the property and fifty additional
acres to Samuel L. Hill. Just as Hill was completing the purchase, however, he and others created NAEI, and in
keeping with the association’s commitment to communal ownership, the farm became part of its common property.15
Eventually, the NAEI acquired the silk company’s four-story brick factory, its Mill River dam and waterpower site, a
sawmill, some small workshops and outbuildings, and several dwellings with land—including the Ross Farm—
amounting to 470 acres.
In a circular aimed at recruiting members, the association stated its aim to organize the community “upon principles . .
. the best calculated to fulfill the designs of God in placing man in this life.” Existing educational and business
institutions did not emphasize “the co-operation of man as an essential condition.” For his own part Hill deplored “the
competition so omnipresent and oppressive” of modern life. Association founders averred that contemporary society
instead recognized “invidious distinctions [and] assigning the highest rank for other reasons than moral worth.” The
NAEI constitution stated the situation more critically. It decried the divide between those who did productive labor
and those who merely lived on the labor of others—or, as it elsewhere stated, “extreme ignorance and poverty in
immediate juxtaposition with the most insolent licentiousness.” It excoriated the “systematically warlike” nature of
governments everywhere and the fact that political parties were “notoriously and characteristically destitute of
principle except the love of place.” Finally, the constitution criticized American religion for having organized itself
into “hostile sects” and for replacing “audible and visible forms for the inward power of truth and goodness.” The
association would instead seek “the union of spiritual, intellectual, and practical attainments” and “the equality of
rights and rank for all,” its circular declared. Among the seven constitutional principles the founders articulated was
that “the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, color, or condition, sect or religion.”16
The NAEI operated a store, school, and common eating and living space for both families and single people who
(continued)
13 Both houses are depicted on a map of Northampton dated 1831. 14 It is unclear how many acres of the Ross Farm property was planted with mulberry trees. “Historical Sketch of Florence,”
Hampshire Gazette, 2 April 1867, stated that the trees covered one hundred acres of the later Ross Farm meadow, while Sheffeld,
History of Florence, 58, states that only fifteen acres of this meadow had the trees, at least initially. 15 “Historical Sketch,” 25-26. The association owned seven houses—the Ross farmhouse, the original Gaius Burt cottage next
door, the Benson, Adam, and Mack houses, and “White’s cottage.” All were occupied by NAEI families. In 1844, nearly eighty
members lived in the boardinghouse. See Sheffeld, History of Florence, 96. 16 See Sheffeld, History of Florence, 69-77, where the text of the circular and constitution appears in full; Hill’s quote appears in
Clark, Communitarian Moment, 32.
47
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 5
became members. The former Whitmarsh mill contained the store, the boardinghouse, and three rooms devoted to
making, finishing, and packing silk. NAEI’s silk growing department handled the trees and cocoonery; its agricultural
department cultivated crops for the community’s use.17 By early April 1842 thirty persons had joined the association,
and by spring of 1844 NAEI had 120 members, the most it had at any one time. Over the four and a half years of its
existence, NAEI attracted 240 members, and the association received at least 180 inquiries asking about or
recommending membership for people who ultimately did not join. More than half of the association’s total
membership, historian Christopher Clark has noted, “had identifiable abolitionist connections or sympathies.”18
Several members and visitors noted that the collective commitment to abolition and equal rights was not only a
principle. The black abolitionist David Ruggles, who moved from New York City to Northampton in 1842 and
became an NAEI member in the same year, wrote in the Albany North Star that the association “is founded on the
high idea of the EQUAL BROTHERHOOD OF THE RACE. While the great majority of reformers are theoretical
merely; the members of this Association are practical—endeavoring to live out the sacred principles of HUMAN
EQUALITY.”19 Frances Judd recalled that “when David Ruggles came here from New York to find a refuge, he was
welcomed and treated as an honored friend, and so were many others.”20 When a New Bedford abolitionist wrote to
ask about the admission of a man of color, NAEI secretary William Adam replied, “Of course, his color is not a
disqualification but rather a recommendation to us.”21 “It was a place to extinguish all aristocratic pretensions. There
was no high, no low, no masters, no servants, no white, no black,” Frederick Douglass noted after a visit to Florence
in the early 1840s. “I found . . . that the men and women who were interested in the work of revolutionizing the whole
system of civilization were also deeply interested in the emancipation of the slaves; and this was enough to insure my
sympathy to these universal reformers.”22 Clark has argued that association members embraced “black men and
women among them as equals—one of the few places anywhere in the United States to do so in this period.”23 This
aspect of the association irritated the Newburyport Watchtower, which described the Florence community as
composed of “extreme Abolitionists, Come-outers, broken down politicians, negroes, ladies and children.”24 Still,
Clark has suggested, NAEI’s strict admission standards—a candidate had to be known and
(continued)
17 Other NAEI departments were lumber, cutlery, mechanical (which included shoe making), domestic (to take care of the
boardinghouse and secure work for women), store, accounting, educational, and secretarial. Sheffeld, History of Florence, 89-90. 18 Clark, Communitarian Moment, 2, 61, 66, 76. 19 David Ruggles to Editor of the Albany North Star, reprinted in Liberator, 24 May 1844. 20 Judd, “Reminiscence,” in Sheffeld, History of Florence, 117. 21 William Adam to John Bailey, 13 February 1843, cited in Paul Gaffney, “Coloring Utopia: The African American Presence in
the Northampton Association of Education and Industry,” in Christopher Clark and Kerry W. Buckley, eds., Letters from an
American Utopia: The Stetson Family and the Northampton Association, 1843-1847 (Amherst and Boston: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2004), 143. 22 Frederick Douglass, “What I Found at the Northampton Association,” in Sheffeld, History of Florence, 130. 23 Clark, Communitarian Moment, 7. 24 Ibid., 95.
48
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 6
recommended by a member or a friend of the group—may have limited black membership. Only four people of color
are known to have been NAEI members—Ruggles, Sojourner Truth (who began speaking publicly on abolitionism
only after coming to Florence), and the fugitives Stephen C. Rush and George W. Sullivan.25
Samuel Hill, the Ross Farm, and Fugitive Assistance
Samuel Lapham Hill came to Florence in the spring of 1841 and resided in the house on the former Burt farm. He,
like Garrison, was adamantly nonsectarian and nonpolitical. Unlike the political abolitionists who split from the
American Anti-Slavery Society to form the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1839, Hill refused to vote;
he rather believed in the power of what Garrison termed “moral suasion” to eradicate slavery.26 Committed to the
association’s aim “to work out an improved state of society,” Hill became the NAEI’s first and longtime treasurer. In
addition, he was for some time the assistant superintendent of silk manufacture there and began, with his Willimantic
associate Hiram Wells, a machine shop to produce cutlery and metal goods the community needed. Northampton
abolitionist Seth Hunt later declared that Hill’s name should “stand highest” on the list of “founders and upbuilders”
of Florence; “he was a staunch friend of the poor and oppressed and a stout defender of free thought and the broadest
religious toleration,” Hunt wrote.27
Several examples of Hill’s assistance to fugitives from slavery have been documented, but his son Arthur Gaylord
Hill, born in 1841 on the Ross Farm, recalled it to have been systematic even though he could remember few specific
“incidents” when asked about the subject in the early 1890s. “A good many passengers stopped ‘five minutes for
refreshments’ at my father’s, and conductors were often changed here,” A. G. Hill wrote in response to a query from
local historian Joseph Marsh. “On a few trips I was either conductor or assistant conductor. Quite a number of the
through passengers temporarily took up their abode in Florence, the balmy anti-slavery climate here proving very
(continued)
25 Sullivan, admitted as an NAEI member in early November 1843, left the community in mid-1844; see Dolly W. Stetson,
Northampton, to James A. Stetson, 26 July 1844, in Clark and Buckley, eds., Letters from an American Utopia, 49. Rush arrived
in May 1843. William Lloyd Garrison wrote in the Liberator, 2 August 1843, that Rush was “a fugitive from the land of chains,
whips and bowie knives, and six months ago stood under the lash of the driver as a beast of burden”; he was impelled to escape
when he learned that, as Garrison noted, “Massachusetts had given succor and protection to George Latimer,” the fugitive who
escaped from Norfolk, Virginia, to Boston in October 1842. Rush left NAEI in April 1846 but soon afterward asked to be
readmitted. “I have tried the people out,” he wrote to Hall Judd on 7 July 1846, “but I don’t find no place like the association yet
for I believe that they live out a principle that the world no nothing about.” Rush’s letter is bound into Records of NAEI, 4:26,
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester. Thanks to Steve Strimer for this information. 26 “Historical Sketch,” 25. 27 Quoted in Sheffeld, History of Florence, 205.
49
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 7
attractive to them.”28 Hill then stated that his father most frequently brought fugitives to “the Kingman’s in
Cummington, but occasionally our living freight was delivered to a Mr. Crafts’ house in Whately.”29
Three years later, Arthur Hill provided somewhat more specific detail about his father’s activity to Underground
Railroad chronicler Wilbur Siebert. “Our station was on the line from Hartford going North, though sometimes we
had passengers who would come up part way through the Hudson River Valley or diagonally across from the
Pennsylvania line. Most of those who came to us came via Southampton (10 miles from Florence) and were brought
to us by a Mr. Lyman (whose first name I do not recall) or some one of his neighbors. Our deliveries were usually
made to a little circle of abolitionists at Cummington Mass, eighteen miles northwest of Florence, of which circle Mr
Kingman was one of the centres. Sometimes our passengers were sent through Whately about ten miles north of
Florence up the Connecticut River Valley, to a Mrs. Crafts.”30 Whether Hill received fugitives at his home between
1841 and 1845, when he lived at the Ross Farm, as well as in the home he occupied at 33 Maple Street afterward, is
not known. His son Arthur was only four in 1845 and surely did not begin to help his father until about 1850, though
what he told Marsh and Siebert may have been based partly on stories recounting events before he was born or in his
infancy.
Fugitive narratives and the retrospective accounts of fugitive assistants and their families strongly suggest that
passage up the Connecticut River Valley was common among fugitives.31 Basil Dorsey, who escaped Maryland
slavery in 1836, eventually reached the home of black abolitionist Robert Purvis outside Philadelphia; Purvis went
(continued)
28 Arthur G. Hill, Florence, to Joseph Marsh, 31 January 1893, quoted in Joseph Marsh, “The ‘Underground Railway,’” in ibid.,
164. 29 Richard Kingman operated a tavern on Main Street in Cummington, northwest of Florence; now 41 Main Street, it is a local
historic site called Kingman Tavern. James M. Crafts, born in Whately in 1817, did not profess any direct fugitive assistance
when he wrote to Wilbur Siebert in 1896. “Of course everything of the nature of assisting runaway slaves on their journey was
kept very close,” Crafts wrote. “And young fellows were considered likely to be leaky. So we were not made the assistants in the
keeping of secrets of that kind.—Yet I have distinct recollections relative to the fact that Mr Osee Monson was always credited
with the honor of being the leader in assisting the poor black men to escape.” Crafts, Orange, MA, to Siebert, 24 July 1896,
Siebert Notebooks. 30 Arthur G. Hill, Boston, July 18, 1896, to Siebert, Siebert Notebooks. 31 Writing in 1900, Aella Greene of Springfield wrote that fugitives coming to the central Connecticut coast from New York City
took one of “two routes of the Underground system” into Massachusetts and possibly Vermont and Canada. These routes
converged at Northampton, and from there a “spur track” existed when it was necessary “to blind the pursuer of fugitives.”
Greene wrote, “The runaways were sent over the hills from Northampton and Florence to Cummington, where they were kept in
hiding until the hunters, supposing them gone forward up the valley had pursued them and had returned from their fruitless
search in that direction and abandoned the quest and gone home.” Fugitives then recrossed the hills to proceed further north up
the valley. Greene’s sources are, however, unknown. Aella Greene, “The Underground Railroad & Those Who Operated It—III:
Well-Known “[Outlaws]” of Westfield, Northampton, Amherst and Other Towns—The Chester Branch, A [Bit] of the Way in
Vermont,” Springfield Republican, 1 April 1900. This three-part series was reprinted in pamphlet form in 2006 by Collective
Copies, Inc., in Florence.
50
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 8
with Dorsey to New York and there placed Dorsey “in the hands of Joshua Leavett, the editor of The Emancipator,
who sent him to Connecticut to find employment on his father’s farm.”32 The Leavitt farm was actually in
Charlemont, Massachusetts, a valley town north of Florence. There Dorsey and his family lived until about 1844,
when they moved to Northampton. In 1838 James Lindsay Smith fled from Northumberland County, Virginia, to New
Castle, Delaware, and then to Philadelphia. Fugitive assistants there sent him “with a letter directed to David Ruggles”
(who moved to Florence in 1842) of the New York Vigilance Committee, and Ruggles in turn sent Smith off with
“two letters, one to a Mr. Foster, in Hartford; and the other to Doctor Osgood, in Springfield.” Smith took a steamboat
to Hartford and another to Springfield, where he found his way to the home of Samuel Osgood, pastor of Springfield’s
First Congregational Church. By 1842 he moved to Norwich, Connecticut, Ruggles’s native place, where he lived the
rest of his life. Probably in 1839 or 1840, William Green, a fugitive from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, was taken aboard
a vessel by a willing captain to Philadelphia and was sent on to Ruggles in New York; Ruggles likewise sent Green to
Osgood in Springfield.33 The presence of numerous fugitives in Springfield is at least suggested by the fact that fully
29.9 % of the city’s 1855 black population claimed slave-state birthplaces. Only in New Bedford, whose fugitive
population is documented to have been substantial, was the proportion of southern-born blacks as high.
