Dutchess County Free Black Communities: Opportunities & Risks of Maritime Adventures Before the Civil War
By Bill Jeffway. © Dutchess County Historical Society, 2024.This is a verbatim script of a talk given February 22, 2024 spoken with presentation slides that may be found in the video documentary.
Thanks for joining us. I'm Bill Jeffway, speaking to you from our offices in Rhinebeck, New York. I am the executive director of the Dutchess County Historical Society and have been for a number of years. I am pleased to speak to you tonight in this program through the sponsorship of Dutchess County Government who year after year, especially for Black History Month, have sponsored our DCHS Virtual Event Space and Black History Month program. So I want to particularly thank the Dutchess County Government, the county executive, county clerk, and office of the county historian for making this work possible. In this way we can bring programs to the public, both live and archived, at no cost to the public. So thank you to Dutchess County Government for being our sponsor. I also want to thank my close collaborator, Melodye Moore, who is a collaborator on all things important, and Will Tatum, the county historian. The three of us meet regularly and try to orient and discipline ourselves to a fact-based source-based understanding of local history.
Just as a point of background, I want to mention that what I'm doing tonight is a little bit different. I often give a presentation, there's a big point to make. There are supporting points, but what I want to do this evening was give a little bit of a view into some of the things we're working on, and some of the discoveries we're making. As a matter of fact, we were joking because some of them we were discovering today. I do that in part to try to encourage others to develop the curiosity that I know some of you have, who I see here, to go down these research rabbit holes. And sometimes you find something and put it aside and it doesn't make a connection for six months or a year or two. So I'm trying a slightly different approach tonight to share work-in-progress findings rather than present a fully baked, finely crafted full narrative with support points.
To give you a sense of what this process of discovery is like – a century ago, Vassar Professor Lucy Maynard Salmon, I love to quote her because she said, and I quote, “A historian's most important job is to rewrite history,” unquote. This sounds very controversial. But she insisted this was the most important job of a historian if the rewriting was motivated by getting to a closer truth. She talked about clearing away the myths of prejudice. She talked about finding new ways of information (she would have loved the internet, virtually all the research I do is online). And so I want to bear in mind tonight the idea, especially as a nation, when we frequently are talking about what history should be taught or understood, to suggest that the history that should be taught and understood is the history that's historically true, and that we learn this truth from the
pursuit and identification of source material. So hats off to Lucy Maynard Salmon for being the most articulate about that a century ago.
Pursuit of historical truth can be particularly difficult among a people that have been actively erased or caricatured, or whose history's been corrupted in some way. And it's further complicated when we take on the study of something that's intentionally clandestine, like the Underground Railroad. So we have to put in those caveats. But I think what we've been able to do in this program, I hope, is expand our understanding of what life was like among men, women, and children in local Black communities in Dutchess County and the mid-Hudson Valley before the Civil War: whether that involved the Underground Railroad, or whether it didn't necessarily involve the Underground Railroad. This is a look into the more complicated lives of men, women, and children who had agency and were defining their own lives within the parameters that they had. While at the same time, they were changing all the rules, including the most fundamental rules: the change of the US Constitution.
I had picked up a book Blackjacks, which was published in 1997, and a more recent book, Sailing to Freedom, both of which explore the Black community at large, and the Black seafaring community. In the case of the later book, the authors use the term Maritime Underground Railroad, which they argue is underrepresented. So that kind of book or narrative can inspire us (it inspired me) to start to see what we might find if we investigate locally, in particular around maritime Black life in this period. And that's what we've done here. In addition to the maritime dimension that's so obvious to Dutchess County given our location along the Hudson River, is that we were the site in the 19th century of the largest Quaker population outside of Philadelphia.
Quakers came to be intimately involved with abolition and with whaling, two of the things we'll look at tonight and how they add overlap. And if you add to this, the specific investment and creation of a global whaling dock in Poughkeepsie in the 1830s near upper Landing, you can begin to sense the possibilities of covering these untold stories that relate to the Black community of men, women and children before the Civil War, more along the river than the inland route. So in expanding the focus to the Maritime Underground Railroad, I am greatly helped by books like Blackjack and Sailing to Freedom, which were mentioned in a recent talk about Bridgeport, Connecticut, about a thriving Black community before the Civil War, a place called Little Liberia, which we'll take a look at as well. I believe that coming to understand these maritime dimensions is best achieved by coming to understand the local people who were in particular roles.
