Change and Continuity in Boston’s Chinatown Streetscape

and in Boston’s Chinatown StreetscapeCONTINUITY HANGE Text by WING-KAI TO Photographs by JOHN D WOOLF

BOSTON’S CHINATOWN IS A RESILIENT community with a long history of se lement and development dating to the 1870s. Its historical streetscape, adjacent to downtown and highways, distinguishes it as one of the more enduring Chinatowns in the United States. Since the 1990s the Chinatown neighborhood has experienced a renaissance a er a long period of neglect, discrimination, and gentrification. The 2020 Boston

Chinatown Master Plan—a document dra ed every ten years in a community-led effort—seeks to develop and maximize affordable housing, improve community health and quality of life, and preserve the community as a historical and cultural district. The state government and the community have worked together to adopt zoning protection of traditional row houses and preserve historical buildings for affordable rentals in the community. Influxes of Chinese international students and new residents in the neighborhood have also patronized restaurants and shops in the business core.

Then COVID-19 suddenly dealt a severe blow to the vitality and livelihood of Boston’s Chinatown communities. The news of coronavirus in China as early as January of last year led to rising anti-Chinese sentiment targeting local Chinese and Asian Americans. The “China virus” label created a negative perception of Chinatown, insinuating that it was unsafe. Since the pandemic hit in mid-March of 2020, local restaurants, retail, and small businesses were, and continue to be, devastated. While the shutdown affected everyone in Boston, Chinatown was particularly hard hit since the narrow sidewalks and small storefronts make outdoor dining hazardous, if not impossible.

In 2017 photographer John D. Woolf documented storefronts and street scenes. His original intention was to highlight threats to the neighborhood from gentrification and development. The following pages illustrate some of the more popular restaurants and buildings in the neighborhood reflecting changes in the community.

At the corner of Beach and Oxford streets one can see a striking contrast between the modern highrise building in the background and the historical row houses in the heart of Chinatown. Across from the new Chinatown Park, behind the traditional architecture, stands the One Lincoln Center building for financial services. Beach Street has long been the business core connecting the Chinatown Gate on one end and Washington Street on the other. Businesses have lined both sides for more than a century. Wings Live Poultry, which sold fresh chicken, ducks, and geese for customers to bring home, from its opening in the 1910s until it closed a few years ago, was among the butcher shops that catered to older Chinese who did not like to consume frozen chicken purchased in supermarkets. Because a wet market was believed to have been one of the first places where the city of Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province in Central China, detected the novel coronavirus, the fear of live poultry as carriers of disease could terminate the practice of buying freshly butchered chicken and ducks in Boston’s Chinatown.

Farther down Beach Street lies Tyler Street, with its concentration of traditional buildings and restaurants dating to the early twentieth century. The most elaborate example of traditional Chinese style is the Lee Association Building. Originally designed in 1928 as a mixture of Spanish Colonial Revival and Chinese motifs, the building is adorned with a cast iron balcony and traditional roof next to other row houses.

For decades, the Ho Yuen Bakery, a small storefront and unassuming store on Beach Street, has served customers authentic Hong Kong food such as roast pork buns, custard buns, coconut buns, egg tarts, and sponge cake. Farther down on Harrison Avenue is the favorite Hong Kong Eatery. Since its opening three decades ago it has been the go-to place for barbecued duck, pork, and chicken; wonton noodle soup; stir-fried beef noodles; and other famous lunch dishes.

Boston's Chinatown has long been the hub of Chinese food and culture, providing Cantonese dim sum for families and grocery shopping for the community. The Empire Garden restaurant and C Mart supermarket, located in a traditional theater building, have served the community for decades. Will these traditions disappear in a shrinking Chinatown due to parking woes and safety concerns?

A broader spectrum of customers has contributed to the popularity of dumplings as a main staple of Chinatown restaurants. Among all the restaurants, Gourmet Dumpling House is the most popular. There is always a long line of customers waiting outside to try the Shanghai xiaolongbao (soup dumplings), fried pot stickers, and other regional dumplings.

The development of luxury condominiums and the downtown business district on Washington Street has threatened the existence of the historical neighborhood. Some older stores, such as the Super 99 market and My-Tan Fashion, have closed; a handful of restaurants serving southeast Asian cuisine, such as Dumpling Cafe and Penang, are still standing.

More than a century ago, the Chinese Masonic Lodge was founded as a mutual aid society for earlier immigrants. Many other family associations, native-place associations, and language schools serve the community as well.