Arthur G. Hill noted that the NAEI members’ feelings about equal rights—“that the brotherhood of man included all
of whatever color or shape of head,” as he put it—encouraged some fugitives to remain in Florence rather than
continue their flight. “Here at any rate was a house of refuge for the ill-treated wanderer whether from Southern
slavery or Northern barbarity,” he stated. “Many residents of color therefore soon made this their home and were
fraternally greeted and guarded.”34 In 1843 Sophia Foord, who taught the NAEI school for a time, noted in a letter to
the fugitive assistant Robert Adams, then living in Pawtucket, “This is becoming or has already become quite a depot
for fugitives—one left here on Thursday & another arrived the day following who will probably tarry a short time. He
is quite intelligent, speaks of having been kindly treated by a Mrs Adams of Providence [illegible word] day last
week, who it is presumed is your mother—He says the slaves escape so frequently that their masters say the
abolitionists must have a rail road under ground, that many more would run away were it not for the belief they are
(continued)
32 Purvis quoted in R. C. Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of
Pennsylvania (Lancaster, PA: Office of the Journal, 1883), 356-61. “Basil Dorsey,” Hampshire Gazette, 2 April 1867, states that
“gentlemen connected with the Anti-Slavery Standard sent him [Dorsey] to Northampton,” but the National Anti-Slavery
Standard, the newspaper to which the Gazette must refer, did not begin publication until 1840, four years after Dorsey’s escape.
See National Register Nomination Form for the Dorsey-Jones House, Northampton, Hampshire County, Massachusetts (2004). 33 Smith, Autobiography; Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green (Formerly a Slave), Written by Himself (Springfield:
L. M. Guernsey, 1853). Green was a Springfield resident at the time he published this narrative. 34 A. G. Hill, “Florence the Mecca Sanctuary of the Colored Race,” Arthur G. Hill Papers, Forbes Library, Northampton, MA.
51
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 9
taught to cherish that abolitionists at the North would beat them.”35 Sixteen fugitives, fourteen by name, have so far
been identified as Northampton residents, if only briefly, in the 1840s and 1850s.36
Judging by the 1850 federal census, Florence appears to have been a more hospitable place for people of color than
the rest of Northampton. Almost 37 % of Northampton’s black population lived in Florence, whose population was
only 17 % of the total population of Northampton. People of color were 9.6 % of Florence’s total population,
compared to 1.9 % of the population of the rest of Northampton. Only two of Florence’s fifty-six people of color (3.5
%) did not live in their own households (and both lived in the homes of former NAEI members), while thirteen of
Northampton’s eighty-four people of color did (15.5 %).37
Two instances of Samuel Hill’s assistance to specific fugitives who opted to remain in Florence have been
documented. In 1852 Samuel Hill sold three acres of land to Basil Dorsey, a fugitive who had been living in Florence
since 1844. However, in that transaction Hill reserved one acre, with its dwelling house, where the fugitive William
Wright was then living.38 The dwelling was the “oil mill house” that David Ruggles had purchased about 1846, and
in which he had lived until some point before his death in 1849. Hill had come into possession of the house as one of
the administrators of Ruggles’s estate, so it was clearly he who rented the house to Wright after it had been moved to
South Street in Florence; it still stands at 47 Florence Road.39 William Wright was one of the ten “fugitives from
southern Slavery” who published a notice in the Northampton Courier urging town residents to attend public meeting
(continued)
35 Sophia Foord, Northampton, to Robert Adams, 8 May 1843, private collection. 36 Among them were Mary Sly, George Washington Sullivan, Stephen C. Rush, and Thomas H. Jones. Sly, said to have been
born in either New Orleans or Natchez, worked for a time at the tavern run by Jeremy Warriner in Springfield; she escaped from
her owner, a “Col. Trask,” and it may be at that time that she came to Florence, where she was listed in the 1855 state census. She
had returned to Springfield by 1860. See an interview with Sly’s daughter, Mrs. Julia Lee, in “Passing of the Old Tavern: Uncle
Jeremy Warriner’s Old Coffee House—Where He Entertained Such Notables as Kossuth and Jenny Lind,” Springfield
Homestead, 6 February 1907; see also “Jerry Warriner’s Tavern,” Springfield Weekly Republican, 31 January 1907, 13; and
Sarah B. Merrick (Warriner’s great niece by adoption), West Seattle, to Wilbur Siebert, 28 February 1907, Siebert Notebooks. 37 Thanks to Steve Strimer for providing the range of households listed in the 1850 census that were Florence households.
Florence’s population of 580 persons included 56 people of color in that year. 38 HCD 142:439. 39 Steve Strimer, “Benjamin Barrett/David Mack/David Ruggles/Hannah Randall House: A Provisional Interpretation of the
Evidence: 47 Florence Road, Florence, MA” (Manuscript, 6 July 2006. Hill later transferred the house and its one-acre lot to
Hiram Stebbins, who in turn sold it to the African American laundress Hannah Randall. She, her daughters, and her grandson
lived there until Randall died in 1883.
52
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 10
on the Fugitive Slave Act in October 1850.40 Wright was listed in the 1850 Northampton census as a fifty-year-old
black laborer who stated his birthplace as Massachusetts, clearly a deliberate falsification. In 1850 Hill also helped
Sojourner Truth, another former NAEI member, to purchase her own home in Florence, and he had his son Arthur
copy Truth’s narrative of her life, taken down by “a kind lady in another town,” and printed it in pamphlet form.
“We expected to work out an improved state of society,” Hill later said of NAEI, “and make ourselves and friends
happier.” In his life after the association disbanded Hill continued what he termed the “honest, earnest efforts for a
better life” that NAEI members had begun.41 Facing stifling debt and, perhaps, growing discord, the NAEI began to
unravel in the fall of 1845.42 In October George W. Benson resigned, and he and the association divided the common
property. Benson purchased ninety acres and the four-story mill, which he quickly converted to a cotton textile mill
with the backing of Northampton’s Williston family, evangelical abolitionists whose assistance to fugitives has long
been asserted.43 The NAEI held the remaining 380 acres, the boardinghouse, several houses and workshops, the
cocoonery, and the farm. Benson’s purchase was designed to reduce the association’s debt, but the enterprise proved
no more tenable after the sale. NAEI disbanded in early November 1846, and Hill alone took on all of NAEI’s
liabilities, stock, and debt. He then developed a plan with his brother-in-law Edwin Eaton of Chaplin, Connecticut, to
make it possible for former association members and others to own their own property and in so doing, Clark has
suggested, be able to maintain some semblance of the social world they had created in Florence. Hill plotted lots in
the modern-day center of Florence, sold building lots, and provided financing. “It was a strong desire of Mr. Hill,”
one local historian noted, “that every man of family should own his little home place, and his influence was thus
extended. Many poor men have been helped by him in the erection of homesteads, and whenever he has deeded land
for that purpose he has stipulated that no intoxicating liquors should be sold on the premises.” In addition Hill hoped
(continued)
40 “To the Citizens of Northampton,” Northampton Courier, 15 October 1850. The signers were Basil Dorsey, William C.
Randell, Joseph Wilson, George Wright, “Losenberry,” John Williams, Lewis French, William Henry Boyer, Henry Anthony,
and William Wright. Like William Wright, George Wright stated his birthplace falsely, as New York, in the 1850 census. Dorsey
(Maryland), French (Virginia), Anthony (Maryland), Wilson (Maryland), and Williams (Kentucky) represented their birthplaces
honestly. Randell, Losenberry, and Boyer do not appear as Florence residents in the 1850 census, and the 1855 state census
shows only Dorsey and Anthony still in town. 41 Samuel L. Hill, Centerville MN, 2 February 1867, for “Historical Sketch,” 8-9. 42 See Sheffeld, History of Florence, 101, on the rumored sources of discontent among association members. 43 According to Aella Greene, “The Underground Railroad & Those That Operated It,” Springfield Republican, 8 April 1900
(reprint, Florence, MA: Collective Copies, 2006) J. P. Williston sheltered fugitives at his house on King Street in Northampton
and at his expense paid to move those who wished to move further north, “by train or team.” Greene stated that Williston sent
fugitives to Levi Graves “and a Billings or two” at Hatfield and employed fugitives at his Florence cotton mill, including Basil
Dorsey. Other sources asserting a prominent Underground Railroad role for Williston include letter of Henry Shepherd,
Northampton, to Wilbur Siebert, 2 October 1896; F. Bonney, Hadley, to Siebert, 18 September 1896; Arthur G. Hill, Boston, 18
July 1896, to Siebert; and Boston Evening Transcript, 31 March 1926, Siebert Notebooks.
53
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 11
to raise enough money through property sales to extinguish the association’s debt. The plan was at least partially
successful: as Clark has noted, “By the autumn of 1846 enough had been done to permit the community to end
without a complete financial collapse.”44
Hill took over the association’s silk business and, after some early difficulty, founded Nonotuck Silk Company
(initially Nonotuck Steam and Silk Manufactory, incorporated in 1855) with Northampton’s Samuel L. Hinckley as a
silent partner. The company made machine twist, sewing, embroidery, rope, etching, color-fast knitting silks, and silk
hosiery and underwear, and it is believed to have made the first thread for sewing machines. By 1867 Nonotuck Silk
employed 137 people at its Florence factory and another 87 people at a plant in nearby Leeds. It became
Northampton’s largest employer and the state’s largest producer of silk goods.45 By 1892 it had plants in adjacent
Haydenville and in Hartford, Connecticut, and employed eight hundred people.46 With two other investors Hill also
financed former NAEI member Hiram Wells in the machine business that became Florence Sewing Machine
Company, which by 1867 employed nearly three hundred people; the popularity of its Florence model made it at least
for a time one of the nation’s leading sewing machine manufacturers.47 Hill also invested in the button and
daguerreotype case factory of Alfred P. Critchlow; Critchlow is stated to have employed fugitives to work in this
plant. By the 1860s R. G. Dunn credit accounts state that Hill was at the very least “worth $100,000.”48
With this substantial wealth Hill created four local institutions that bespoke his commitment to equal rights and social
reform. With two other men he incorporated the Workingmen’s Savings Bank of Florence. Like mechanics’ banks
and five cents savings banks, workingmen’s banks offered low minimum deposits as a way to enable middling and
working people to save and have their savings invested. In 1863 Hill and others founded Florence’s Free
Congregational Society, which aimed to accomplish goals much like those of the NAEI. Its articles of agreement
stated, “We set up no theological condition of membership, and neither demand nor expect uniformity of doctrinal
belief; asking only unity of purpose to seek and accept the right and true, and an honest aim and effort to make these
the rules of life. And, recognizing the brotherhood of the human race and the equality of human rights, we make no
distinction as to the conditions and rights of membership in this society, on account of sex, or color, or nationality.”49
In 1864 Hill contributed $31,000 toward the $33,000 cost of a new schoolhouse for the district, he funded an evening
school for working adults and children, and in 1876 he founded one of the first kindergartens to be created in the
(continued)
44 “Historical Sketch,” 27; Clark, Communitarian Moment, 181. 45 In the fall of 1852, when a separate post office was to be established in the district, residents assembled to choose a name. Dr.
Charles Munde, who operated the water cure David Ruggles had established, suggested the name Florence, because that city was
“the great silk emporium of Italy.” See Sheffeld, History of Florence, 107; Clark, Communitarian Moment, 206. 46 “Historical Sketch, 26; Clark, Communitarian Moment, 162. 47 Sheffeld, History of Florence, 242; “Historical Sketch, 15; Clark, Communitarian Moment, 207. 48 Clark, Communitarian Moment, 213. 49 Clark, Communitarian Moment, 207; Sheffeld, History of Florence, 147-48.