There were Blacks in leadership roles like ship and boat captains that you will meet. There were some who were deckhands and waiters, and some who were chambermaids, stevedores and ferry operators. So you had a vast network of all types from the Black community in various roles along the maritime route. And this helps us round out the picture, especially in Dutchess County, given the reasons just mentioned about our strategic location on the massive Hudson River and diverse communities. 2
I want to start by talking about the settlement here that is so unique: with Dutch, English and enslaved Africans settling from the west from the river, and Quakers coming from New England, Nantucket and Long Island from the east, and southeast.
The first Quakers arrived locally around 1728, and they were seeking some isolation and an eagerness to be left alone, if you will, because they were persecuted in New England. And while the Dutch and English were settling along the riverfront, the Quakers settled along the edge of Dutchess County. The Revolutionary War found a lot of activity in southern Dutchess like the Fishkill Supply Depot.
This military activity prompted Quakers to move further inland and west to Poughkeepsie. So we had a migration of Quakers from the East into the West, and the reverse with the Europeans and enslaved Africans. And what is particularly interesting about this, I think, is this dynamic that there were both inland routes and water routes, and we're much more familiar, I think, with the Quaker inland routes. When you look at the waterborne routes and river landings, like we're looking at here, the foot of Main Street at the Exchange Hotel, you find very rich and diverse communities. So this additional focus on maritime is not so much at the expense of anything that's been going on. It’s really meant to be an additional dimension that we can simultaneously examine as both inland and along the river.
The other thing I like to keep in mind, we often talk about the Underground Railroad and can think of the kind of ultimate positive outcomes of the ambition of freedom seekers emancipating themselves. The more we study it though, the more we find a good deal of kidnapping of free persons of color, who were then sold into a lifetime of slavery in the South. So there were risks for freedom seekers escaping. But there were risks for free Blacks in so-called free states.
We’re probably all a little bit more familiar with the story of Twelve Years a Slave, the story of a free Black man sold into enslavement in the US South. But this is something that went on and occurred and happened to a far greater degree. We have a couple of local examples we will examine. So this is another duality that the river routes and inland routes were opportunities to chase and go for freedom, but they were also unfortunately constant and persistent risks.
The first topic I want to talk about are global whaling and Quaker connections. This is a global map that shows that these ships would go out for something like two or three years. So sometimes people would ask, “how could it be that Poughkeepsie or even the city of Hudson were whaling centers, they're not near the sea.” But when you consider the fact that these ships would go out for two and three years, you can see that there's actually little difference between being in Poughkeepsie or New Bedford, Massachusetts, relatively speaking. So the global whaling and Quaker connections are something that have local ties and help illuminate the global dynamism of the Black community. And in particular, I mentioned we have someone from Australia on, we have a lot of input from a descendant of a Dutchess County man and family who lives in New Zealand, Jan Green.
Regarding global whaling connections, I want to start by discussing a man from Massachusetts. This is Paul Coffey. He was born in 1759 and died in 1817. He was an African American entrepreneur, Whaler and abolitionist. Coffey achieved success as a merchant and sea captain. He is an iconic representation of the fact that around 1800 – out of five sailors were Black. This is called Portrait of a Black Sailor. It's an unknown artist around 1800, and it's been tentatively identified as Coffey based on his likeness to a silhouette, although it's never been confirmed. As a young man, Coffey embarked on three whaling voyages to the West Indies. During the Revolutionary War, he managed to get through a British blockade to deliver goods to Nantucket. After the war, he established a successful global shipping business along the Atlantic Coast, constructing his own ships in a boatyard on the Westport River in Massachusetts. Notably, he founded the first racially integrated school in the United States in Westport, Massachusetts. That's a lot for one person to do!
So here is an example that we have from nearby Massachusetts of a Black man who was in such a leadership position. And I start with him because I think a profile of him represents the dynamics of looking at Blacks in leadership positions as captains of seafaring ships and river boats and the whaling industry, and the overlap of Quaker and whaling strongholds.