Chinese immigrants still use traditional herbal medicines carried by stores like Nam Bac Hong, which has been in existence since the 1960s. Here, older Chinese residents can find herbal medicine prescriptions by scale as well as other over-the-counter preparations commonly used in mainland China and Hong Kong. The arrival of Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s brought eateries serving delicious pho noodles and Vietnamese bread. More recently other cuisines such as Chinese hotpot, Japanese sushi, Korean barbecue, and Taiwanese bubble tea have also become popular in the neighborhood.

Immediately north of the boundaries of Chinatown is a proliferation of trendy cafes, world-class hotels, and theater buildings used by Suffolk University and Emerson College. Will Chinatown gradually be absorbed into a modern redevelopment area for middle-class tourists or will it be able to maintain its historical traditions?

A few years ago, the WCVB-TV show Chronicle named the Chinatown Gate, erected in the 1980s, one of the new icons in Boston. In 2021 we need to make every effort to rebuild the community and small businesses a er the economic devastation of the pandemic. In January, a report published in The Boston Globe lamented the end of the city’s bustling restaurant scene due to the COVID-19 restrictions, an evening curfew, and limitations for outdoor dining in Chinatown.

As we enter the Year of the Ox according to the Chinese calendar, Chinatown is enduring its darkest winter while trying to maintain hope with public art installations and virtual cultural programs for the community. With an uncertain future of economic recovery and the year-end election of a new Boston mayor, our struggles for the survival, perseverance, and rejuvenation of Chinatown will be entering a critical period in the next two years. If history provides any answer, Chinatown will endure and thrive again as a vibrant historical and cultural district a er its inception about 150 years ago.

Wing-kai To is assistant provost for global engagement and professor of history at Bridgewater State University. As a public historian, he served as vice president of the Chinese Historical Society of New England from 2012-2018. To’s research focuses on the history of Chinese and Japanese in New England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as contemporary Asian American communities in New England. He is the author of Chinese in Boston, 1870-1965 (Arcadia Press, 2008) and other studies of Asian and Asian American history.

John D. Woolf has worked as a photographer and studio manager at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for forty years and has been the digital systems manager of the Department of Intellectual Property for the past two decades. In about 2016, having seen how much the city was changing because of a building boom and gentrification, Woolf began documenting Boston's neighborhoods before much of their historic architecture was razed. Chinatown, he saw, was changing especially rapidly: growing up around it, and spreading into it, were expensive condominium and office skyscrapers. In 2017 he began photographing the storefronts, restaurants, and small businesses that still existed. He donated some of these images to Historic New England in 2020.

Learn more about his work on Wednesday, March 10, from 6 to 7 p.m. at the online exploration and discussion Documenting Twenty-first Century Boston: A Conversation with Photographer John D. Woolf. Register for this event at my.historicnewengland. org/6800/woolf.

A New Lease on Residential Life

by JENNIFER ROBINSON Preservation Services Manager, Southern New England

Community preservation efforts bring endangered house back from the brink

Driving along scenic Salem End Road in Framingham, Massachuse s, travelers might catch a glimpse of a rambling white farmhouse perched beside a stone wall and a large swath of grass, all overseen by two grazing goats. The picturesque scene belies a complex past, however—one that in recent times nearly meant the demise of the house because of longtime abandonment and an exceedingly complex legal history. Despite those hardships, Brewer House, one of the latest additions to Historic New England’s Preservation Easement Program, rose above it all and stands as a testament to the devotion, care, and hard work of a network of local preservationists.

The varied gables, windows, and ells of Brewer House reveal a structure that has been adapted to meet the needs of its many residents across centuries. Research indicates that components of the main house probably date to the late 1770s, concurrent with Colonel David Brewer’s purchase of the property. Subsequent owners constructed several additions over the next 200 years. Brewer House is known locally as the Clayes House because of its association with Sarah Clayes, a seventeenth-century Salem, Massachuse s, resident who was jailed during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–1693. Sarah and her husband, Peter, rese led in present-day Framingham in 1693 with other Salem refugees. Local tradition holds that Brewer House may have been built on the foundation of the Clayes House. Architectural historians have been investigating the evolution of Brewer House’s construction, including its foundation; to date, none has found conclusive evidence to suggest the presence of a seventeenth-century residence.

Those studies further the understanding of the house and its surroundings, which have been an integral part of Framingham’s landscape for generations. The

house provides a touchstone to the past for the community, and as it gradually slid into disrepair in the early 2000s, neighbors and passersby became increasingly alarmed. Vacant and in the midst of a complex dispute regarding ownership, invasive vegetation slowly engulfed the property and years of neglect damaged it. As any preservationist knows, that can quickly spell disaster; an uninhabited house falls victim not only to the elements, but also to vandals and curious trespassers, which rapidly intensifies and perpetuates degradation.