54
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 12
United States. Like the Free Congregational Society, Hill stated that he would fund the kindergarten as long as it
educated small children in a way “unmixed with ecclesiastical and theological exercises or influence” and remained
open to all Florence residents “without distinction of race, nationality, or previous condition.”50 Clark has stated of
Hill, “Keeping in the background, he was rarely mentioned by visitors. But in time he quietly emerged as the
community’s last main leader and principal arbiter of its fortunes,” the man “eventually to become most closely
identified with the community and its local influence.”51
Austin Ross, the Ross Farm, and Fugitive Assistance
The Ross Farm had been part of the common property of NAEI since 1841, and with the association’s demise in July
1846 it fell to trustees Samuel L. Hill, Hall Judd, and Joseph C. Martin. At first they mortgaged 305 acres in six
adjoining lots, including the farm, to the trustees of Amherst College, and in October 1849 Hill sold the farm to Abel
Ross of Chaplin, Connecticut, who had moved to Northampton probably about the same time as his nephew Austin
Ross. Austin Ross arrived in Florence in March 1845 and probably lived at the 123 Meadow Street property from the
time of his settlement there: Hill had moved to a new house in 1845, and it seems likely that he did so to make way
for Ross. Austin Ross purchased the property from his uncle in July 1857.52
Austin Ross (1812-1902) and his wife Fidelia moved to Northampton to run the association’s farm. “When the water-
cure was in operation,” one local history notes, “he supplied that establishment with from 50 to 75 quarts [of milk] per
day.”53 He continued dairying, to supply the village with milk, after the association disbanded and at any given time
kept from twelve to twenty cows. Ross came from Chaplin to Florence about the same time as Joseph C. Martin, to
whom he was related by marriage, and it is likely that he knew Hill and other NAEI members in Connecticut, where
he had been an abolitionist. According to Clark, Hill and other Willimantic abolitionists were “in touch with a further
group, in the small town of Chaplin, Connecticut, that fought a long battle over abolitionism and women’s rights
within the congregational church before being forced to give up” and leave it. The antislavery movement in Chaplin
had been, Clark has noted, “active and close-knit” and had existed harmoniously with the church until the schism in
the movement in 1839-40. Martin, “one of the radicals,” and others actively opposed the Congregational minister’s
efforts to keep women from speaking at revival meetings and his characterization of abolitionists as a “disorganizing”
influence. Garrisonians, or “old organizationists,” argued for the involvement of women as equals in antislavery
reform because equal rights for all was a main tenet of the movement; “new organizationists” held that any focus on
women diffused the movement’s original focus on the plight of the enslaved. Chaplin abolitionists tried
(continued)
50 Sheffeld, History of Florence, 148, 156-57; “Historical Sketch,” 27; Clark, Communitarian Moment, 216. 51 Clark, Communitarian Moment, 166, 17. 52 HCD 114:269, 130: 325, 174:254. 53 “Historical Sketch,” 30; Clark, Communitarian Moment, 188. How many acres Ross initially farmed is unclear; his purchase
from Abel Ross in 1857 included 116 acres.
55
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 13
to compel the church to take a formal stand against slavery until 1843, when they decided to “come out”; the church
excommunicated them, and within months Martin moved to Florence. Martin became a member of the NAEI in April
1844, and nine months later Ross arrived. Clark does not mention Ross as among the Chaplin objectors, but it seems
almost certain that he was. “In his early life he became an abolitionist,” the Hampshire Gazette noted in its 1901
obituary for Ross, “and was dismissed from the Presbyterian church on account of his anti-slavery sentiments.”54 His
uncle Abel was probably also among them: on 6 March 1841 later NAEI member Erasmus Darwin Hudson wrote,
“Last evening went to Friend Hill’s with Geo. W. Benson, W. L. Garrison . . . . after the meeting went home with bro
Abel Ross and Charles L. Fiske who have been persecuted by their minister because they favor male and female
equally participating in religious meetings.”55
That Ross was an abolitionist is indicated by his financial support of the North Star, the antislavery newspaper
Frederick Douglass began in 1847, and Douglass’s later Frederick Douglass’ Paper.56 That he assisted fugitives was
asserted in local histories and in numerous obituaries for both him and his wife. “His home was used as an
underground rail-road, sheltering fugitive slaves in their flight to Canada where freedom waited him,” Florence’s
Anna Pauline Friedrick recalled. “Mr. and Mrs. Ross were ardent abolitionists, and their home served as a station of
the ‘underground’ railroad,’” one 1902 obituary for Fidelia Ross stated, and Austin Ross’s Hampshire Gazette
obituary the year before noted, “During the anti-slavery times he was a successful agent for the underground railroad,
and many a slave was gotten into Canada through his assistance.” Ross’s antislavery impulse is also evident in his
membership in the Free Soil Party (Ruggles, Basil Dorsey, and Critchlow were all members as well), and his
commitment to equal rights is demonstrated by his charter and lifelong membership in Florence’s Free Congregational
Society.57
In his 1893 account of Florence’s role in the Underground Railroad, Joseph Marsh asserted one specific instance of
Ross’s fugitive assistance.58 He is said to have sheltered a fugitive whose last name was Wilson “about a year and a
half in one of his chambers” and to have secured him work as a night watchman at the Greenville cotton mill (the
successor to Benson’s cotton mill, which failed in 1850). Arthur G. Hill recalled a fugitive named William Wilson,
(continued)
54 Ibid., 44; Christopher Clark and Kerry W. Buckley, eds., Letters from an American Utopia: The Stetson Family and the
Northampton Association, 1843-1847 (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 152 n. 149; Austin Ross
obituary, Hampshire Gazette, 28 January 1901. 55 Hudson Family Papers, Special Collections and Archives, W. E. B. DuBois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Thanks to Steve Strimer for this excerpt. 56 See the “Receipts” column in North Star, 25 January 1850, and Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 11 February 1853. 57 Henry S. Gere, Reminiscences of Old Northampton: Sketches of the Town as It Appeared from 1840 to 1850 (N.p., 1902), 61-
62; Obituary for Austin Ross, Hampshire Gazette. 58 Marsh, “‘Underground Railway,’” 167.
56
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 14
but he did not state that he lived with Ross at any time. NAEI member Dolly Stetson referred to a James Willson in
three letters to her husband in 1844 and 1845, but this Willson left the community in May 1845 because, she wrote,
“he is not a good workman.”59 Because Ross did not move to Florence until March 1845, it seems unlikely that this
man is the Wilson he housed for eighteen months.
It is possible, however, that the Wilson at the Ross Farm was Joseph Willson, one of the ten fugitives who signed the
Fugitive Slave Act meeting call in October 1850 and who sold a lot he had purchased in 1848 only three days after
that meeting.60 Hill recounted Wilson’s story twice, once referring to him only as Wilson and once as William
Wilson; it may be that Hill simply recalled the man’s first name incorrectly. One of Hill’s reminiscences states that
Wilson came to Florence “before the decision of Justice Taney and its results,” which would have placed his arrival at
some indefinite moment before March 1857, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney upheld a lower-court
ruling that Dred Scott was not free even though his master had often brought him into territories where slavery was
illegal. Hill wrote of Wilson, “He decided to remain here, became a laborer, lived on Nonotuck St., got together a
little money, tramped back to Virginia to try to rescue his son from slavery. After a few months he appeared with his
son. Leaving him he went back to get his daughter. He was captured and kept in slavery again for several months. He
again escaped and arrived here with his daughter when the three started for Canada to happily breathe the air of
freedom.” In another account Hill noted that Wilson’s son stayed behind in Florence during his father’s second trip
south because he was “confident that his father would again escape and decided to wait for him here. Sure enough, in
a little while the old gentleman and daughter came, and after a short stay to rest and get a little money the whole party
moved north to the queen’s dominions.”61 Whether this man or his son lived for some time with Ross, and whether
Hill described the Joseph Wilson of 1850, is not known; no man of color by either name appears in Northampton
censuses of 1855 and 1860.
The Ross Farm’s Later Years
In 1870 the Ross household included Austin and Fidelia, as well as their son, Dwight, and his new wife, Mary. Their
daughter, Martha, still lived “at home,” although the Rosses’ third child, Edson, had left the house. Two farm
laborers also boarded with the family. Ten years later, Austin and Fedelia shared the house with two farm workers
and a hired housekeeper. Both Dwight and Martha, who in the meantime had married local merchant Robert M.
Branch, had separate households. Dwight and his family lived in a house on Meadow Street east of the Mill River;
the Branches address is unknown. By 1884, Austin Ross had built a new barn to the property at 123 Meadow Street,
(continued)
59 Dolly W. Stetson, Northampton, to James A. Stetson, 26 May 1844, 20 February 1845, 4 May 1845, in Clark and Buckley,
eds., Letters from an American Utopia, 36, 86, 106. 60 Joseph Willson purchased lot #4 in Bensonville Village lots on 12 October 1848 and was living next to Ezekiel Cooper, also an
African-American from Maryland, at the time the federal census was taken in Florence in August 1850 . Willson sold the lot on
26 October 1850. See HCD 125:307, 136:36. 61 Hill, “Florence the Mecca Sanctuary of the Colored Race”; Sheffeld, History of Florence, 166.
57
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 15
but at more than 70 years of age, he had given over much of the day-to-day management of the farm and the milk
delivery route to Dwight. In 1890 Austin conveyed title to the 122-acre farm to his son, and parents and son
exchanged houses, with Dwight taking charge of the homestead. In 1901 Martha Jane Branch was deeded a lot of
land on the southeast corner of Meadow and Prospect streets. Her address in 1900 was 48 Meadow Street, opposite
her parents’ retirement house at no. 61. Austin died the following year.62
At Dwight Ross’s death in 1917, his obituary described the Ross Farm as “one of the largest in the Connecticut
valley,” and it further noted that Dwight was known throughout the valley as “a tobacco raiser and for many years as
a producer of milk.”63 When the 1910 census was enumerated, Dwight was a widower, and his son, Alfred L. Ross,
and Alfred’s wife, Florence, were living with him on the farm, with the son described as the “foreman.” Dwight
conveyed the farm to his son in 1915.64 The 1920 census indicates that Alfred, his wife and two daughters were the
farm’s sole occupants following his father’s death. The census recorded his occupation as “tobacco farmer.” Ross
sold the farm, which amounted to 122 acres of land, to Richard J. Whalen, a buyer and packer of leaf tobacco from
nearby Hatfield in 1927. The farm carried a $12,000 mortgage, and Whalen was financed by Hipple Bros. & Co., Inc.
of Philadelphia, apparently a tobacco trader. Whalen became sole owner in 1928, but defaulted on his mortgage in
1931, which had been picked up by another tobacco trader, H. Duys & Co., Inc. in New York City.65
.
In 1930, the farm was rented to Frederick J. Wentzel, a 29-year-old born in Massachusetts to German parents. He was
listed as a “general farmer,” although tobacco likely continued. Perhaps Wentzel had been operating the farm since
Richard J. Whalen had purchased it in 1927. Alfred L. Ross was working as a laborer on a large tobacco farm in
Enfield, Connecticut, when the census was taken that year. He was one of fourteen farm workers residing in a
boarding house there while his wife and daughters resided in a rented home back in Florence. Their Massachusetts
household also included two female boarders, an indication of economic hard times.
Wentzel was followed by Lawrence and Edna Pratt as tenants before H. Duys & Co. sold the property to Harry W.
and Minnie B. Marsh of Hatfield in 1939. The Marshes moved to the farm and immediately sold a 4.38-acre parcel at
the west side of the farm on Spring Street, and they sold a seven-acre parcel east of the Mill River in 1941 suggesting
that they were covering losses on the farm with the sale of property.66 Another tobacco grower, Richard H. Blauvelt,
bought the farm in 1946; he also bought 17 acres of land on the south side of Meadow Street and opposite the farm.
The following year, he sold both tracts to Theodore Blauvelt, either his son or brother. In 1955 Theodore Blauvelt
conveyed the farm to Blauvelt Tobacco Farms, Inc. along with five other tracts located in Hatfield.67 Theodore
(continued)
62 HCD 431:469, 551:62. 63 Obituary for Dwight A. Ross, undated clipping in Branch scrapbook. 64 HCD 711:299. 65 HCD 834:161, 844:454, 871:369, 872:443. 66 HCD 940:495, 946:123, 998:136. 67 HCD 1000:394, 1012:354, 1204:58.
58
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 16
Blauvelt and his family resided in the old farmhouse for 39 years, during which time he removed the piazza and other
Victorian features it had accrued and “restored” the building closer to its original external appearance, at least
frontally. Otherwise, the company used the existing buildings, adding only a two-story masonry building in which
farm workers boarded. Blauvelt shut down the farm in 1972 and, after reserving the current 2.25 acres with the house
and farm buildings for his use, sold the rest to Philip R. Cohn and Bradford R. Collins, who promptly filed a
subdivision plan for 39 lots fronting on Meadow and Spring streets. (Six of these lots on Spring Street have been
built on.)68 The speculators defaulted on their $80,000 mortgage and the Greenfield Savings Bank foreclosed on the
property in 1977. The bank sold the farm acreage to Pyramid Corporation of Hadley, the builder of mega-shopping
centers based in DeWitt, New York. Development plans did not materialize, and that land was sold to its present
owner, Allard’s Farms, Inc., in 1978.69 In 1986 Theodore Blauvelt sold the remaining 2.25-acre property to John Jay
and Lois Shelley Schieffelin of Williamsburg, Massachusetts, and the Schieffelins sold it to current owners Alicia and
Nooni Hammarlund in 2002, who use it principally as their residence.70
Architectural Significance
The original form, plan and appearance of the farmhouse built by Theodore Burt in ca. 1825 are still discernable, and
as such, the existing house is a distinctive example of Federal-period rural architecture in Northampton and
Hampshire County. Because of its date of construction, it is a transitional building that retains characteristics of 18th-
century construction techniques (framing and center chimney) and façade proportions, while exhibiting early 19th-
century innovations in room arrangement and decoration. The two-story, side passage plan form was modern and
commodious, reflecting the better than middling status of its builder, Theodore Burt. Although exterior and interior
surface materials have been renewed, the heavy timber frame, center chimney, and decorative woodwork have
survived largely intact.