You might be surprised that Poughkeepsie was a whaling center for a few decades from the 1830s. It was specifically invested in by the Improvement Party. Matthew Vassar was part of that political and economic movement in the 1830s. It's the same party that brought you College Hill and the academic institution on top of it, and that brought Poughkeepsie’s first reservoir. You can see here, just above upper landing (upper landing is at the bottom of the screen) where the Fall Kill empties into the Hudson. And just north was not only the whaling dock, but you can see this whole great platform or area dedicated to whaling where ships would dock before they went out on their much longer and return years later. This map shows Dutchess County and – at the left Poughkeepsie and Hudson in blue. And along the south, we have Bridgeport, Connecticut where I mentioned this thriving community called Little Liberia. And then next New London, and then New Bedford, Massachusetts, all along the Long Island sound. All had strong Quaker ties, all oriented to whaling. And I want to talk about that little yellow circle just to the north and east of Dutchess County in Massachusetts because it reminds us of a few things about New York as a slave state. It is the tale of the time when enslaved persons were fleeing New York State for Massachusetts because there was slavery in New York, and there wasn't slavery in Massachusetts.
There happened to be two communities called New Guinea, one in Sheffield, Massachusetts, one in Hyde Park, New York. And what is interesting, but not surprising once you understand it, is that the bump in the free Black population in Sheffield, Massachusetts happened between 1790 and 1810. That's because Blacks were fleeing from enslavement in New York. Many were from Livingston Manor. So this was a matter of moving, not such a great distance, to get out of the slave state of New York and into the free state of Massachusetts. Then what you find, of course, in the next generation between 1810 and 1830 (shown in blue) the New Guinea community of Hyde Park had an explosion in population. These are people escaping from as far away as Brazil,
but largely the South and the Mid Atlantic states. So a lesson, just to remind us, that New York state used to be a slave state from which freedom seekers needed to flee. These are the few houses that remain in little Liberia. There was a wonderful recent talk about the rehabilitation of these buildings. There's an organization called the Freeman Center, and I'd like to just read directly from their website: “Little Liberia was a seafaring community of free people of color. It boasted a luxurious seaside resort hotel for wealthy Blacks cited in a letter to Frederick Douglass, Bridgeport's first free lending Library, a school for colored children, businesses, fraternal organizations, and churches. About thirty-six structures comprised little Liberia. And of them, only the Freeman houses that you see here survive on original foundations. They're listed on the National Register of Historic Places for their significance, both in the African American community and in women's history.” End quote.
It's interesting that there are some exciting plans to turn this site into an ambitious educational and recreational center in partnership with MASS Design Group. Some of you know that MASS Design is very active in work in Poughkeepsie on College Hill in particular, and along the Fall Kill with Scenic Hudson. So it's interesting that these little houses have such a powerful story to tell and how all too easy it is to erase and forget such a powerful history.
So I had mentioned Australia and New Zealand in particular because we've had some wonderful communications with family descendants in both Australia and New Zealand. The most published is the woman in the bottom right screen there, Jan Green from New Zealand. Some time ago, she wrote Letter to a Brother, which we published on our website, and we've now published her more recent work, Dear Brother. Jan is a descendant of Alfred Brown, who is the older Black gentleman in the middle. And she has letters from his brother Alonzo in Poughkeepsie. And based on these letters that have been in the family for generations, she's been able to put together a profile and picture of what it was like to have this relationship between these two brothers who were born in the town of Washington as free Blacks, but ended up living a world apart from each other.
The Brown family escaped enslavement somewhere. It looks like the father of these two brothers was born in New Jersey and escaped enslavement in New Jersey. And their mother was from Dutchess County. But I urge you to look at our website and see the wonderful narrative by Jan Brown. Henry Brown married Judith Tellman in 1813 in the town of Washington. They had six children. Two of the sons became involved in whaling: Jan's ancestor Alfred – and George, who we have found little information about. Jan has really documented through the preservation of these family letters, these wonderful stories. We don't necessarily know what motivated the two brothers to get involved in whaling, and one to go permanently to Australia. It could have been the just usual dynamics of seeking a better life or adventure or getting away from prejudice and risk in the United States.