Luckily, a passion for this local asset catalyzed a coalition of devoted community members to take action. In 2006 Preservation Massachuse s, the statewide nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the Commonwealth’s historic and cultural heritage, placed Brewer House on its “Top 10 Most Endangered Properties” list. Around BELOW Brewer House owners Healan Gaston and Andrew Jewett keep two goats—Schran the same time, a (left) and Axel—on the property to help keep invasive vegetation at bay. PAGE Much of community group, the Sarah Clayes House Trust, the hearth, located in the earliest part of Brewer House, is contained behind a wall. During the restoration project, old shoes were found behind the cupboards. Hidden footwear, found frequently in colonial buildings, may have been used to ward off evil. formed to organize efforts to secure the future of the property. Community members led cleanups of the landscape, boarded the windows, raised funds, and even held vigils on Halloween to protect the house from trespassers.

The status of Brewer House reached a tipping point in 2017 when Annie Murphy, current director of the Framingham History Center, believed that its structural elements could not survive another winter. Knowing that something needed to be done expeditiously, she and her husband, Edward, partnered with Elizabeth Owens and her husband, Robert, to become direct investors in the restoration of the house. They had been active earlier as part of the Sarah Clayes House Trust, and each couple provided $500,000, to be repaid when the house was sold a er the restoration was complete. By July 2017 the project was fully underway. Edward Murphy, a contractor with experience working on historic homes, put his expertise to work. The restoration was painstaking, with significant structural repairs required to secure the original framing. When asked about lessons learned during the restoration, Annie Murphy offered this observation: “Any preservation project will be longer, more expensive, and more involved than you can imagine.” Despite all of the tedious work and looming deadlines, there were always small reminders of why the project was special. Annie recalled finding shoes behind the cupboards of the hearth in the earliest part of the house [concealed footwear has frequently been found in colonial structures and is thought to have been a practice to guard against evil]—a tangible reminder of past residents. Elizabeth Owens was particularly gratified by the work of the experts who assessed parts of the house using dendrochronology (a process used to date the age of the wood framing) and paint analysis. Each discovery added another layer of understanding, as well as opened up new questions about the lives lived in each room over time. Annie cited the involvement of as many people in the community as possible in the early stages

as a key element of the project’s success; and it was indeed a broad coalition of Framingham supporters and preservationists that spurred this stunning transformation. In addition to grassroots organizational efforts, there were other important factors at play that brought a ention to the property and eventually garnered the critical mass needed to move the final restoration project forward. In 2008, the Framingham Historic District Commission listed the house as a single-property Historic District, ensuring that potential developers could not alter it in a manner that diminished its essential character when viewed from public vantage points. Furthermore, the assistance of nonprofit groups such as the Land Conservation Advocacy Trust and the Foundation for Metrowest ensured that tax-deductible gi s could be accepted in the years leading up to restoration.

Perhaps most importantly, the state a orney general’s Abandoned Housing Initiative (AHI) provided the extra momentum the project needed in 2014. The AHI allows for the appointment of a receiver to move forward with restoration projects for qualifying abandoned properties, enabling communities to take charge of empty and decaying buildings in their neighborhoods. In the case of Brewer House, A orney General Maura Healey’s office assisted in identifying and communicating with the mortgage holder a er the 2008 financial crisis, then a huge roadblock to moving ahead. The mortgage holder subsequently donated the property to the Land Conservation Advocacy Trust, finally freeing the house a er years of uncertain ownership.

In the final chapter of its restoration, Brewer House advocates knew that its unique features demanded the additional protections afforded by a preservation easement. This would assure that a high standard of preservation could be maintained for exterior features and distinctive interior details, even a er it was sold and as ownership changed over time. Historic New England was the ideal partner, having one of the nation’s oldest and most recognized easement programs. Finalized in 2019, Brewer House is among 116 privately owned properties protected under the Historic New England Preservation Easement Program.

Brewer House has found ideal stewards in Healan Gaston and Andrew Jewe , the first owners since its restoration. Both have a keen sense of the history that surrounds them, and Gaston’s work as a lecturer in American Religious History and Ethics at Harvard Divinity School dovetails with studying Framingham’s rich and complex past. She plans to engage her class in local research, and she and Jewe will continue to research the structure and site.

Gaston and Jewe are facing the remaining challenge of landscape management with enthusiasm and creativity. They have recruited their two children to look a er a pair of goats acquired to help tame the invasive vegetation. It is this type of dedicated work, and that of hundreds of volunteers, donors, government agencies, and passionate community members, that has assured that Brewer House will remain an essential part of the Framingham community and landscape.