The interior plan is notable for its compactness and interesting symmetrical organization. An entry with staircase and
a parlor occupy the public realm in the front of the house, with a large kitchen and small heated chamber in the rear.
The front spaces have stylish woodwork in an up-to-date Federal style; the board architraves and parlor mantel have
deeply profiled surfaces and simple geometric corner blocks. There were four chambers on the second story and a
fifth in the attic. A significant distinction of the house is that fugitives from slavery were housed in one or more of
these rooms during the period Samuel Lapham Hill and Austin Ross inhabited the house.
Samuel L. Hill is believed to have harbored fugitives in chambers in the house as they followed prescribed routes up
the Connecticut River Valley on the Underground Railroad. His son, Arthur G. Hill, provided accounts of his
(continued)
68 HCD 1615:18; also HC Plans 80:32 & 37. 69 HCD 1977:347, 2018,232, 2046:66. 70 HCD 2778:13, 6994:80.
59
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 17
father’s activity, but he did not specify whether these actions took place during or after the family resided at Ross
Farm in 1841-45. However, if the Hills’ activities are unproven, there are solid accounts of Austin and Fidelia Ross
hosting fugitives in their home and assisting them safely north. Additions were made to the house after the Civil War,
so the Underground Railroad activities would have taken place in the original section of the house.
Austin Ross was a successful farmer; his rich bottomland along the Mill River provided the basis for a productive
farm that supplied the expanding industrial village of Northampton with fresh milk and dairy products. By 1860 his
household included his wife and three children as well as a revolving coterie of farm laborers and domestic servants.
He enlarged the house with the addition of a two-story service wing, with a new kitchen on the ground floor and bed
chambers for hired help above. He also expanded the narrow room in the northwest corner of the ground floor with a
one-story addition on the west side of the house to make it more functional. Farmhouses with barns connected to
them by an intermediate building containing work and storage rooms became popular forms in the Connecticut River
Valley in the 19th century, and barns with entrances in their gable ends are commonly positioned at the end of the
linear alignment of house, connector, and barn. Austin Ross added a long ell perpendicularly to the east side of his
new kitchen wing in a variant on the connected house and barn; but his barn, complete with its gable end front façade,
was sited about 45 feet away. The ell contained a wood shed, stable, wagon house and, probably, privy. The large
barn with a voluminous interior for storing hay was constructed later, and it would have replaced an earlier barn that
may have been connected to the house and ell, but that is not known for sure. The barn is a modern type that was
built throughout the valley in the last quarter of the 19th century as dairy farming became an important agricultural
occupation, and increasing amounts of hay were grown and stockpiled for feeding and bedding cows through the
winter months. These tall aisle barns were distinguished by their gable fronts with full transoms above the doors. A
shed attached to the side of the Ross hay barn was where the cows were comfortably sheltered. Better barns had flush
vertical siding, slate roofs, and highly ornamented rooftop ventilators, such as was the case at the Ross Farm. The
barn was a far greater sign of Ross’s fashionableness and status than the old Burt house in which he lived, although
they had “improved” its appearance with the addition of shadowy roof eaves and a wide piazza on the south and east
sides.
The addition of a tobacco barn (or two, the wagon house and stables originated as a tobacco barn) at this time
illustrates the evolving history of the property and the Ross’s’ involvement in this regional agricultural innovation.
Farm production gradually shifted so that tobacco was the principal crop. Dwight Ross’s son, Alfred, was identified
as a tobacco farmer after he assumed proprietorship of the property in 1920. The large tobacco barn on the property
represents the type that was constructed throughout the valley, and now that tobacco growing is no longer a viable
agricultural product, it is one of a diminishing number of intact tobacco barns in the region.
The Ross Farm is significant in a number of local historical and architectural contexts, with it role in the
(continued)
60
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 18
philosophical underpinnings and the practical operation of the Underground Railroad having state-wide significance.
The house is a distinctive example of early 19th-century domestic architecture in the area, and its surviving barns and
outbuildings illustrate the course of farming in the region over a period of more than a century.
Archaeological Significance
Since patterns of ancient Native American settlement in Northampton are poorly understood, any surviving sites could be
significant. Many areas in the town are underreported, and few sites have been systematically excavated in the area.
Native American sites on the Ross Farm property may contribute important information related to ancient subsistence and
settlement patterns within the Connecticut River drainage and the importance of those activities along major tributaries of
that drainage. During the Contact Period, an important regional core developed along the Connecticut River in the
Hadley-Northampton locale. During this period, Native subsistence and settlement patterns focused on larger riverine
village sites along the Connecticut River, with seasonal exploitation of nearby upland faunal and floral resources. Ancient
sites on the Ross Farm property may contribute important information that identifies how these patterns evolved from
earlier periods. Archaeological sites in the area may identify similarities between ancient patterns of subsistence and
settlement along major Connecticut River tributaries, and later Contact Period patterns that focused on the Connecticut
River with seasonal exploitation of the uplands.
Historic archaeological resources described above may contribute important information related to the early settlement
and agricultural history of Northampton, 19th-century communal, utopian movements in Massachusetts, and the
Underground Railroad movement in the Commonwealth. Additional historical research, combined with archaeological
survey and testing, may locate evidence of the Parsons sawmill, whose precise location is unknown but may be located on
the property. Archaeological resources from the site of the Parsons sawmill may contribute important information related
to the early settlement of Northampton, the architectural characteristics of 17th century New England mills, and sawmill
technology. The earliest documented archaeological resources on the Ross Farm property are potential resources
associated with the Gaius Burt farmhouse (1801), including barns, outbuildings, and occupational-related features (trash
pits, privies, wells). Historical and archaeological research at the Burt farmhouse may contribute important information
related to the architectural characteristics of early 18th century farmhouses in Northampton, and the importance of
agriculture in early Connecticut River Valley settlements. Important information may exist that identifies the internal
configuration of the farmstead, its relationship to building patterns of farmsteads in other New England areas, and the
focus and technology associated with agricultural production on the farm.
Additional historical research combined with archaeological survey and testing in the vicinity of the existing farmhouse
may also contribute important information related to settlement, agriculture, manufacturing, and social evolution.
Structural evidence of barns, outbuildings, and detailed analysis of the contents of occupational-related features, may
identify structures and features that were used by the inhabitants of both farmhouses, or reused by residents of the existing
house. Important information may exist related to the cultivation of silkworms, the operation of the
(continued)
61
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 8 Page 19
Northampton Silk Company, and the social, cultural, and economic lives of the farm inhabitants. Occupational-related
features may be stratified so that different occupations of the house and activities can be isolated through time.
Outbuildings and occupational-related features may also contribute important information related to the Northampton
Association for Education and Industry, a communal utopian organization created at a time when several similar groups
were created across antebellum Massachusetts. Historical and archaeological information may exist that identifies the
extent to which silk production supported the community. Building types, their organization, and artifact distributions
may also exist that identify the extent the groups developed around a nondenominational, free religious society,
abolitionist activities, and other ideals such as women’s equality, temperance, vegetarianism, and peace.
Additional historical research combined with archaeological survey and testing may contribute important information
related to the Underground Railroad in Massachusetts and the role the house and its inhabitants played in that movement.
Between 1825 and the Civil War, two occupants of the house, Samuel Lapham Hill and, later, Austin Ross, engaged in
activities to assist fugitives in their escape from slavery. During Hill’s occupancy, from 1841 to 1845, the property was
part of a complex of buildings and land owned by the Northampton Association for Education and Industry noted above.
Austin Ross, a member of the Association, purchased the farm in 1846 and lived there until the late 1890s. The Ross
family occupied the farm until ca. 1935. A significant distinction of the house is that fugitives from slavery were housed
in one or more rooms of the house during both the Hill and Ross periods of occupancy. A further distinction of the Ross
occupancy is that he was reported to have sheltered a fugitive for a year and a half in one of the house chambers.
Documented occupancy of the house by fugitives for extended periods of time is important, since it increases the potential
for their occupancy to be recognized in the contents of occupational-related features and possibly in the architectural
characteristics of the house, barns, and outbuildings.
Since properties that harbored fugitives on the Underground Railroad are indistinguishable from similar buildings that
were not associated with Underground Railroad activities, structural evidence of buildings in this type that survive in an
archaeological context should also offer no additional evidence of their Underground Railroad association. Associated
occupational-related features (trash pits, privies, wells), however, may contribute important evidence that documents
Underground Railroad activities at these locations. Subsistence refuse and material culture items associated with fugitives
may have been deposited in hidden areas to conceal the presence of fugitives at these locations. On the other hand, refuse
and material culture associated with fugitives may not have been hidden at all but deposited in normal trash deposits. By
the mid 19th century, trash deposits on residential properties may be more common in rural areas than urban settings.
Hidden refuse deposits may characterize both urban and rural areas. Refuse deposits may contain evidence of africanisms
or West African culture associated with Southern black fugitives that contrasts sharply with material culture items of
Anglo homeowners or even northern blacks. Privies may also contain important macro-fossil evidence that indicates the
presence of fugitives. Parasitic and floral evidence may exist that indicates an association with diseases and parasitic
conditions specific to West Africa or the American south. Occupational-related features can be an important
archaeological resource type on Underground Railroad sites, since they can occur with both extant buildings and on
archaeological sites.
(end)
62
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 9 Page 1
Major Bibliographical References
PRIMARY SOURCES
Amherst, MA. University of Massachusetts. W. E. B. DuBois Library. Special Collections and Archives. Hudson Family
Papers.
Ancestry.com. U.S. Census Records, 1840-1880.
Boston MA. Boston Public Library. Antislavery Collection.
Cambridge MA. Houghton Library. Harvard University. “The ‘Underground Railroad’ in Massachusetts.” Vols. 13 and
14 of Notebooks Concerning the Underground Railroad. Material Collected by Professor Wilber H. Siebert, Ohio
State University, Columbis, n.d.
Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds., Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1982
Northampton, MA. Forbes Library. Arthur G. Hill Papers.
_______________. Hampshire County Registry of Deeds
SECONDARY SOURCES
Clark, Christopher. The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Clark, Christopher, and Kerry W. Buckley, eds. Letters from an American Utopia: The Stetson Family and the
Northampton Association, 1843-1847. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
Gere, Henry S. Reminiscences of Old Northampton: Sketches of the Town as It Appeared from 1840 to 1850. 1902.
Greene, Aella. “The Underground Railroad & Those Who Operated It.” Three-part series. Springfield [MA] Republican.
April 1900; reprinted Florence, Collective Copies, Inc., 2006.
“Historical Sketch of Florence,” Hampshire Gazette, 2 April 1867.
Judd, Frances P. “Reminiscences.” The History of Florence, Massachusetts. Including a Complete Account of the
Northampton Association of Education and Industry. Charles A. Sheffield, ed. Florence: by the editor, 1895.
(continued)
63
NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet Hill – Ross Farm
Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA
Section number 9 Page 2
Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green (Formerly a Slave), Written by Himself. Springfield MA: L. M.
Guernsey, 1853.
[Obituary of Austin Ross]. Hampshire Gazette, 28 January 1901.
Sheffeld, Charles A., ed. The History of Florence, Massachusetts. Including a Complete Account of the Northampton
Association of Education and Industry. Florence: by the editor, 1895.
Smith, James Lindsay. Autobiography of James L. Smith. Norwich, CT: Press of the Bulletin Company, 1881.
(end)
64
Appendix e (Sample Form B’s in district)
Follow Massachusetts Historical Commission Survey Manual instructions for completing this form.
FORM B −BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSIONMASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
Topographic or Assessor's Map
Recorded by:Bonnie Parsons
Organization:Pioneer Valley Planning Commission
Date (month / year): March, 2010
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
22D-061-001 Easthampton NTH.2496
Town:Northampton
Place:(neighborhood or village)Florence
Address:47 Florence Road
Historic Name:Benjamin Barrett-David Ruggles House
Uses:Present:single-family house
Original: single-family house and water cure center
Date of Construction:ca. 1840
Source:History of Florence
Style/Form:Cape Cod form
Architect/Builder:
Exterior Material:
Foundation:brick
Wall/Trim:vinyl
Roof:asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
Major Alterations (with dates):Attached wing and garage
Condition:good
Moved: no | | yes | x | Date ca. 1851
Acreage:
Setting:This is an east-facing house set on a slight rise in the landscape.
65
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [47 FLORENCE ROAD]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
NTH.2496
__X_ Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form.
Use as much space as necessary to complete the following entries, allowing text to flow onto additional continuation sheets.
ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION:
Describe architectural features. Evaluate the characteristics of this building in terms of other buildings within the community.