The attraction of the sea for a Black man was the extraordinary feeling of being away from enslavement and physical shackles and risks of kidnapping, while at sea. We'll talk about how
Frederick Douglass viewed and thought about and imagined the sea – and used it as a source of inspiration for his own self emancipation.
Because census records are generally done door to door sequentially, while the Brown family did not have a house that showed up on a map in 1858, when we look at the neighbors who did have houses marked on the map who are in the census, we get a general sense of where the Brown family lived. In general, they lived due south of the village of Millbrook toward the border of the next town to the south. We know that they were like many free Blacks, and I'm thinking in particular the nearby Bolin family, who were not necessarily concentrated in a free Black community, but who were scattered among these more remote parts or Quaker strongholds of Dutchess County.
This is particularly interesting because it's Alfred Brown's Seaman’s Protection Certificate, shafted by Jan Green. These were very important, especially if you were Black, because they acted effectively as a passport to prove American citizenship. And of course, in 1836, a Black man was not considered a citizen, and may not even have been considered a person. Alfred Brown left the comforts of the town of Washington and started to sail the seas as a whaler with this protection. Whether he knew he would eventually live in Australia permanently or not, I don't know. But this document was important because in possession of a Black man, it gave him protections at sea that he would not have been able to enjoy at home. Alfred is noted as five feet, eight inches tall, with wooly hair and yellow complexion. I spoke to Jan about this. At that time, when someone was described as having a yellow complexion, usually by white people, this was a reference to someone who had some degree of American Indian heritage. The Bolin family that had intermarried with Indigenous People, we believe from the nearby Schaghticoke.
And I spoke to Jan about that possibility. And it is entirely possible that there was some intermarriage with indigenous people in Dutchess County at that time. The Black academic, the late A.J. Williams-Meyers spoke very eloquently about the free Black communities that were created in Dutchess County, and how they created a sense of safety and trust that attracted multiracial couples. So I think it's not necessarily surprising to find that in this instance, if indeed that is what the description indicates.
This is a picture of Alfred in what we think is his rough weather gear. It's not a great photograph, but it gives you some sense of what he might have been like. And with that, I want to turn the corner a little bit. The conversations about the global whaling industry have been very outerdirected in terms of Black men, largely at sea, finding opportunities for adventure, for income, for freedom, for pride in developing skills and profession. And this next and second section that I'm talking about I want to look closer to home along the Hudson River. And we include Chesapeake Bay and Maryland because we encounter it so much as we study the local Black community. I was surprised to learn that Frederick Douglass, who grew up in Baltimore, was a ship caulker in Chesapeake Bay. So he worked on ships and he considered himself able to converse and move in comfortably in the sailing community.
In his autobiography, he speaks about how powerful and important it was that he could move among seafaring people. We know Frederick Douglass as the great abolitionist. And I was surprised to learn that his method of escape ended up not being a ship or a boat, but he did dress in sailor's clothing, and he held in his possession a Seaman’s Protection Certificate, the kind we looked at earlier that Alfred Brown had. By dressing as a sailor, by having a convincing Seaman’s Protection Certificate, he was able to persuade those at checkpoints that he was actually a free person. Allow me to quote these wonderful words of Douglass from his autobiography.
He said and I quote, “Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe, those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me, so many shrouded ghosts. It cannot be that I shall live and die as a slave, I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom.”
Although his vehicle was not a boat, he was disguised, as I said, as a sailor, which allowed him to escape with his Seaman’s Protection Certificate. Douglass also, of course, spoke to the terrible tortuous journey of death across the Atlantic where enslaved persons were stacked like so much cargo and so many died a tortured death. So he spoke about a maritime view that was at once inspirational and beautiful and powerful in its ability to hold in his imagination the potential for freedom, while at the same time, reminding him of the tortuous and deadly journeys that so many didn't live through, in the slave trade involving North America or the Western Hemisphere.
So I want to share one more local idea about Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay before we move on. This is a little bit more of a question than an answer. Many of you are aware of the New Guinea community at Hyde Park. And what is unusual there is there was not a Black church, but there was St. James Church, which was welcoming in terms of baptisms, Sunday schools, and paid employment. And what is unusual also is in the graveyard where we find the resting place of New York Governor Morgan Lewis, not far from the Jenkins family of enslaved persons. And there is a little double tombstone to the right in the Jenkins plot, which was the tombstone of two children who died roughly at the same time in their early twenties. So they were adults, but still very young. And the words on this tombstone say, this, “Hard by the foaming Chesapeake, where it's surging billow sweep, there rests a form I loved too well, in death's oblivious sleep.”