Historic New England launched the Study Center at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachuse s, in early 2020. Designed to explore research areas that are new to Historic New England, it is commi ed to furthering knowledge and understanding of the region’s past and supporting our efforts to share everyone's history. The Study Center connects with the academic realm by building relationships with higher education institutions in related graduate programs. The following articles address the topic of historical accountability, which has given rise to the term “difficult” or “hard” history. They deconstruct long-told narratives that obscure or omit the centrality and persistence of racism and white supremacy in American culture.

WhEn ThE SeTtLeRs CaMe:

The Wabanaki Confederacy’s Sense of Agency

by FAHIM RAHMAN The recipient of a joint bachelor’s degree in history and government from William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Fahim Rahman is pursuing a master’s in history at Northeastern University in Boston.

Scholars ofen use the term “settler colonialism” to describe the practice of conquering a place and exploiting the native inhabitants as well as the land. In the context of early American history, the term can be used to defne the expansion of European nations into the “frontier” of North America to acquire valuable natural resources. However, framing settler colonialism—also called settler encroachment and white encroachment—as a purely territorial phenomenon presents a narrow perspective of the region’s history and fails to convey the heterogeneity of the early American past. While colonialism had widespread impacts on Native lands, that perspective does not accurately depict settler-Indigenous relations. It incorrectly conveys the spatial history of how Europeans “discovered” the Americas and marginalizes or dismisses altogether the existing Native history.

A complex sociopolitical network of Indigenous nations, alliances, and rivalries had long existed in North America when Europeans arrived. Colonists did not “discover” or “settle” the land; they entangled themselves in a well-established framework of Indigenous relations. It would be a precarious endeavor to make discrete conclusions about Indigenous peoples as a whole, given that each nation had variable relationships with one another as well as with the Europeans. One lens through which to look at colonial-Indigenous relationships is the history of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Examining how the Wabanaki experienced and responded to colonial exploitation might foster a more thorough understanding of their history and the multifaceted nature of settler encroachment. Although territorial expansion was an integral aspect of encroachment, it was also a geopolitical, economic, cultural, and social phenomenon.

Te Wabanaki Confederacy, located in what is now known as Maine and the Canadian Maritimes, is composed of fve predominant nations: the Penobscot, the Passamaquoddy, the Mi’kmaq (Micmac), the Maliseet, and the Abenaki. Early Wabanaki people were hunters and gatherers who relied upon native resources to craf goods and form cultural traditions. Tey had an established social structure and a rich history long before the Europeans arrived.

England began colonizing this region of North America in the seventeenth century to extract natural resources and broaden its economic capabilities—economic growth was at the crux of colonial imperialism. Anglican colonies were established to exert control over Native lands and diminish Indigenous resistance to future settlements. However, colonialism had broader efects than spatial consumption and domination. Settlers regarded Indigenous peoples as “savages” and “wild beasts”; the English thought of them as uncivilized, holding that Anglican culture was superior. With the impetus of gradually reforming and Christianizing Indigenous peoples, the Reverend John Eliot, a Puritan missionary, established fourteen “praying towns” in New England. Missionaries in these

communities attempted to transform Indigenous identity by imposing Protestantism, and its associated lifestyle, on Natives. Te confict between colonists and Native peoples was always a cultural afair, where the exchange of English dress, norms, ideas, and goods countered traditional ways of life.

Te Wabanaki Confederacy exercised agency when faced with the adversities that settler encroachment imposed. As coastal peoples, Wabanakis used their capabilities to hinder colonial industries and retain their autonomy. Wabanaki seafarers used their maritime prowess to prey upon colonists, decimating commercial ships, commandeering sailing vessels, and sinking fshing boats to sustain their command of the North Atlantic. Yet, violence was not their preferred means of resistance; they strategized diplomatic maneuvers based on cultural concerns and imperatives. Te Kennebec Wabanaki, for example, formed a Protestant church to obtain access to the colonial market while maintaining their traditions, appropriating Christianity in such a way that it did not come at the expense of their cultural norms. By continuing to participate in traditional practices, the Wabanaki resisted assimilation into colonial culture while concurrently using Protestantism as an entry point into the Atlantic market. Tus, they were able to manipulate Anglican culture to their advantage. For instance, the leader of a Wabanaki crew purposefully donned English sea fashion as a costume to elevate his standing when he encountered Englishmen. Tis was a symbolic leverage of Anglican culture to bolster his diplomatic legitimacy. While these are only a few of many instances of Wabanaki resistance, their diverse methods exhibit their historical agency.