This is a one-and-a-half story house under a side gable roof with no interior chimney. A moved house, its chimney would have
been lost at the time of its move and replaced with an exterior wall chimney on the south elevation. It has a Cape Cod form. It is
four bays wide and two bays deep, and there is a one-story wing, three bays long, on its north elevation that connects to a single bay garage. The entry is off-center. The vinyl-sided building has two shed-roof dormers on its east façade. Windows in the house have replacement vinyl 6/1 sash. There is a hipped roof porch across the full width of the house’s east façade. It rests on turned posts above a lattice apron. This is a modest house, like many in Florence, and its Cape form was a popular one. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE Discuss the history of the building. Explain its associations with local (or state) history. Include uses of the building, and the role(s) the owners/occupants played within the community. This building was owned by Benjamin and Mary Barrett on Spring Street built ca. 1840. At the time they owned the house, it appears that it was near the Anthony and Celeste Henry House at 40 Spring Street. Benjamin Barrett appears in the 1850 census in Northampton as a physician with his wife Mary. The Barretts sold the house to the utopian community, the Northampton Association for Education and Industry who used it to house one of the Association’s founders, David Mack whose role in the community was to teach and oversee the schooling of community members. Following David Mack, the house was occupied by two more community member families - that of George Benson and then the Stetsons, Dolly and James. When the Stetsons left the house to live in the Association boarding house, another community member, Harriet Hayden, who had previously been expelled from the community moved in for her final days. When Harriet died the house was turned over in 1845 to David Ruggles who remained here until his death in1849. Ruggles was one of the country’s foremost black journalists who during his years in New York as a member of the New York Committee of Vigilance helped free over 600 fleeing slaves, including Frederick Douglass, before moving to Florence where he worked on the Underground Railroad and was a member of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. In poor health, Ruggles in Florence became a proponent of hydrotherapy and started his own water cure in 1846 from this house. He treated patients with some success until his death in 1849 and by then had begun building a water cure center on Spring Street. Ca. 1851 the house was moved to the land of a freed slave, Basil Dorsey on the west side of Florence Road, and Hannah Randall, an African American woman, lived here from 1856-1882. She worked at the water cure and lived here after it was moved. By 1895 Patrick Bartley owned the house. He worked for the Florence Sewing Machine Company and lived on Elm Street, presumably renting the house to others. BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Beers, F. W. County Atlas of Hampshire Massachusetts, New York, 1873. Hales, John G. Plan of the Town or Northampton in the County of Hampshire, 1831. Miller, D. L. Atlas of the City of Northampton and Town of Easthampton, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, 1895. Walker, George H. and Company. Atlas of Northampton City, Massachusetts, Boston, 1884. Walling, Henry F. Map of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, New York, 1860.
66
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [47 FLORENCE ROAD]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
NTH.2496
National Register of Historic Places Criteria Statement Form
Check all that apply: Individually eligible Eligible only in an historic district
Contributing to a potential historic district Potential historic district
Criteria: A B C D Criteria Considerations: A B C D E F G
Statement of Significance by _____Bonnie Parsons___________________
The criteria that are checked in the above sections must be justified here. The Barrett-Ruggles House is individually eligible for the National Register as the home to David Ruggles,
Abolitionist who freed over 600 slaves, established a water cure in Northampton and was one of the nation’s first
Black journalists. The house is significant as well for its association with the Northampton Association for Education
and Industry.
67
Follow Massachusetts Historical Commission Survey Manual instructions for completing this form.
FORM B − BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
Topographic or Assessor's Map
Please see attached map.
Recorded by: Bonnie Parsons
Organization: Pioneer Valley Planning Commission
Date (month / year): March, 2010
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
23A-025 Easthampton NTH.2542
Town: Northampton
Place: (neighborhood or village) Florence
Address: 35 Park Street
Historic Name: Sojourner Truth House
Uses: Present: single-family house
Original: single-family house
Date of Construction: ca. 1850-1900
Source: African American Heritage Trail
Style/Form: Queen Anne
Architect/Builder:
Exterior Material:
Foundation: brick
Wall/Trim: vinyl
Roof: asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
Major Alterations (with dates): House raised and reconfigured, ca. 1895
Condition: good
Moved: no | x | yes | | Date
Acreage: 0.343 acres
Setting: This is a west-facing building overlooking Park Street Cemetery.
68
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [35 PARK STREET]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
NTH.2542
__X_ Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form.
Use as much space as necessary to complete the following entries, allowing text to flow onto additional continuation sheets.
ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION:
Describe architectural features. Evaluate the characteristics of this building in terms of other buildings within the community.
This house of two-and-a-half stories contains the foundation and framework of Sojourner Truth’s house, which was discovered
by the David Ruggles Center in 2001 during an investigation of its interior structure. In its current condition the house is without
particular architectural merit, its only distinguishing feature being the porch on turned posts with eaves brackets and a small Queen Anne style stair window on the south elevation. The house is vinyl-covered and has vinyl replacement windows. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE Discuss the history of the building. Explain its associations with local (or state) history. Include uses of the building, and the role(s) the owners/occupants played within the community. The Sojourner Truth House was identified as being at 67 Park Street from a labeled photograph in the collection of the David Ruggles Center. A closer reading of the photograph however reveals that the Truth House was not at 67 but at 35 Park Street, a small Cape house that was later to be expanded to its current size. Sojourner Truth, a former slave, came to Florence in about 1843 at the suggestion of friends who knew about the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community whose principles included the equality of all people no matter their sex, color, or condition, sect or religion. She stayed in 1843 and became a member of the community. According to a letter written by association member Dolly W. Stetson to her husband James A. Stetson on March 6, 1845, ”the washing room is a seperate [sic] department Sojourner Director and Mr Fitch assistant and they wash for all the community that choose to send their washing”. In 1844 she gave her first anti-slavery lecture and within a few years became a noted public speaker on abolition. Truth wrote her autobiography Narrative of Sojourner Truth in 1850 and with proceeds from sale of the book she bought or built this house in Florence. The mortgage of the house was held for her by Samuel L. Hill, an Abolitionist, and co-founder of the utopian community in Florence called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry and founder of the Nonotuck Silk Company. Truth was able to pay off her mortgage to Hill by 1854. She continued to live in the house until 1857 when she moved to Battle Creek, Michigan where she lived out the rest of her life. In 1884 the house had been enlarged and by 1895 it had been re-modeled and enlarged and belonged to E. Brackett. By 1926 it was owned by retired couple Edward C. and Ella Waite. BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Beers, F. W. County Atlas of Hampshire Massachusetts, New York, 1873. Hales, John G. Plan of the Town or Northampton in the County of Hampshire, 1831. Miller, D. L. Atlas of the City of Northampton and Town of Easthampton, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, 1895. Walker, George H. and Company. Atlas of Northampton City, Massachusetts, Boston, 1884. Walling, Henry F. Map of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, New York, 1860. Sheffield, Charles (ed.). History of Florence 1681-1894, Florence, 1895. David Ruggles Center. African American Heritage Trail, n.d.
69
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [35 PARK STREET]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
NTH.2542
National Register of Historic Places Criteria Statement Form
Check all that apply:
Individually eligible Eligible only in an historic district
Contributing to a potential historic district Potential historic district
Criteria: A B C D Criteria Considerations: A B C D E F G
Statement of Significance by _____Bonnie Parsons___________________
The criteria that are checked in the above sections must be justified here.
The Sojourner Truth House would contribute to a multiple resource listing on the National Register of Historic Places
of properties associated with Abolition and the Underground Railroad in Northampton. In these Northampton
locations, documented activities in support of the Underground Railroad transporting fugitive slaves to Canada took
place. Here lived Sojourner Truth, former slave and noted Abolitionist.
70
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [35 PARK STREET]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
NTH.2542
71
Follow Massachusetts Historical Commission Survey Manual instructions for completing this form.
FORM B − BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
Topographic or Assessor's Map
Recorded by: Bonnie Parsons
Organization: Pioneer Valley Planning Commission
Date (month / year): March, 2010
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
23A-3 Easthampton NTH.158
Town: Northampton
Place: (neighborhood or village) Florence
Address: 27 Meadow Street
Historic Name: William Gerhardt House
Uses: Present: two-family residence
Original: one-family residence
Date of Construction: ca. 1873
Source: Registry of Deeds and Atlas
Style/Form: Italianate
Architect/Builder:
Exterior Material:
Foundation: brick
Wall/Trim: vinyl
Roof: asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
Major Alterations (with dates): Siding added, porch shortened, and windows replaced, ca. 2000.
Condition: good
Moved: no | x | yes | | Date
Acreage: 0.248 acres
Setting: set on a slight rise, this house faces south near the center of Florence. There are two large maple trees at the street.
72
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [27 MEADOW STREET]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
NTH.158
___ Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form.
Use as much space as necessary to complete the following entries, allowing text to flow onto additional continuation sheets.
ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION:
Describe architectural features. Evaluate the characteristics of this building in terms of other buildings within the community.
This is a large-scale house, two-and-a-half stories in height under a side-gable roof on which are two interior chimneys. The
house is five bays wide and two bays deep and on the south façade is a center entry behind a stacked porch on turned posts
with brackets at the eaves. The second story of the porch has a closed railing of shingles and its roof rests on posts. The house has lost a good deal of its character with the use of 1/1 vinyl replacement windows and vinyl siding. Originally its porch was full-width and its turned brackets and pedimented roofs at the two stories added considerable ornament to the façade. Remaining, however, are two through-cornice, front-gabled dormers with Italianate peaked windows in their gable fields. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE Discuss the history of the building. Explain its associations with local (or state) history. Include uses of the building, and the role(s) the owners/occupants played within the community. From the Form B of 1980, “In 1873 William Gerhardt bought half an acre of land on Meadow Street for $400 and built this double house soon after. It appears that the house was an investment as Mr. Gerhardt continued to live on Center Street, now Middle Street, in Florence. Gerhardt was a die sinker and later a saloon keeper.” Research by Florence historian Steve Strimer indicates that this house may contain portions of a much earlier house, known as the Josiah White house seen on the map of 1831. The Strimer research included a field investigation of the building’s structure, which found a second frame 36’ x 8’ x 12’ within the current frame. Confirmation of the second frame and dating of its members would be important to link the White house with this larger house. It is known that Lydia Maria Childs leased the Josiah White house from its then owner Joseph Conant during her stay in Florence. Following Child, the White House was occupied for a time by Charles Munde, owner and operator of the water cure treatment facility at the corner of Spring and Meadow Streets after the death of its founder David Ruggles. BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Beers, F. W. County Atlas of Hampshire Massachusetts, New York, 1873. Hales, John G. Plan of the Town or Northampton in the County of Hampshire, 1831. Miller, D. L. Atlas of the City of Northampton and Town of Easthampton, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, 1895. Sheffeld, Charles. The History of Florence, Massachusetts, Florence, 1985. Strimer, Steve. Oral History, April, 2010. Walker, George H. and Company. Atlas of Northampton City, Massachusetts, Boston, 1884. Walling, Henry F. Map of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, New York, 1860. Registry of Deeds: Book 306 Page 496; Book 293 Page 89; Book 290 Page 291. Northampton Directory 1875-76; 1885-86,
73
Follow Massachusetts Historical Commission Survey Manual instructions for completing this form.
FORM B − BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
Topographic or Assessor's Map
Recorded by: Bonnie Parsons
Organization: Pioneer Valley Planning Commission
Date (month / year): June, 2010
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
23C-003 Easthampton NTH.2545
Town: Northampton
Place: (neighborhood or village) Florence
Address: 615 Riverside Drive
Historic Name: George and Catherine Benson Cottage
Uses: Present: single-family house
Original: single-family house
Date of Construction: ca. 1846
Source: Sheffeld, History of Florence
Style/Form: Queen Anne
Architect/Builder:
Exterior Material:
Foundation: parged brick
Wall/Trim: clapboards
Roof: asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
Major Alterations (with dates): Windows replaced ca. 2005
Condition: good
Moved: no | | yes | x | Date 1873-1879
Acreage: 0.2 acres
Setting: This house faces south on a narrow lot that is shaded with trees on the east.
74
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [615 RIVERSIDE DRIVE]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
NTH.2545
__x_ Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form.
Use as much space as necessary to complete the following entries, allowing text to flow onto additional continuation sheets.
ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION:
Describe architectural features. Evaluate the characteristics of this building in terms of other buildings within the community.