And if you're familiar with reading many of these tombstone etchings, they tend to be things about God and grace and resurrection. And this is a little unusual in that it's so specific to both specific to an area and not really talking about the individual who was buried here, but rather a memory that was important to them. This is a good example of sharing partial findings, or the process of what I like to describe as not getting to full answers, but getting to richer and better questions!
What did either his parents, or what did he want us to know in 1856 when he died with these words on his headstone. At the time a “form” often referred to a person or a body, but I also
wonder if it could have been an idea or a concept or, or something else that lies in death's oblivious sleep.
This is just a beautiful view of the Chesapeake and a reminder of how deep and complex the Chesapeake Bay is. It's just south of Philadelphia, and it's one of the reasons it was so central to the Underground Railroad.
Now focusing on the Hudson River in particular, I want to give you a sense of both the frequency with which you would encounter Black men, women and children on the Hudson River as well as a sense of what it was like in 1800. There are these wonderful words from the author Washington Irving. He described the scene when he was a boy and taking his first voyage up the Hudson River in 1800. Here's what he wrote, and I quote, “Our captain was a worthy man, a native of Albany. He was one of the old Dutch stock, this captain. But his crew was composed of Blacks reared in the family and belonging to him, enslaved to him as Negro slavery still existed in the state.
All his communications with them were in Dutch. They were obedient to his orders, though they occasionally had much discussion of the wisdom of his orders, and were sometimes positive in maintaining an opposite opinion. This is especially the case with an older gray headed Negro man who had sailed with the captain's father when the captain was a mere boy.” [Aside: So that's really the 18th century]. “The older Negro man was very well informed on seamanship. I observed that the captain generally let him have his way. And we got under way and saw the delights and found these great wonders as we ascended the Hudson River.”
I like the story for a lot of reasons. It shows Blacks in a position of knowledge and skill. It shows them speaking Dutch, which when you look at many of the ads of freedom seekers, you find they're multilingual, skilled in music, in professions. And I think it is an interesting little slice of slice of life on the Hudson River. We know that there were many young men who acted as waiters on Steamboats. One of the ways we know this is tragic. There's this extraordinary headstone in the so-called “Colored Cemetery,” Section E of the Rhinebeck Cemetery, where three brothers are buried. They were killed by the same accident. One died a day later, but it was the same accident that killed these three young Black men who were waiters on a steamship. Their father was from Maryland. And we found in our work in looking at Oak Street in Rhinebeck, that there were a lot of Black residents who were from Maryland before the Civil War. The boys’ father was not only from Maryland, but he is listed as being a boatman. So the sons and the father were all involved in boating on the Hudson. And in this instance, it led to this tragic ending.
Ferries. River ferries across the Hudson River. The young boy shown here is Cornelius Vanderbilt, who got his footing financially by taking over his father's cross-Hudson River Ferry business. These were the types of ferries in operation in the late 18th and early 19th century and we know that they were operated by enslaved men. We are told on good authority by none other than Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, that the ferry that was operated at upper landing at Poughkeepsie was rowed by enslaved men. And we are told that at the lower landing at Fishkill,
what is today Beacon, the ferry was operated by an enslaved man named Quam. So ship captains, ferry operators… also stevedores.
These are famous murals by Olin Dows in the Rhinebeck Post Office depicting enslaved stevedores. Dows is considered to have depicted local Black history accurately in both the Rhinebeck and the Hyde Park Post offices. In the latter we find a depiction a Black fisherman, fishing for deep water sturgeon to obtain its eggs, or roe.
