5 minute read
Expanding the Story at Pierce House
Above: Built in 1683, Pierce House is one of the last surviving examples of seventeenth-century architecture in Boston. Photograph by Jeff Bousquet.
by CAROLIN COLLINS, Education Program Manager, and KATE HOOPER, Education Program Coordinator, Pierce House
Built by the Minot family in 1683 and purchased by Thomas Pierce in 1696, Pierce House remained in the Pierce family for ten generations, until Historic New England purchased it in 1968. Historic New England later acquired many of the Pierce family papers, including an account book and a journal kept by Colonel Samuel Pierce in the 1700s.
Pierce’s journal and account book were the keys to transforming Pierce House from a sleepy house museum into a vibrant center for student learning. Pierce was “a regular guy”—a middle-class farmer, not a politician or general or wealthy merchant. His journal entries offer an eyewitness account of how events such as the Boston Tea Party and the Battles of Lexington and Concord were perceived by those living nearby and how the unrest and eventual war interrupted and shaped daily life. His account book records some of the ways he interacted with other area farmers and skilled tradespeople, bartering farm products, such as cider and meat, for manufactured goods, such as shoes and tools. We worked with classroom teachers to turn the information from these primary source documents into programs for elementary school students that are exciting, hands on, and grounded in history.
However, Pierce’s papers do not allow us to tell the full story of the community. Women are underrepresented in our programs, and free and enslaved Black and Indigenous people do not appear at all. By presenting a Dorchester where everyone is presumed to be White, we are leaving out vital parts of the community’s history and points of connection for students.
Most of the students who visit Pierce House for school programs attend Boston Public Schools, where approximately 15 percent of students are White and 70 percent are classified as low income by the Department of Education. We make programs economically accessible by providing bus transportation and free or reduced admission; we are working to make the first floor of Pierce House fully physically accessible; and our programs are, by design, interesting and engaging for students of different learning styles and abilities. Yet, our education program’s reliance on Pierce’s papers meant that these exceptionally diverse students were learning about a narrower set of experiences than we wanted to present.
In 2023, as part of Historic New England’s Recovering New England’s Voices initiative, we received an Expanding Massachusetts Stories grant from Mass Humanities. The grant enabled us to hire Dr. Paula Austin, Associate Professor of History and African American and Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University, to expand research into the Pierce family and surrounding community in Dorchester, looking specifically for information about enslaved and free Black residents from the time the house was built through the eighteenth century. Austin conducted research in Historic New England’s Pierce Family Papers and related collections held by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
The records of the First Parish Church of Dorchester proved to be a particularly rich primary source. For a time, Samuel Pierce recorded the births and deaths of the parish. In keeping with the custom of the time, White residents were referred to without any racial markers (“January 6 Died An Enfant Child of Mr. Philip Withington”), whereas Black and Indigenous people were marked as such (“November 16 Died A Negro Man of Mrs. Primer named Cato”). By cross-referencing the names in this document with Pierce’s journal and account book, we see a fuller picture of life in colonial Dorchester.
Thomas Pierce was sixty-one years old when he purchased Pierce House and twenty acres of land. His age suggests he would have needed help farming, but we do not know whether he used hired hands, indentured servants, or enslaved people for farm labor. We do know that the Pierces’ neighbors owned slaves. Through our research, we are also learning more about free Black people in the community, including a man named
This work has allowed us to broaden our lens and expand our stories while keeping everything grounded in meticulous research and documented fact. Over the next year, we will adapt our school programs to incorporate this new information. Simultaneously, we will continue trying to find out as much as we can about the free and enslaved Black and Indigenous people of colonial Dorchester and the ways their lives intersected with the lives of the Pierce family.
Ongoing research on Black and Indigenous history related to Pierce House is part of Historic New England’s Recovering New England’s Voices (RNEV) initiative.