Although white encroachment resulted in the widespread decimation of Indigenous populations, with causes ranging from disease to the brutality of enslavement, the Wabanaki people were dynamic historical actors. Tey wove resistance into diplomacy, trade, and culture to meet the Anglican hegemony that was ingrained in every facet of colonial society. Te Wabanaki Confederacy “has taken many forms in its eforts to adapt to external pressures,” anthropologist Willard Walker wrote in a 1998 article in the journal Maine History, but has survived concerted eforts on its integrity by continuing to embody its core values and traditions. Even though their territory was largely taken away from them by imperialists, the Wabanaki mounted a comprehensive strategy of resistance that facilitated the preservation of their identity. Still present today, the Wabanaki Confederacy is an authentic example of a sovereign Indigenous nation.

For more information visit the websites of the Abbe Museum (abbemuseum.org) in Bar Harbor, Maine, and the Portland, Maine-based Wabanaki Alliance (wabanakialliance. com).

LEFT Map of Wabanaki homeland in northern Maine and Canada (mainestatemuseum.org). BELOW Wabanaki Confederacy design (www. legendsofamerica.com).

Before American slavery came to be defined as the plight solely of African-descended peoples, European se lers enslaved Indigenous peoples. Historians are giving this obscured colonial practice greater a ention, revealing that white encroachment included the trafficking of Native peoples across the Atlantic. Some scholarship aims to deflate the idealized view of the North as the bastion of liberty for people of color.

AN OVERLOOKED HISTORY: SLAVERY IN NEW ENGLAND

by JULIA WOHLFORTH AND MEGAN WATTS Julia Wohlforth is a graduate student in history and museum studies at Tu s University in Medford, Massachuse s, and Megan Wa s is a master’s degree candidate in history at Simmons University in Boston.

“I doe not see how wee can thrive until we ge into a stock of slaves suffitient to doe all our busines.” –Emanuel Downing, August 1645

With 1619 documented as the year that the first kidnapped Africans were brought to the British se lement of Jamestown, Virginia, a statement such as Emanuel Downing’s may not seem out of the ordinary. However, it may surprise even those who are well-informed about the colonial period to learn that Downing, a British immigrant a orney who lived in Salem, Massachuse s, made his observation in a le er to John Winthrop, his brother-in-law and the chief Puritan leader in New England; that he was referring to using slaves in New England, not the South; and that he was talking about capturing Indigenous people to trade for Africans.

Slavery in the United States is primarily associated with the kidnapping of people from western Africa and forcing them to work on Southern plantations. American collective memory relates the Northeast with abolitionism, the Underground Railroad, and the fierce fight for African American legal and social freedoms. New England, however, was a slave society for centuries, from the colonists’ earliest interactions with Indigenous communities. The thriving colonies of the region were built upon that practice, and the acceptance of human bondage is implicitly wri en into many of the cultural moments that New Englanders celebrate today.

The enslavement of Indigenous people in New England was initially more common than the enslavement of Africans. In many ways, Indigenous enslavement laid the groundwork for the enslavement of Africans, which would become standard practice by the start of the 1700s. From the Europeans’ earliest explorations of New England, they took Indigenous people captive, to be used as guides or displayed as curiosities back in England. Patuxet tribe member Tisquantum (o en called Squanto), who brokered peaceful relations for the Pilgrims, was initially kidnapped by English explorer Thomas Hunt and sold in Spain. He made his way to London and lived there for several years before he was able to return to New England. The scale of enslavement grew throughout the seventeenth century. During the Pequot War of 1636-1637 hundreds of women and children were taken as slaves. Winthrop authorized the sale of some to Bermuda and other locales in the Caribbean, while many others remained in New England to supplement the shortage of female laborers.

The Massachuse s Bay Colony enacted the first slavery law in the English Atlantic World in 1641 with a statute called The Body of

Liberties. A provision in the section titled “Liberties of Foreigners and Strangers” defined the status of Native people held in bondage by authorizing the enslavement of “lawfull captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us.” The idea of “just war” ruled the semi-coded language of these practices. In war, New England colonial forces considered themselves civilized with their policy of slaughtering Pequot men and sparing the women for use as slaves. By the time Downing wrote to Winthrop in 1645, however, it had become fairly obvious that the enslavement of Native women was less of a solution to colonists’ labor shortages than they had hoped. These women knew the geography of the area be er than their captors and they knew the cultures of surrounding tribes. Indigenous slaves who ran away were far more successful in their frequent escape a empts than the completely displaced African slaves. This had become a nuisance to New England slave owners.