Dows’s depiction was based on an article in one of those great weekly illustrated magazines. The newspaper sent a journalist and a sketch artist to capture exactly what was going on. So this is meant to accurately reflect an event in 1878. And we think from census records, we may have figured out who these individuals are. DCHS has in its collections an interesting kind of sketch notebook that relates to this hotel, the Exchange Hotel which had its own barge of the same name at the foot of Main Street. The sketchbook relates to someone either preparing a directory in the 1840s or a census. It's a great insight into the number of persons of color who were employed at the Exchange Hotel in one way or the other. Harry Mitchell, boatman Samuel Hall, Steward. John Bradford, Diana, and so on. This is where we learned of the variety of roles that persons of color had, either at the hotel or in the barge, or in the upper landing or the landing itself.
I want to look specifically at Poughkeepsie and some of the findings we have here. I mentioned the Dutchess whaling dock, and we've come across two men, Quakers, where there is good documentation of them operating important safe houses on the Underground Railroad. One is to the north, a man named Samuel Thompson, who had a house at the corner of Hoffman and Albany Streets. Albany Street is not quite built on that map yet, but you can see it's very close to the whaling dock. The other, David Arnold, was at 71 North Water Street, and his house, you can see at the bottom is not far to the south of Upper Landing. They were Quakers who were well known to have operated these locations for several decades. Samuel Thompson to the North, David Arnold to the South. We haven't quite found a photograph yet, but there are descriptions from family members of the house as it existed on 71 North Water Street indicating where fugitive slaves were kept and hidden. So that's something we've only just encountered. The other thing we keep an eye out for in identifying influential Blacks along the riverfront, are any who owned property. We believe that this is the site of property owned by Uriah Boston, who was a well-known and successful barber. And his house is likely to have been right around this spot, or in the, probably in the style of the older building that you see in the middle there. Uriah Boston was wealthy enough to become what we think is the one person who qualified to vote in Poughkeepsie in 1835, who was Black. YNew York state had required property ownership for men to vote which it removed for White men in 1821, but kept it in place for Blacks. You can see the effect of that, that in 1835, Poughkeepsie had 1,035 voters who were White and had one voter who was Black. I think that voter is likely to be Uriah Boston. He owned several properties at the same time in Poughkeepsie, and he was very active as an abolitionist.
These are just a couple examples of how the Underground Railroad may have worked through Poughkeepsie. In 1840 there were 30 girls who claimed to have helped hide and get provisions for a Black boy, who said he was a fugitive slave. We don't know how he arrived or how he went
on, but this was a story in the Liberator in 1840. And then, this is a wonderful story for its simplicity. In 1847, the anti-slavery standard reported that a Mrs. Wharton of Texas came to Poughkeepsie with her quote-unquote “slave girl.” But the girl left her mistress and is now in the enjoyment of her freedom. And that was reported by Charles Van Loon, who was a very outspoken abolitionist Baptist preacher in Poughkeepsie. I find it a very powerful story in its simplicity.
Baxtertown is interesting. It's one of the free Black communities that has been written about for quite some time. And in general, the story focused on the area at the bend in the road just north of Fishkill Village, where you'll see on the map there's an AME Zion Church. And this definitely was a mixed race community, to Dr. Williams-Meyers’s point. The “H Catskill” in the 1867 map is Henry Catskill. And he was reported to be said to be an Indigenous Person according to the local historians at the time.
Not too far away there is a Black cemetery. Many of the stones are buried or missing, but the cemetery is certainly still there and there's a lot of interest in it. There have been some consistent, interesting stories that were always part of the story of Baxtertown.
As in this 2016 Poughkeepsie Journal profile, the story of the fish peddler Joseph Thomas is described as a man who would make certain sounds with his horn depending on how many people were coming in on the so-called Underground Railroad. But we now know that Joe Tom as he was called, was much more than just a fish peddler.
If we look around the area that we're talking about at who owned property and where Blacks owned property, we find our friend Joseph Thomas, the fish peddler, and we find that his son built a house next to him that you can see in the map shown here. Census records show Thomas as a laborer who was born in Virginia so there was speculation that he was a freedom seeker himself. Most notably, like Douglass and Brown, Joe Thomas held a Seaman’s Protection Certificate, suggesting he was more than just a local peddler. This meant that he was on the high seas and that he was, no doubt, a very able sailor.
Also we found as a property owner a Charles Charles Williams who owned property adjacent to the Presbyterian Church, and we think he was involved in the Presbyterian church.
