[In early May,
with the lockdown closing in around us a bit, my sons and I took a daytrip up
to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where we walked around the historic
waterfront area (masked and at a social distance from fellow visitors,
natch). This week I’ll highlight a handful of histories from this multi-layered
New England community, leading up to a special post on other NE historic
daytrips!]
On three of the
many educational stops along a vital
historic path.
1)
The African Burying Ground: No
engagement with Portsmouth’s history can avoid two crucial yet contradictory facts:
the city reflects and
exemplifies the foundational presence and influence of African Americans throughout
colonial New England; yet until very recently that presence was entirely
absent from the city’s public presentations of its histories and stories. Summing
up both of those layers (literally as well as figuratively) is the city’s
African Burying Ground, the only known 18th century cemetery for New
England African Americans; yet one that as of a few years ago was invisible,
paved over and turned into a parking lot. The reason I know and can share the
first and more important part of that duality is thanks to the work of the
folks at the African
Burying Ground Trust, a community that overlaps closely with those who
maintain the Black Heritage Trail (like Executive
Director JerriAnne Boggis). Thanks to their efforts, these vital Portsmouth
and American histories have begun to be written back into the landscape and our
collective memories.
2)
Noyes Academy: New Hampshire, like other
New England states, began gradually abolishing slavery in the years after
the Revolution (although I do mean gradual,
and even that process required the voices and efforts of courageous enslaved
African Americans and their allies). But if anyone thinks that abolition meant
that the state became thoroughly inclusive or integrated, feel free to point
them to the tragic, ugly history of Canaan’s
Noyes Academy: founded in March 1835 by abolitionists as America’s first
co-educational school for African Americans; and destroyed in August and
September of that same year (after months of virulent opposition in the press) by
rampaging mobs of white supremacist townspeople. In those few short months of
operation, the school featured as students such vital future leaders as Henry
Highland Garnet and Alexander
Crummell, making it a doubly significant historic landmark. But there’s no
escaping the most telling fact about Noyes Academy, as captured in its Canaan
historic marker: that this inspiring educational community so “outraged
opponents” that they turned to mob violence in response.
3)
The Harriet Wilson Memorial
Sculpture: History is told not just through the best and worst of such collective
spaces and experiences, however, but also through the individuals who live and
shape it. No New Hampshire individual has a more compelling story (in every
sense) than Harriet
Wilson (1825-1900), who from her birth and childhood of indentured
servitude in Milford through her autobiographical novel Our
Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), Spiritualist
lectures and séances, and late-life religious and educational ventures
experienced and shaped a good deal of 19th century American society.
Thanks to the efforts of the Harriet
Wilson Project, which funded Fern Cunningham’s Wilson Memorial Sculpture in
Milford’s Bicentennial Park among many other spots on the Milford Black Heritage
Trail, this unique yet telling New Hampshire, New England, and American life
can, like all these histories and stories, be more fully included in the
landscape of our collective memories.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other historic sites or daytrips you’d highlight?
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