Downing noted in his le er that “if upon a just warre the lord should deliver them into our hands, wee might easily have men women and children enough to exchange for Moores” [Africans]. For this reason, “a warr with the Narraganset is verie considerable to this plantation,” he wrote, referring to his 300-acre North Shore property. Enslaving Indigenous people was proving to be unprofitable in New England, but that didn’t mean the colonists would stop exploiting them. War, Downing proposed, would allow for the capture of Indigenous people who could be exchanged for the more profitable African slaves. This practice of exchange became fairly popular among New England colonists and they smoothly transferred their slave labor system from Indigenous people to Africans.

The population of Black slaves in America would not exceed

Indigenous numbers until the turn of the eighteenth century. Between 1619 and the

Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, millions of African and African-descended people were forced to be slaves. Though most were confined in the South, the

Massachuse s Body of

Liberties, originally intended to define the status of Native slaves, informed the legal definitions of Africans held in bondage. This demonstrates again how Indigenous slavery set the precedent for Black enslavement.

Slavery ended in New England before it did in the South, though in many instances not very long before. In Massachuse s, the Quock Walker cases of 17811783 successfully challenged the institution using language in the state constitution (the constitution itself does not prohibit slavery), which had been passed in 1780. Vermont first prohibited it in 1777. Because of unenforced or complex laws, legalized slavery lasted longer elsewhere in the region; it did not legally end until 1843 in Rhode Island, 1848 in Connecticut, and 1857 in New Hampshire. Maine’s timeline is somewhat unique, as what is considered modernday Maine was territory held by French se lers and was part of Massachuse s and New Hampshire at different points. It a ained statehood in 1820 as a free state. However, the pre-statehood occupiers of that land practiced slavery. It is important to note

An image published in 1890 depicting European colonizers with Indigenous people they had captured as slaves. Wallach Division Picture Collection, New York Public Library.

that even when a state prohibited slavery it could still be in effect. Travelers from other areas could bring enslaved people with them. In addition, it is highly likely that slavery operated in households illegally in some areas a er it was abolished.

Slavery is ubiquitous in New England’s past but is o en omi ed from the most cherished historical stories. One example is Paul Revere’s account of his “Midnight Ride,” a hallmark in American history, national myth, and collective memory. Revere wrote: “A er I had passed Charlestown Neck, & got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on Horseback, under a Tree.” Mark, the subject of Revere’s casual geographic reference, was a Black man executed in 1755 a er being convicted as an accessory in the poisoning death of his master, John Codman I [the grandfather of John Codman III, of Historic

New England’s Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachuse s. See article on page 23]. Mark was hanged and his tarred body displayed in an iron gibbet in a public place for more than two decades. Intended as a warning to anyone who contemplated defying white supremacy, Mark’s remains became a waymark. Enslaved Black individuals made up a substantial segment of the workforce in North America, and they contributed greatly to New

England’s economy. While images presented today of slavery o en focus on largescale plantation labor, Black slaves in New England generally did different kinds of work. A large majority performed domestic labor in private households. Many were highly skilled and worked at shops (general and printing), on ships and in shipyards, and at marketplaces. As with Indigenous enslavement practices, Black children were o en used for certain tasks, with some white families procuring them as companions or as playmates for their youngsters.

Northeasterners also used goods and products that were produced elsewhere by slave labor, and the New England region prospered from them. Black people enslaved on plantations in the West Indies produced huge amounts of sugar, mahogany goods, rum, and molasses. New Englanders’ consumption of these goods fueled a demand that supported the continued enslavement and exploitation of Black people in the Atlantic World.

While New England’s labor needs were different from those of the South, there were few regional differences in the restriction of rights, discrimination, and horrific abuse. Mental, emotional, physical, and sex abuses were commi ed against enslaved people, no ma er the time and place in the Americas. Accounts of the violence and terrorism are o en given in firstperson narratives, such as those of civil rights activist and orator Frederick Douglass. Born a slave in about 1818 in Maryland, Douglass escaped in 1838. In his 1845 memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the first of several autobiographical books, Douglass tells of both witnessing and experiencing the brutalities that whites inflicted upon Black people.

Despite the United States’ near-complete abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in December 1865, it contains a condition under which enslavement is sanctioned today), its legacy of torments and damaging effects was not eliminated. Laws enacted throughout the United States either established de facto slavery or severely circumscribed the very existence of Native and African Americans. Such legislation is a part of the systemic racism that continues to uphold social, economic, and political disparities and injustices that impact Indigenous and Black people while benefiting much of the white majority population.