Then we looked at Carthage landing to see if there were Blacks who owned property there. And there really were, including Isaac Dorsey who ran a boarding house. So this is a Black man, census records say he was born in Maryland, and he operated a boarding house. And then you have these men who own property, including William Davies, Henry Francis, and Henry Bowman owning houses adjacent to the property. By the way, Henry Bowman is buried in the Osborn Hill cemetery. So you can start to see how these things are all likely connected and, and intercepting.
Okay, that was a quick view of the Hudson River and some of the experiences we might have found along the landings. And I want to just give you a couple of work in progress glimpses into a couple of different topics. This is where we urge others to get interested in helping research topics, and find and develop these stories. How could we speak about an international view from Dutchess County without actually talking about views of, or representations relating to, Africa? And I find this story really amazing. This finding involved Jackie Harper from Celebrating the African Spirit as she was involved with Bard archaeology in work at the Germantown Parsonage. What they discovered was this cosmogram etched into the fireplace, and there also were certain crystals placed in certain areas of the fireplace that suggested that there was an understanding of African rituals here.
And so Bard’s archaeologist, Christopher Lindner, has published on this, it's not a secret, and I find it an amazing touchstone and reminder that we probably don't think as much about Africa as we might when we were thinking about those of African heritage. This is the parsonage in Germantown, just north into Columbia County. I couldn't help but appreciate that at a recent visit with Celebrating the African Spirit to the Loeb at Vassar College, that there was this contemporary artist who used the inspiration of a cosmogram, and other dimensions related to his personal experience, to express this very powerful idea of connection between the living and the dead. And so I flag this only to say that we should look out more for connections to Africa. I find this fascinating but only the beginning of understanding.
This next topic deserves a lot more work. A certain road in Marlboro in Ulster County continues in some legal documents to be referred to as “Africa Lane.” I came to learn that the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s produced a great exodus of Whites and enslaved Blacks to the United States. And this is a recent profile in the New York Times of Pierre Toussaint, who ended up leaving Haiti as an enslaved person, but became very wealthy as a hairdresser to the rich and famous. This is a Stuyvesant woman who was a fierce admirer and customer. The Catholic Church has taken some first steps toward making him a Saint, because, as a wealthy Catholic, he gave generously to good causes such as the orphanage and the Church. So this is the story of a man who emerged from enslavement and through financial success and a strong moral compass, is on the road to sainthood, literally!
Here the words, “Africa Lane” are pulled from a contemporary property deed. So in this way it is still referred to as Africa Lane. In the 1790s, a French national, a man named John Alexander Robert, fled Haiti. Census records show that in 1790 he held eighteen enslaved persons in Marlboro. He eventually decided to move on to France. He gave some of the land to those enslaved persons, and they lived there for generations. So I find that absolutely amazing. The children, some of the children that came out of Africa Lane in Marlboro ended up living in La Grange and getting married in La Grange and finding homes in La Grange. You can see the Milden and Wyncoop families on this map, they're Black. And again, it just makes the point that Blacks were living not just in free Black communities, although those communities had a very important role, but they were present everywhere in, in the county. And this is a good example of that. 11
Brazil and Hyde Park. We talked about this a little bit before, but I find it amazing. This is a headstone in Rhinebeck cemetery Section E, the so-called colored cemetery. This is the wife and son of Robert St. John. We know from local historians from the 19th century that Robert St. John escaped from Brazil and settled at New Guinea Hyde Park. And the lesson here, I think, is that not everybody bothered to go all the way to Canada. St. John felt that he could find enough sanctuary and safety in Hyde Park, and he stayed there, and he lived in the household of the architect that created the new St. James Church that stands today, and eventually operated a farm in the rural parts of Hyde Park. So I wanted to just touch those three very distant international spots with those ideas.
Before I mention and close with a quick look at the Celebrating the African Spirit online trail, and I'm just prompting myself here to remind everyone that this Saturday from 2:00 to 4:00, this will be the last time that you'll be able to see the artifacts from the Hyde Park New Guinea archeological work. It is at the Hyde Park Historical Society Museum, and it's this Saturday between 2:00 and 4:00. So I encourage you to go, if you haven't had a chance to see that.
I will now wrap up by going live to the Celebrating the African Spirit Trail related to the Walkway Over the Hudson.
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