This is a modest house two bays wide and two bays deep and two-and-a-half storied in height. It has a side-gable roof with no
interior chimney. Rather the chimney is an exterior wall chimney on the building’s east elevation. There are no windows on the
second story of the south façade, but there is a shed-roofed porch on this façade that rests on turned posts that give the building its stylistic designation as Queen Anne, though the porch was not part of the original construction of the building and was probably added after the house’s move. Foundations are high and parged. Windows have simple drip edge surrounds and this trim is found at the main south door surround as well. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE Discuss the history of the building. Explain its associations with local (or state) history. Include uses of the building, and the role(s) the owners/occupants played within the community. Though moved in the 1870s, there is strong documentary evidence that this house was owned and occupied by George W. and Catherine Benson between 1841 and ca. 1850 when it was located at the corner of Maple Street and Nonotuck Street. The house historically was known as the Benson Cottage, distinct from the Benson House that was on Main Street, Florence. George W. Benson is noted as one of the founders of the utopian community: the Northampton Association for Education and Industry, though for all the founders it was clearly a family effort. In the late 1830s, George and Catherine Benson lived in Brooklyn, Connecticut and had four children; George was a silk manufacturer and the son of George Benson who was a founder of the Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. George W. Benson was an early Abolitionist as one of the men who provided support to Prudence Crandall when she established a school for African-American girls in Canterbury, Connecticut. One of George’s sisters, Helen, was married to the editor and leading Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. As second generation Abolitionists, the Bensons became involved in the movements for social reform that incorporated Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalism and the theories of communitarians Robert Owen, who in 1825 founded New Harmony in Indiana, Charles Fourier, whose principles published in 1840 were behind Brook Farm near Boston, and the writings of John Humphrey Noyes who was later to found the Oneida Community in New York in 1848. Benson met up with others interested in a community that would couple education and industry with its beliefs in social equity - William Adam, David Mack and Samuel L. Hill. In 1841 the four came to see Broughton’s Meadow as a possible community site, and once satisfied, bought the Northampton Silk Company, which would provide the industry with Benson’s guidance, while David Mack, an educator, would establish the schooling. The Bensons moved to their small house as Community members in 1841. The founders formed the formal Association and began soliciting members in 1842. In 1843 the Community, as it was called, had 30 men over 18; 26 women (and an additional 6 women hired from the community to work in the factory), and 46 children under 18. The silk industry, however, didn’t generate enough profits to pay off their debts, and the Association’s financial foundation became ever more precarious. George W. Benson resigned in 1845 as Association president and soon after from the Association entirely in order to buy the silk mill with financial backing of J. P. Williston, Samuel Williston, and Joel Hayden and convert it to a cotton
mill, thereby eliminating some of the debt. In 1846 the Bensonville Manufacturing Company bought the brick mill and 100 acres
and Benson converted it to cotton. He and his partners hired African-Americans, among them fugitive slaves, providing them an
economic stability that in turn fostered an African-American community in Florence. In November, 1846 the Association was
ended but the future seemed bright for the manufacture of cotton, and the Bensons in 1847 added on to the house. Accounts
suggest that Sojourner Truth lived with the family after 1846 and until she bought her own house in 1850. But in 1848 George
was removed by his partners from the cotton mill enterprise for religious reasons and soon was greatly in debt. It is thought that
it was in 1848 that the family moved out of the cottage and to the Benson House on Main Street in Florence. They left
Massachusetts altogether in 1850.
From maps and a bird’s eye view, comments in Sheffeld’s History of Florence, and dendrochronology, it is likely that the Benson
Cottage was moved between 1873 and 1879 to this location. By 1884 the house was owned by A. Lyman Williston who with his
75
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [615 RIVERSIDE DRIVE]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
NTH.2545
wife Sarah, three children and two servants lived further north on River Street and would have rented this house out. Williston was an agent for the cotton mill that was still operating. In 1895 the house was owned by John J. Corbett. Corbett was a contractor-carpenter in Northampton, so the house continued to be a rental during this period. By 1926 the house was owned by Leroy and Emma Handfield. Leroy was a foreman at the Corticelli Silk Company where many of his neighbors also worked. BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Beers, F. W. County Atlas of Hampshire Massachusetts, New York, 1873. Miller, D. L. Atlas of the City of Northampton and Town of Easthampton, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, 1895. Sheffeld, Charles. The History of Florence, Massachusetts, Florence, 1895. Strimer, Steve. A Case for the House at 615 Riverside Drive, Florence, Massachusetts to have been the George W. and Catherine Benson Cottage, ms., David Ruggles Center, Florence, n.d. Walker, George H. and Company. Atlas of Northampton City, Massachusetts, Boston, 1884. Walling, Henry F. Map of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, New York, 1860.
76
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [615 RIVERSIDE DRIVE]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
NTH.2545
National Register of Historic Places Criteria Statement Form
Check all that apply:
Individually eligible Eligible only in an historic district
Contributing to a potential historic district Potential historic district
Criteria: A B C D Criteria Considerations: A B C D E F G
Statement of Significance by _____Bonnie Parsons___________________
The criteria that are checked in the above sections must be justified here.
The George and Catherine Benson House would contribute to a multiple resource listing on the National Register of
Historic Places of properties associated with Abolition and the Underground Railroad in Northampton. In these
Northampton locations, documented activities in support of the Underground Railroad took place. Fugitive slaves
were employed in Florence businesses, and after the Fugitive Slave Law they were transported to Canada with Florence citizens as their guides. Here lived George and Catherine Benson who were important in Florence history for their role in creating the Northampton Association of Education and Industry and for their role in the Underground
Railroad as active Abolitionists.
The house is modest but reflects the principles of the Association members who eschewed personal gain and material
goods for social and economic equality among all people.
77
Follow Massachusetts Historical Commission Survey Manual instructions for completing this form.
FORM B − BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
Topographic or Assessor's Map
Recorded by: Bonnie Parsons
Organization: Pioneer Valley Planning Commission
Date (month / year): March, 2010
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
23A-097-001 Easthampton NTH.2532
Town: Northampton
Place: (neighborhood or village) Florence
Address: 133 Nonotuck Street
Historic Name: Joseph and Henrietta Willson House
Uses: Present: single-family residence
Original: single-family residence
Date of Construction: ca. 1850 and ca. 1880
Source: The History of Florence
Style/Form: gable-and-wing
Architect/Builder:
Exterior Material:
Foundation: brick
Wall/Trim: shingles
Roof: slate
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
Garage
Major Alterations (with dates): Shingle siding added and windows replaced, ca. 1990.
Condition: good
Moved: no | x | yes | | Date
Acreage: 0.271 acres
Setting: This is a south-facing house set on a hillside.
78
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [133 NONOTUCK STREET]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
NTH.2532
__x_ Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form.
Use as much space as necessary to complete the following entries, allowing text to flow onto additional continuation sheets.
ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION:
Describe architectural features. Evaluate the characteristics of this building in terms of other buildings within the community.
The Joseph and Henrietta Willson House is a two-and-a-half story, gable-and-wing form house with a wrap-around porch that
extends from the south to the east elevations. It is stylistically modest although the large gable-and-wing form was popular
during the Queen Anne style. There are ells on the rear of the house that make it complicated in plan. Sash has been replaced with 1/1 and the house sided in wood shingles. The porch rests on posts with simple brackets at the eaves, a form that was used at the end of the 19th century. The house as it appears now is a later 19th century expansion of a ca. 1850 house and represents mill workers’s housing in Florence for its simplicity. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE Discuss the history of the building. Explain its associations with local (or state) history. Include uses of the building, and the role(s) the owners/occupants played within the community. Joseph and Henrietta Willson, Arthur and Alvord Willson in 1850 on the US Census appear as a black family who owned this house (in Joseph’s name), worth $300. The Willsons were fugitive slaves and although their exact relationship was not identified on the census of that year, their relative ages would suggest a nuclear family. All four family members had been born in Maryland and the three men were laborers while Henrietta appears to have been working at home. Henrietta was 55, Joseph was 40, Arthur was 23 and Alvord was 18 years old. None of the members of the household could read or write. They lived next door to another family of fugitive slaves, that of Ezekiel and Louisa Cooper with six children. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 caused many of the former slaves living in Northampton to flee. First, though, when the Fugitive Slave Act was made known, men in Florence, where 10% of the population was African-American, attempted resistance. Joseph Willson signed a document with nine others, which called for a meeting in Northampton to resist the Act. By the time the next census was taken, none of the family members shows up in the country. The homes along Nonotuck Street in the early decades of the 20th century were mostly occupied by mill workers. In 1926 Joseph and Lena Sanuta lived here. Joseph worked at the Corticellii Silk Company. He and relatives Adam, Benjamin and Wladlek had immigrated to Florence by 1915 and were living and working together at the Nonotuck Silk Company although they lived elsewhere in Florence. Joseph married and he and his wife Lena, following a pattern of many residents in Florence, moved within the community so that by 1960 they were living at 49 Middle Street and Joseph (also listed as Bladas) was working at the Veterans Administration Hospital. BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
U. S. Federal Censuses of 1850, 1860. David Ruggles Center, African American Heritage Trail, Florence, Massachusetts, 1840-1860, n.d. Sheffield, Charles (ed.) History of Florence 1681-1894, Florence, 1895. Beers, F. W. County Atlas of Hampshire Massachusetts, New York, 1873. Hales, John G. Plan of the Town or Northampton in the County of Hampshire, 1831. Miller, D. L. Atlas of the City of Northampton and Town of Easthampton, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, 1895. Walker, George H. and Company. Atlas of Northampton City, Massachusetts, Boston, 1884. Walling, Henry F. Map of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, New York, 1860.
79
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON] [133 NONOTUCK STREET]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
NTH.2532
National Register of Historic Places Criteria Statement Form
Check all that apply:
Individually eligible Eligible only in an historic district
Contributing to a potential historic district Potential historic district
Criteria: A B C D Criteria Considerations: A B C D E F G
Statement of Significance by _____Bonnie Parsons___________________
The criteria that are checked in the above sections must be justified here.
The Joseph and Henrietta Willson House would contribute to a multiple resource listing on the National Register of
Historic Places of properties associated with Abolition and the Underground Railroad in Northampton. In these
Northampton locations, fugitive slaves lived while they were employed in Florence businesses and from which they
fled after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed. Here lived the Willson family, fugitive slaves from Maryland. The house is modest but reflects the economic position of former slaves and free Blacks in Florence who were employed and thereby enabled to buy property.
80
Follow Massachusetts Historical Commission Survey Manual instructions for completing this form.
FORM B − BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
Topographic or Assessor's Map
Recorded by: Bonnie Parsons
Organization: Pioneer Valley Planning Commission
Date (month / year): February, 2011
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
23A-55 Easthampton NTH.176
Town: Northampton
Place: (neighborhood or village) Florence
Address: 31-35 Maple Street
Historic Name: Samuel L. Hill House
Uses: Present: multi-family house
Original: single-family house
Date of Construction: 1840s
Source: 1845 deed
Style/Form: Gothic Revival
Architect/Builder:
Exterior Material:
Foundation: brick
Wall/Trim: clapboards
Roof: slate and metal
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: Carriage barn converted to housing
Major Alterations (with dates):
Conversion of carriage barn to housing, n.d.
Condition: good
Moved: no | x | yes | | Date
Acreage: 0.739 acres
Setting: This house is set back from the street in alignment with its neighbors. It is on a tree-shaded lot.
81
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON ] [31 MAPLE STREET]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
NTH.176
__x_ Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form.
Use as much space as necessary to complete the following entries, allowing text to flow onto additional continuation sheets.
ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION:
Describe architectural features. Evaluate the characteristics of this building in terms of other buildings within the community.
The Samuel Hill House is unique in Northampton. It is a Gothic Revival style house, probably architect-designed. It is two-and-
a-half stories under a side-gable roof with two, shaped chimneys on its ridge. There are three steeply-pitched cross-gables on
the west side of the roof asymmetrically placed. Beneath each cross gable is a two-story, angled, five-window bays, the upper bay being smaller in size than the lower bay. The bays have metal-covered roofs that are engaged, polygonal Gothic spires. Between the cross-gables on the roof are front-gabled dormers with pointed upper sash windows. The west façade is five bays wide and it has two entries of unequal size placed between the bay windows. The entries have porticoes that are supported on square posts with shaped brackets at the eaves. On the north elevation is a full-width porch under a hipped roof that extends across the two bays of the main block and extends to the two-story ell on the east side of the building. This is a highly elaborate porch with clustered posts connected by arches and ornamented with spindles and quatrefoils in its frieze above turned baluster railings. Window sash in the house is 2/2 and 4/4. On the east side of the house is a two-story Gothic Revival carriage barn that has been converted to housing. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE
Discuss the history of the building. Explain its associations with local (or state) history. Include uses of the building, and the role(s) the owners/occupants played within the community. From Form B of 1976: “’On the list of the founders and builders of Florence, the name of Samuel L. Hill must, by general consent, stand highest,’ so begins the preface of the biographical section of the History of Florence. S. L. Hill moved to Florence in 1841 at the age of 35, and remained here until his death in 1882. Originally from Rhode Island, and by trade a carpenter, he had moved c. 1830 to Willimantic, Connecticut, where he worked as an overseer in a cotton factory. He rose to superintendent and then to manager. It was in Willimantic that be ‘became prominent in church and village work and did much to encourage his associates and workmen to lead better and purer lives.’ After moving to Florence, he helped organize the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI), also known as the Florence Community. The NAEI ‘was a co-operative colony emphasizing tolerance in religious attitudes and equitable economic and social relationships.’ This utopian experiment was similar to the more well-known Hopedale and Brook Farm. NAEI purchased the estate of the defunct Northampton Silk Co. in September of 1841. These 300 acres contained the water privilege and surrounding intervale that had supported a silk manufactory, which was powered through its dam and canal, 100 acres of mulberry trees, and a boarding house. The Community continued in the silk business and built another boarding house. S. L. Hill served as treasurer of the Community from its organization in April 1842 until its dissolution in November 1846. At the demise of the Community, S. L. Hill and his brother-in-law, Edwin Eaton, purchased most of the flat table-land that forms the center of Florence south of Main Street. This land was sold off as lots to persons willing to establish homesteads. Park, Pine, Maple and West Center Streets were settled in this manner. Hill also continued the silk business, which after some
initial financial problems, was incorporated as the Nonotuck Silk Company in 1866. Samuel Hinckley, a wealthy resident of
Northampton and Hill’s financial backer, was president of the company and Hill served as manager and treasurer. The business
steadily increased and new buildings were erected in Florence and Leeds in Northampton, and in the Haydenville section of
Williamsburg. Their trade name was ‘Corticelli’ and the company became known throughout the U.S. for ‘spool silk, machine
twist, crochet, knitting, lace and filo silk, buttonhole twist, etc.’ Hill joined in with other local businessmen in organizing and
investing in several other local industries. These include: Florence Manufacturing Co. (later known as Pro Brush), Florence
Sewing Machine Co., Northampton Emery Wheel Co, and the Florence Furniture Co.