When Massachusetts adopted The Body of Liberties in December 1641, it became the first colony to legalize slavery. The document codified the enslavement of Indigenous people and was later used as the basis for extending slavery to those of African heritage.

by WENDY HUBBARD Site Manager, Lincoln, Massachuse s, and DOROTHY A CLARK Editor

Bonds of Family, Bonds of Chattel

The Codman Estate’s legacy of “the peculiar institution”

The two-story Georgian mansion and expansive farm that Charles Chambers built between 1730 and 1741 in what then was part of Concord, Massachusetts, was situated high on a man-made hill where its size and placement were meant to impress, serving as a daily reminder of the owner’s mastery over land and people. Tat mastery included his ownership of people of African heritage.

Te slave trade was an important system of wealth accumulation for many prominent New England families, enabling the amassing of fortunes that would be passed down to their descendants for centuries. One of these families was the Chambers-Russell-Codman clan, whose interfamilial and multigenerational ties of mutual interests, money, and inherited property—the Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts—grew upon a foundation that included slavery.

In stark contrast to the continuity of this family’s history, the enslaved did not have lucrative or illustrious legacies to pass down. Considered commodities, they were separated and scattered by their owners’ bequests, purchase or sale, payment of debts, and other transfers or exchanges. Te names of some are listed as property in family account books, wills, probate records, and inventories, or in public notices, pamphlets, and publications, much of which is in Historic New England’s Library and Archives. Teir personal possessions and spaces were not preserved. Nothing associated with them was passed down for posterity. Still, the geographies where and in which their lives were spent remain.

Te subjugation of people of color underpinned colonial commerce and systems of wealth acquisition. Indeed, New England’s prosperity was funded directly and indirectly by the slave trade with investments in shipping, shipbuilding, rum distilling, exports, raw materials, and fnished goods through trade with Caribbean plantations. As prominent landowners of European descent, the Chambers, Russell, and Codman men helped to uphold these systems, occupying positions of authority in government and the courts to better secure their vested interests.

Charles Chambers (1660-1743), a British immigrant, was the progenitor of the Chambers-Russell-Codman clan. Te multiple intersections among the Chamberses, Russells, and Codmans over four generations began in 1708 when Chambers was appointed guardian of orphaned John Codman I (1698-1755) of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A sea captain in Antigua, Chambers maintained investments in more than sixteen vessels, some of which worked out of Barbados. No longer active at sea by 1708, the Charlestown resident purchased 275 acres in Concord [now a part of Lincoln, which became a separate town in 1754]. Over time

he purchased another 400 acres. He had long held Black people as slaves. Among them were Lincoln, Caesar, Jack, and Chloris.

Little is known about Lincoln, Caesar, Jack, and Chloris. Jack and Chloris married in 1697. Jack purchased the couple’s freedom in 1706, Chambers having set a price of sixty pounds; Jack paid him in twentypound installments. Te purchase agreement indemnifed Chambers from any bond or support of the couple.

Upon Chambers’s death, his grandson Chambers Russell (17131767) inherited the estate, which included the enslaved man Lincoln. Lincoln married a woman named Zilpah, whom the Russells owned. Teir fve children were born into slavery on what had become the Chambers-Russell family property— the vast farm with the Georgian mansion. Russell was appointed a judge in Middlesex County in 1745. A decade later, the judge—a slave owner—presided over the trial of the poisoning death of John Codman I, who as mentioned above, had been the ward of Russell’s grandfather. Tree enslaved Black people—Mark, Phoebe, and Phyllis—were convicted. Russell ordered the grisly executions of Mark and Phyllis and banished Phoebe to the West Indies, where to be enslaved was so brutal it was a death sentence.

In 1754, Massachusetts Governor William Shirley ordered all towns to conduct a census of enslaved people over the age of sixteen. Te town of Lincoln documented sixteen males and seven females. At this time, slavery in New England, apart from work required on the docks, was largely a household economy. Te enslaved performed the tasks of running colonial households and farms.

Some were highly skilled and worked as carpenters, shipwrights, sail makers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, weavers, bakers, coopers, and tailors. If their owners loaned them out, some enslaved people earned wages—a portion of which their owners felt they were entitled to—with which they could meagerly augment their existence. Te violence of family separation was an ever-present threat to the vulnerable and powerless enslaved population.

Lincoln and Zilpah’s fve children were Bilhah, Peter, Ishmael,

Zilpah, and Brister. Born about 1744, Brister may have either been sold or given to a Lincoln selectman and housewright; the

Massachusetts Vital Records

Project lists the child as “Negro boy of Mr. Timothy Wesson” and having been baptized on January 14, 1753. Brister would become the property of Wesson’s daughter Abigail and her husband, John Cumings, a wealthy doctor and land speculator, who wed about three weeks afer the child’s baptism. Te Cumingses owned at least one other slave, Jem.

