Set Apart: The Carr Family at Casey Farm

Above: Among the recovered archaeological fragments from the tenant house at Casey Farm were ceramic shards reflecting the diversity of utilitarian and decorative wares used by the Carr family. Selected fragments, coupled with other materials such as glass and bone, provide a rare glimpse into the life of an African American household in early nineteenth-century Rhode Island.

by JANE HENNEDY, Site Manager for Southern Rhode Island

Henry Carr and his wife, whose name has yet to be recovered, were free African Americans employed at Casey Farm in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, in the early nineteenth century. Between 1804 and 1810 – during an economic depression, and in period where even free Blacks did not have equal rights under the law – the Carrs were tenant farmers. The Carrs lived roughly a half mile from the core of the farm, but their story is now central to our interpretation of farm life thanks to a new exhibition in the Casey farmhouse museum gallery.

Over three centuries, the Caseys employed indentured servants, paid laborers, renters, tenant farmers, and at least fourteen enslaved people to keep their farm and other properties profitable. Most of these workers lived near the family, who kept careful records of their workers and enterprises. From Silas Casey’s records, we know that in 1804, Carr’s yearly compensation was $80 ($2,000 today), plus an acre likely for a garden, pastureland for two hogs and one cow, corn, and use of the “small house.” Casey noted tasks performed by hired hands, likely including Carr— animal care, pressing cider, breaking flax, growing grain, and making cheese, an activity that probably involved Mrs. Carr.

Prior to 1775, Rhode Island had the largest percentage of enslaved people in any northern colony. Some of its residents participated in the kidnap and sale of Indigenous and African people, and others benefited from an economy based on forced labor. Slavery became less economically advantageous in the North after the American Revolution, and Rhode Island passed a gradual emancipation act in 1784. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Black people in Rhode Island were legally free. As Christy Clark-Pujara writes in Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island, however, “free was a terribly relative term.”

Among the recovered archaeological fragments from the tenant house at Casey Farm were ceramic shards reflecting the diversity of utilitarian and decorative wares used by the Carr family. Selected fragments, coupled with other materials such as glass and bone, provide a rare glimpse into the life of an African American household in early nineteenth-century Rhode Island.

Even in such a difficult social and political climate, Black Rhode Islanders forged community bonds. Carr, for example, took part in Negro Election Day, a day each summer when enslaved and free Black people gathered to socialize and elect community leaders in an era when most were denied voting rights. Carr participated even though his white employer attempted to control him by docking his pay and isolating him from the farm and his neighbors.

Documents can only tell us so much. No mention of the Carr family or the small house in which they lived appears in records after Silas Casey’s death in 1814, when his son leased the Casey family’s house to white tenants. In the mid-1990s, a field school through Rhode Island College conducted an archaeological dig near the small house at Casey Farm under the direction of Boston University graduate student Ann-Eliza Lewis. It was not the easiest dig; in the 1970s, the Navy Seabees bulldozed fire breaks across the property, and they jumbled the site of the small house. Nevertheless, Lewis and her team recovered, identified, and stored fragmented household objects. Small items such as chalk, combs, thimbles, and a teapot and cups showed that the Carrs purchased non-essential items and engaged in leisure activities.

More than two centuries after the Carr family left Casey Farm, archival, archaeological, and curatorial research has brought their family’s story back to the property. Their former homesite is now part of a conserved woodland with walking trails.