S. L. Hill continued his community involvement in the post-NAEI period in Florence. He continued the Community store,
running it alone until 1850 when Isaac Parsons was brought in as a partner; financed the building of a new school house for the
area; kept a station on the underground railroad; contributed greatly to the building of Cosmian Hall, Florence’s main public
building; and established, as well as endowed, the Florence Kindergarten (also known as the Hill Institute). The kindergarten,
82
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON ] [31 MAPLE STREET]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
NTH.176
built in 1876, was one of the pioneer institutions of its kind in the country, and was probably the only endowed kindergarten in the country until Mrs. Leland Stanford endowed six kindergartens in San Francisco in 1891. Arthur G. Hill, S. L. Hill’s son, followed his father’s footsteps as one of Florence’s leading citizens and lived at this address until the 1920’s. A. G. Hill helped found the Florence Tack Company in 1874, served as president of the Florence Furniture Company in the 1890’s, was co-founder of the Martin and Cash Carrier Co., and served as Northampton’s second mayor in 1887-1888. The S. L. Hill House was probably built in the early 1840’s. Hill’s ‘house on Maple Street’ is mentioned in an 1845 deed.” From the Form B of 83 Pine Street of 1976, “He is also noted for the operation of an Underground Railroad station, aiding and abetting the safe transport of slaves from one destination to another.” As Eugene C. Gardner, Springfield architect, designed the Nonotuck Silk Mill building in Leeds, it is possible that he also designed this house, which might be further researched. BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Beers, F. W. County Atlas of Hampshire Massachusetts, New York, 1873. Hales, John G. Plan of the Town or Northampton in the County of Hampshire, 1831. Miller, D. L. Atlas of the City of Northampton and Town of Easthampton, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, 1895. Walker, George H. and Company. Atlas of Northampton City, Massachusetts, Boston, 1884. Walling, Henry F. Map of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, New York, 1860. Registry of Deeds: Bk. 116-P. 360, 114-377, 92-270
83
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON ] [31 MAPLE STREET]
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
NTH.176
National Register of Historic Places Criteria Statement Form
Check all that apply:
Individually eligible Eligible only in an historic district
Contributing to a potential historic district Potential historic district
Criteria: A B C D Criteria Considerations: A B C D E F G
Statement of Significance by _____Bonnie Parsons___________________
The criteria that are checked in the above sections must be justified here.
The Samuel Hill House would contribute to a potential Florence Center Historic District and would be eligible as an
individual listing for the work of Samuel Hill in founding the Northampton Association for Education and Industry, a
utopian community. He was also a significant member of the Florence community working to establish the Hill
Institute, taking part in government, organizing and funding businesses and developing its streets. This house would also qualify for the National Register as part of a multiple resource listing for the Underground Railroad as Mr. Hill was a conductor carrying fugitive slaves through Florence on their way to Canada.
This house is architecturally significant as a fine example of the late Gothic Revival style.
84
January 21, 2019
Ms. Sarah LaValley
Office for Planning and Development
Northampton, MA 01060
Dear Ms. LaValley,
As a long-serving English teacher at Northampton High School and a Florence resident, I am
writing to encourage your support in establishing the Florence Abolition and Reform National
Historic District. I have had the opportunity with my students and with my family to do many of
the historic walks lead by Steve Strimer, and I have always come away well informed and proud
of where I live and teach. This has been the reaction of my students as well. The fact that
Strimer and others have had a wide vision that they keep pursuing is glorious. I am so grateful
that they have forged a way to share their vision and I fully support their future goals. Look at
what they've managed to fund and create: the Sojourner Truth statue, the history walks around
Florence and downtown Northampton, complete with maps and accompanying
information, the historical plaques, the David Ruggles Center, and educational curriculum. It is
fitting, without a doubt, to continue to support this vision with a Historic District in Florence. I
believe it will continue to highlight our wonderful village to our residents and bring visitors to
our community.
I am writing to you on Martin Luther King Day. This day of civil action is a way to recognize
progress and encourage it. It is fitting that Florence celebrates its unique history. Students are
always amazed that their hometown has such a rich history in terms of equality and respect for
all. It's in the air they breathe. The way to make this information accessible is to encourage the
work of the Ruggles Center so that those in the know have the means to continue to uncover
more information on people, structures, and landscapes that are so vital to our rich history.
Thank you for considering supporting these valiant efforts.
Sincerely,
Suzanne Strauss
Appendix F (Letters of support)
85
Community Preservation Committee
Brian Adams, Chair
City Hall
210 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
Dear Mr. Adams,
I am writing in full support of the application by the Committee for Northampton that would
establish a National Historic District in Florence that would honor the incredible importance of
Florence’s place in history. This District, tentatively titled, “The Florence Abolition and Reform
National Historic District” would help record and preserve the built and natural landscapes that
were the setting for heroic figures of the abolitionist movement and Underground Railroad of
the 18th and 19th centuries. Sojourner Truth, David Ruggles, Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria
Child, Basil Dorsey, Samuel Hill, and William Garrison are just a few of the heroes that lived or
had connections here. It was a center for the abolitionist’s movement and many African
Americans, many formerly enslaved, settled here. Few other places in the country can claim this
rich history.
Thousands of people have walked the sections of the proposed districts with guides from the
David Ruggles Center and Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee to experience this history. I
have been one of them and for the last seven years I have brought my students to the David
Ruggles Center and on walking tours of this area of Florence. My students have researched,
written biographies, and performed a play about these local heroes and their place in Florence.
There was nothing more profound than to bring them to this area and walk the streets, see the
homes, the buildings, the river, and the landscape that shaped this history. They stood under
pines in a spot were Frederick Douglass once stood. They saw the house that Basil Dorsey built
and the gravestone where he was buried. They walked from the beautiful statue of Sojourner
Truth to the house she bought and lived in. History came alive for them.
This place is so worthy of becoming a National Historic District. It would document, identify
and help preserve this unique place so its history can be celebrated for generations.
Sincerely,
Nancy Childs
2nd/3rd Grade Teacher
86
Community Preservation Committee
City of Northampton
Brian Adams, Chair
City Hall
210 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
Dear Mr. Adams,
I write in support of the application by the Committee for Northampton, Inc. to establish a National Historic
District in Florence. This District, tentatively titled “Florence Abolition and Reform National Historic District”
will help preserve the built and natural landscapes associated with the abolitionists and progressive reformers
who founded the factory village of Florence.
Thousands of citizens have walked sections of the proposed district with guides from the David Ruggles Center
and Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee. A series of events this past November, sponsored by five area
public libraries, and organized around the theme of the Underground Railroad and Abolitionist history of the
city, drew thousands of people to events, exhibits, author talks, and walking tours. The overwhelming
response of those who attended was a desire for even more information and interpretation of the stories
behind the homes and properties on the streets they pass every day. The stories of these houses and their
occupants are vital to our understanding of our region and our history. Assembling them in a permanent,
nationally recognized archive would increase exposure, encourage research, and improve our citizens’
knowledge of the community they call home. The inclusion of the homes of Sojourner Truth and David
Ruggles, whose homes would not qualify for the Register for reasons of architectural integrity, along with over
forty other homes of African Americans, many formerly enslaved, as well as numerous abolitionists and
reformers would further understanding of the value and importance of this place.
Our community has demonstrated a continued passion for more information, preservation and interpretation
of the history of this area. The last twenty-five years have shown steady growth in what we know about these
reformers and strong continued public interest in their strivings. This designation would further establish the
importance of this story to our city’s history and encourage schools, libraries and local history organizations to
collaborate to ensure future generations understand and build upon what has been discovered. A National
Historic District would serve to bring together what has been uncovered, in a form accessible to scholars and
the general public. Creating this district will identify structures and landscapes, each a part of a bigger story
about a place where social justice and free thought were guiding principles of the populace, like few other
sites in our country can claim to have been.
Sincerely,
Dylan Gaffney
Forbes Library Local History & Special Collections
Northampton, MA
87
88
8
9
Community Preservation Committee
City of Northampton
Brian Adams, Chair
City Hall~210 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
Dear Mr. Adams:
I am writing now to enthusiastically support the application submitted by the
Committee for Northampton, Inc. to establish a National Historic District in Florence.
The District—currently being referred to as the “Florence Abolition and Reform
National Historic District”—will preserve the buildings and landscape associated with
the abolitionists and early reformers who founded the village of Florence and it will
help promote recognition of this vitally important history.
Because of the fine, tireless, scholarly, and dedicated leadership provided by guides
from the David Ruggles Center and the Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee, literally
thousands of children and adults have walked sections of the proposed district and
been educated about its impact and significance. We have the exciting opportunity to
have the moving and powerful stories of these houses and their occupants assembled in
a permanent archive. This will be a remarkable contribution and milestone, recognized
on the local, regional, and national levels.
In addition to the two properties already on the National Register with an
Underground Railroad context, the Hill/Ross Farm and the Dorsey/Jones House, the
homes of Sojourner Truth and David Ruggles, whose homes would not qualify for the
Register for reasons of architectural integrity, will be documented and recorded in the
NR along with over forty other homes of African Americans, many formerly enslaved,
and numerous white abolitionists and reformers.
Over the last two decades, there has been continuous development in what we have
learned about these early progressive reformers and the public—both young and old—
are demonstrating increasing interest in this history and the lessons these sites and
stories have to teach us. A National Historic District would lace together all that has
been researched and uncovered in a form that would be accessible to scholars in the
field as well as the general public.
Creating this district will identify structures and features in the natural landscape that
tell the story of a community where social justice and free thought were guiding
principles way ahead of their time historically. The district would be unique in its
offering—few other sites in our nation reveal the confluence and tell the story of
90
progressive thought, equality, shared power, and community building that this area,
both the buildings and the natural environment, conveys.
Thank you for your attention.
Yours sincerely,
Rev. Dr. Andrea Ayvazian
Founder and Director
Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership
www.truthschool.org
91
H I S T O R I C N O R T H A M P T O N
46 Bridge Street Northampton, Massachusetts 01060-2428 413.584.6011
www.historicnorthampton.org info@historicnorthampton.org
January 23, 2019
Brian Adams, Chair
Community Preservation Committee
Northampton City Hall
210 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
RE: Florence Abolition and Reform National Historic District
Dear Mr. Adams and Members of the CPC,
On behalf of Historic Northampton, we are writing in support of the application by the Committee for Northampton, Inc.
to complete the work needed to establish a National Historic District in Florence.
Thanks to the remarkable research and dedication of volunteers at the David Ruggles Center and Sojourner Truth
Memorial Committee, during the last 25 years thousands of people—young and old—have been able to learn more about
Florence’s 19th century abolitionists and progressive reformers and how their words and actions shaped local and national
conversations.
As proposed, the Florence Abolition and Reform National Historic District would help preserve both the built and
natural landscapes associated with the people who founded Florence’s factory village. If granted, the project would
dramatically expand the existing Underground Railroad district (currently just two homes: the Hill/Ross Farm and the
Dorsey/Jones House) and add more than forty homes owned by African Americans, many of whom were formerly
enslaved (e.g. Sojourner Truth) and a number of white abolitionists and reformers. The stories of their lives and homes,
much of it recently uncovered, would be assembled in a permanent, nationally recognized archive, which would be
available to the general public, students and researchers.
Thanks to the work of volunteers with the David Ruggles Center and Sojourner Truth Committee, our community now
knows so much more about these reformers. And it’s clear that local residents are hungry for this kind of information.
The public walks and lectures offered by the Ruggles Center and Sojourner Truth Committee routinely draw huge
crowds! Gatherings of 60 or more are typical! Just as important, older people are not the only ones taking part and
learning. Hundreds of students from Northampton and other area schools, from elementary-age to college, have been able
to take these tours, visit the Sojourner Truth statue and walk in the footsteps of David Ruggles. For a young person,
understanding that your local community played an important role in issues of national consequence is empowering and
meaningful.