In 1777, Cumings, a militia colonel, enlisted his slave to serve with him in the Revolutionary War. Cumings would eventually give up his claim of ownership of Brister and Jem. (Cumings, who died in 1788 at the age of sixty, made a provision in his will for the establishment of a small fund, managed by the selectmen, to care for Brister and Jem so that if they required assistance, it would not have to be paid from the town cofers.) By 1779, Brister had taken Freeman as his surname.

Brister Freeman returned to Concord and married a woman named Fenda. Afer more than three decades a slave, he became the second former slave to own land in Concord, which he co-purchased with another onetime slave near Walden Woods. Brister worked as a day laborer and Fenda was reportedly a fortuneteller. Te couple had three children. Fenda died in 1811 and Brister in 1822. Henry David Toreau wrote about the Freemans as well as other once-enslaved Black people in Walden (1854). Among them was Brister Freeman’s sister Zilpah White.

Zilpah and another brother, Peter, were free, having been abandoned when Charles Russell, a Loyalist who in 1767 inherited the Lincoln estate (property that included their siblings Bilhah and Ishmael), fed to his inlaws’ plantation on Antigua with his family during the Revolution. Another signifcant intersection of ChambersRussell-Codman owners and their slaves occurred in 1768 when Charles

Russell married Elizabeth Vassall of Cambridge (17421802). Te couple inherited two slaves, Robin and Luck, from Elizabeth’s mother, Penelope Royall Vassall (17241800). Penelope’s father was Isaac Royall (1672-1739), who had traded in sugar, rum, and enslaved people, which made him extremely rich.

Zilpah White, like her mother, worked as a spinner in the Chambers-Russell household. Afer Charles Russell and his family fed the country, she settled in a squatters’ community at Walden Woods. She lived in a one-room house on the common land that bordered Walden Road and made her living spinning fax into linen fbers. Toreau wrote that her living conditions were “somewhat inhumane.” Yet her ability to provide for herself at a time when few, if any, Concord women lived alone was a phenomenal accomplishment.

In 1781, John Codman III (1755-1803), grandson of John Codman I, married Margaret Russell (1757-1789), the niece of Judge Chambers Russell and the sister of Dr. Charles Russell. She had inherited the Lincoln property along with family wealth acquired in shipping and trade.

Codman III was born in Charlestown. A conservative Boston aristocrat, he was a successful merchant. His business, Codman and Smith, owned a number of ships and traded with European countries and in the Caribbean. A 1785 business document titled “Prices Current” lists values of Jamaican and American produce, liquors, and “New negroes as in quality $50-68 per head.”

Te couple’s son, Charles Russell Codman (1784-1852), was fve years old when his mother died; he inherited the estate and his father served as steward. In 1799, Codman III undertook the largest expansion of the property. Many features of Grandfather Codman’s mansion and landscape are visible today.

In 1807, Charles Russell Codman took control of the Codman Estate. He sold the house and its several hundred acres incrementally to fnance his extensive European travel. It would remain outside the family for ffy-fve years, until Ogden Codman Sr.—Charles’s son—and his wife, Sarah Fletcher Bradlee, embarked on their “Lincoln plan” to reclaim it. Codman Sr., orphaned at age 12, saw the estate as a symbol of family continuity and ancestral heritage. Marriage into the Bradlee family, whose wealth came largely from the Old China Trade, created the frst big infusion of cash since Grandfather Codman’s time. Te couple purchased the estate in 1862, christened it Te Grange to evoke the image of a gentleman’s country estate, and set about preserving the property as Grandfather Codman had envisioned it.

Te last Codmans to live on the estate were Ogden Jr. (an architect and notable interior designer), Alice, Tom, Hugh, and Dorothy. In 1968 Dorothy, the surviving sibling, bequeathed the Codman house, collections, family papers, and a parcel of land surrounding the perimeter of the mansion to Historic New England.

Many historic sites have sidestepped presenting interpretations of the indivisible ties between slavery, white supremacy, and racism. Historic New England is working to recast its interpretations, including that of the Codman Estate. Te life stories of Lincoln, Zilpah White, Mark, Brister Freeman, Robin, Bilhah, Peter, Ishmael, Phyllis, Phoebe, Scipio, Luck, Zilpah, Jack, Chloris, Caesar—and no doubt nameless others—will never be fully known. But their footfalls continue to echo through the Codman Estate’s halls and barns and leave impressions in its felds, forests, and across time.

PAGE Portrait of John Codman III (c. 1800 by John Singleton Copley), a successful merchant in the late eighteenth century who sold enslaved Africans. LEFT Sarah and Ogden Codman Sr. purchased the Codman Estate in 1862 after it had been out of the family’s ownership for six decades.