By creating this district, we believe that the public will gain a deeper and broader understanding of Florence’s rich
history and by extension, Northampton’s history. As proposed, it will not only highlight specific home sites and
landscapes, but also describe how 19th century Florence fits within a larger context of social reform movements in the
United States—as well as how it distinguished itself with its own particular ideas about social justice, free thought and
equality.
We are in full support and hope that you are able to grant this award.
Sincerely,
Laurie Sanders Elizabeth Sharpe
Co-Director Co-Director
92
Community Preservation Committee
City of Northampton
Brian Adams, Chair
City Hall
210 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
Dear Mr. Adams,
I am pleased to write in enthusiastic support of the creation of a National Historic District, tentatively
entitled "The Florence Abolition and Reform National Historic District." I am a long-time resident of
Florence, and formerly the founding Managing Editor and Executive Editor of the African American
National Biography under the direction of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at the W. E. B. Du Bois
Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Additionally, I am currently
engaged in writing a book profiling over fifty persons whose stories provide the deep background for
Rosa Parks’s famous protest as they, too, refused to yield their seats on stagecoaches, trains, steamboats,
streetcars, and buses from the 1830s to the 1960s. Three of the earliest known of these protesters – David
Ruggles, Sojourner Truth, and Basil Dorsey – lived here in Florence. I can see Sojourner Truth’s house
and Basil Dorsey’s grave from my living room window, and I can walk to David Ruggles’s house and to
the site of his famous water cure hospital in ten minutes, and walk along Nonotuck Street, where
numerous former and fugitive slaves lived in relative peace. This proximity and awareness keeps alive in
me a sense of the extent to which our history has been (and still is) shaped not by large, abstract forces but
by individual people who choose to stand up not only for their own rights but for those of others as well. I
am fully confident that the creation of the Florence Abolition and Reform Historical District would do
much to inspire similarly those who live here, of course, but more importantly, those who don’t but who
may choose to visit to see for themselves where American history played out through the lives of people
who may have seemed ordinary in their daily lives but who were dedicated to the core principle of
equality on the basis of race, religion, and gender.
In the course of my engagement with a wide range of African American biography over the years, I
came to realize the outsized role that such a small village as Florence can play, demonstrating – among
much else – the importance of local and individual action, discussion, and determination as larger
historical events take place around us. Research done over the last decade or two has revealed and re-
examined the presence here of important figures in the history of the abolition of slavery, the recognition
of women’s rights, and the acceptance of free thought. Though they are perhaps little known today, many
of those who lived in Florence and those who came here to meet with them took part in fervent debate,
but they also took direct action in some of the most significant movements in our nation’s history. No less
significant, of course, are those whose names are lost to us but who came here as fugitives to find succor
and safety in an otherwise inhospitable country.
The creation of a National Historic District in Florence would, of course, be a great boon to the
village and to all of Northampton. More importantly, it will make the learning of crucial moments and
movements in American history more real and more readily accessible and comprehensible to students
and indeed to anyone who takes an interest in such things. If there is any way I can help to further this
effort, please do not hesitant to contact me.
Cordially,
John K. Bollard
17 Lilly St.
Florence, MA 01062
jkbollard@gmail.com
93
62 Chestnut St. Northampton, MA 01062 413-575-2277 CraigDP413@gmail.com TrailsideCompanies.com
Community Preservation Committee January 20, 2019
City of Northampton
Brian Adams, Chair
City Hall
210 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
Dear Mr. Adams,
I write in support of the application by the Committee for Northampton, Inc. to establish a National Historic District in Florence.
This District, tentatively titled “Florence Abolition and Reform National Historic District” will help preserve the built and natural
landscapes associated with the abolitionists and progressive reformers who founded the factory village of Florence. Thousands of
citizens have walked sections of the proposed district with guides from the David Ruggles Center and Sojourner Truth Memorial
Committee.
The stories of these houses and their occupants will be assembled in a permanent, nationally recognized archive. In addition to
the two properties already on the National Register with an Underground Railroad context, the Hill/Ross Farm and the Dorsey/
Jones House, the homes of Sojourner Truth and David Ruggles, whose homes would not qualify for the Register for reasons of
architectural integrity, will be documented and recorded in the NR along with over forty other homes of African Americans, many
formerly enslaved, and numerous white abolitionists and reformers.
The last twenty-five years have shown steady growth in what we know about these reformers and the public interest in their
strivings. A National Historic District would serve to bring together what has been uncovered, in a form accessible to scholars and
the general public. Creating this district will identify structures and landscapes, each a part of a bigger story about a place where
social justice and free thought were guiding principles of the populace, like few other sites in our country can claim to have been.
I’ll also add-in, as a Realtor specializing in antique houses, we are seeing greater interest from new buyers looking to live in village
center locations. Places with grid-patterned streets, sidewalks, and porches. Places like Florence Village Center. We are seeing
places getting renovated because of this new awareness of village center locations. A National Register District would help tie this
together. And I’ll also add-in, as a Bed & Breakfast operator and a member of the Hampshire County Tourism Council, I’m aware
that the fastest growing sector of the historic tourism industry is the African-American experience. Your support of this grant re-
quest will be an important step in this process.
Sincerely,
Craig Della Penna
94
January 22, 2019
Community Preservation Committee
City of Northampton
Brian Adams, Chair
Dear Mr. Adams,
The Mill River Greenway Initiative (MRGI) is writing this letter in support of the
application by the Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee and the David Ruggles Center
for funds to help establish a National Historic District in Florence. MRGI is a citizens
group dedicated to the preservation and enhancement of the natural and cultural resources
of the Mill River watershed.
Florence is the shiniest bead on the iron necklace of mill villages on the Mill River from
Northampton to Goshen and is by far the most important industrial village on the river.
Its industries hired the region’s largest number of workers and were among the pioneers
in developing of America’s silk and plastic industries in which abolitionists,
Underground Railroad conductors and members of the Northampton Association for
Education and Industry participated.
The cultural importance of Florence is clear from a glance at the cluster of landmarks on
the map that accompanies this request, all of which are either on or close to the Mill
River, particularly all the historical landscapes, which MRGI is committed to protect and
enhance. In fact, MRGI has produced a self-guided walking tour brochure of Mill River
sites in Florence, highlighting many of those sites. Those brochures should be available at
the Deptartment of Planning and Sustainability.
Please let us know if you have any questions about MRGI or our support for this major
initiative.
Respectfully, the MRGI co-moderators,
John Sinton Gaby Immerman Neal Bastek
95
Community Preservation Committee
City of Northampton
Brian Adams, Chair
City Hall
210 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
Dear Mr. Adams,
I am writing today to offer my strong support of the application by the Committee for Northampton, Inc.
to establish a National Historic District in Florence, tentatively titled “Florence Abolition and Reform National
Historic District.” The purpose of this project is to help preserve the built and natural landscapes associated with
the abolitionists and progressive reformers who founded the village of Florence.
This project has both personal and historic significance for me as a scholar and someone who was born
and raised in Northampton. After completing a Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1974, I
began a scholarly career that focused on nineteenth-century American literature. My special interest is on major
authors and their relationship to the reform movements that characterized the antebellum period. In the course
of a professional career that has spanned over forty years, I have published a number of book and scores of
scholarly articles on this subject. What I did not know for most of this time is the rich history of the place where
I lived my entire early life and the relevance of that history to the very subject that was the focus of my
scholarship. My childhood home was 47 Florence Road. Imagine my surprise and delight when, I discovered,
thanks to the efforts of the David Ruggles Society, that this was once the home of David Ruggles, one of the
most notable black activists and reformers of his day. Similarly, the tobacco farm that provided my first summer
job was, I have discovered, the Agriculture division of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry.
ProBrush, as it was then known, where I worked in subsequent summers throughout my college days, was the
site of the organization's industrial division. I learned all of this rich history and much more thanks to the efforts
of the Ruggles Society to recover the past. I now use some of this information in my lectures on the history of
the antislavery movement, which I now see is uniquely intertwined with my own personal history.
I have since returned to Florence many times to walk the familiar streets of my boyhood, but now I am
guided by the historical map and narrative that the Ruggles Society has provided. This experience would be
enhanced and preserved by the establishment of A National Historic District that would serve to bring together
what has been uncovered, in a form accessible to scholars like me as well as the general public. Creating this
district will identify structures and landscapes, each a part of a bigger story about a place where social justice
and free thought were guiding principles of the populace, like few other sites in our country can claim to have
been. I am pleased to offer this project my enthusiastic and unqualified support.
Sincerely,
Len Gougeon, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Department of English & Theatre
University of Scranton
Scranton, PA 18510
96
97
98
Community Preservation Committee
City of Northampton
Brian Adams, Chair
City Hall
210 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
Dear Mr. Adams,
I am writing to support the application by the Committee for Northampton, Inc. to establish a
National Historic District in Florence. My wife and I are among the thousands of citizens who
have walked sections of the proposed district with guides from the David Ruggles Center and
Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee. The district, tentatively titled “Florence Abolition and
Reform National Historic District” will help preserve the built and natural landscapes associated
with the abolitionists and progressive reformers who founded the factory village of Florence.
Several of the African Americans who lived within the proposed historic district are buried at
the Park Street Cemetery, including members of the Anthony, Askin and Dorsey families,
George W. Hoderstia and Laura Knowles Washington. The cemetery (est. 1825) is located
across the street from the former home of Sojourner Truth. As reported in the Preservation
Master Plan, prepared by Martha Lyon Landscape Architecture LLC:
“Many of the individuals influential in the establishment and growth of Florence are
interred at Park Street, including early industrialists and business owners, leaders in the
abolitionist and Underground Railroad movements, and members of the Northampton
Association of Education and Industry.”
The Park Street Cemetery seems worthy of inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places,
in its own right, and should certainly be considered for inclusion in the proposed National
Historic District, along with the other properties currently under consideration.
Respectfully submitted,
Robert W. Drinkwater
Amherst, Massachusetts
Member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, author of In Memory of Susan Freedom:
Searching for the Gravestones of African Americans in Western Massachusetts (in press).
99
100
101
January 21, 2018
Community Preservation Committee,
City of Northampton
Mr. Brian Adams, Chair
City Hall
210 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
Dear Mr. Adams:
As the author of “Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for
the Soul of America,” a comprehensive history of the Underground Railroad, I am
pleased to offer my enthusiastic support for the establishment of a national historic
district in Florence dedicated to the community’s illustrious and nationally
significant role in the Underground Railroad.
Few communities in the United States have an equally coherent and well-
documented underground history. The ensemble of surviving properties is
remarkable, and deserves the kind of scholarly, professional attention that the
David Ruggles Center can provide. Its researchers’ efforts have already made
Florence a model for the preservation of Underground Railroad history. The
present project is a logical, and I daresay urgent extension of what has already been
done.
Public interest in the Underground Railroad, abolitionism, and the history of
slavery is likely to continue to grow. Saving what remains of that history is
imperative for future generations. Much can be accomplished by documenting and
presenting the more than forty homes cited in the project’s proposal, particularly
since they constitute not just random sites but the remains of an entire community
which once served as a beacon of liberty to the enslaved.
Sincerely,
Fergus M. Bordewich
www.fergusbordewich.com
102
Community Preservation Committee
City of Northampton
Brian Adams, Chair
City Hall
210 Main Street
Northampton, MA 01060
Dear Mr. Adams,
The Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee, an arm of the Committee for Northampton,
unanimously supports this application to the Community Preservation Committee for the
establishment of a National Historic District in Florence. This District will help preserve the built
and natural landscapes associated with the abolitionists and progressive reformers who
founded the factory village of Florence. Thousands of citizens have walked sections of the
proposed district with guides from the David Ruggles Center and Sojourner Truth Memorial
Committee. The stories of these houses and their occupants will be assembled in a permanent,
nationally recognized archive. In addition to the two properties already on the National Register
(NR) for their ties to the Underground Railroad (Hill/Ross Farm and Dorsey/Jones House), the
homes of Sojourner Truth and David Ruggles will be documented and recorded in the NR along
with over forty other homes of African Americans, many formerly enslaved, and numerous
white abolitionists and reformers.
The last twenty-five years have seen steady growth in our knowledge of these reformers, and
public interest has greatly increased. A National Historic District would bring together what has
been uncovered, in a form accessible to scholars and the general public. Creating this district
will identify structures and landscapes, each a part of a bigger story about a place where social
justice and free thought were guiding principles of the populace; few other sites in our country
can make this claim.
The Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee works in collaboration with the Ruggles Center to
promote an understanding of Sojourner’s significance in American history. This project will
coordinate with our goal of educating and inspiring others through knowledge about
Sojourner’s work and the Abolitionist Community in Florence. We are currently partnering with
the Northampton Public Schools to bring her inspirational life story into the classroom and to
lead students on a walking tour of Florence’s African American Heritage Trail. Designating an
area of Florence as a National Historic District would greatly enhance these efforts. We
wholeheartedly encourage you to support this application.
Sincerely,
Marcus J. Ware, Chair, Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee
103