“Nov 5- Admitted Dinah Freeman to full communion.” Scribbled in the margin, “She was a colored woman.”
Peterborough minister Elijah Dunbar made this note in his church record for 1819. Two hundred years later, the Monadnock Center for History and Culture embarked on a project to recover the history of Black people and people of color in the Monadnock Region. In 2020, the Monadnock Center partnered with the Historical Society of Cheshire County to do a methodical study of the region’s Black residents using volunteer researchers. The Recovering Black History in the Monadnock Region project seeks to fill out our histories and recover the names and experiences of Black people who have lived here from the Colonial period to 1930.
One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, local historians across New England began to write town histories. In the aftermath of the Civil War, looking back to the settlement of our towns and the nation’s founding was a way to unify a people that had so recently been torn apart by politics and bloody conflict. Preserving and sharing the histories of our communities was a way to reconnect people to the values that formed the nation. As W.R. Cochrane wrote in the preface to his “History of the Town of Antrim, New Hampshire,” “Our town has little that is brilliant; but much that is solid, honorable and good.”
In the Monadnock Region, the grandchildren of the first white settlers were in their elder years by the time of the United States Centennial. The town historians knew that the family stories and memories of these people needed to be captured before it was too late. Dr. Albert Smith, historian of Peterborough, wrote in 1876, “…what little we have saved is now put into a permanent form for another century.” But the histories these men wrote were histories of their people — white settlers with their roots in Europe, most notably the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who settled many of the region’s towns. They left the stories and experiences of many people out of these histories. Little is said of the founding mothers, while much is documented about their husbands and sons. Native Americans, enslaved people and free people of color are sometimes mentioned, but little information is recorded. Black families are rarely found in the genealogies that are invariably included in these volumes.
A notable exception is the “History of Antrim,” where Cochrane recorded three Black families. The reason Cochrane included them may well be the influence of Nathaniel Parker. He was a Black man who went to work for Antrim builder David McCauley in 1809 as a child of seven. Cochrane described Nathaniel Parker as “kind, industrious, and smart. His memory has been of great service in preparing this book.”
Parker was the son of a formerly enslaved man, Caesar Parker of Litchfield, who gained his freedom at the time of the Revolution. Nathaniel Parker spent a number of years living and working in McCauley’s household and lived most of his life in Antrim working as a farmer and later a peddler. Parker invented the Parker Spool Curve, a device the Peterborough Transcript described in 1888 as “well-known among the horsemen of NH and CT.” Nathaniel Parker never married and passed away June 17, 1896, in Goffstown.
Another Antrim family, John and Abigail Stuart, offers an intriguing look at life here in the 18th century and illustrates some of the difficulties we encounter in researching these families. Cochrane said the Stuarts moved to Antrim from Londonderry in the 1770s. He remarked Abigail was “marked by negro blood.” An earlier Antrim historian, Dr. John Whiton, described John as having “Indian blood.” He said that Abigail had “a tinge of the African.” Both men noted Abigail’s maiden name was Phipps.
Whiton wrote, “Mrs. Stuart, familiarly known of old as old Granny Stuart, was a kind, neighborly woman, an excellent nurse, a self-taught Doctress, ready to aid the sick by day or night, and often useful, before there was a regular physician in the place.” Cochrane described Abigail as “a woman of great endurance… excellent in sickness. She took the place of a doctor in the new settlement, being always ready for many years to start at any hour of the day or night in service to the suffering. …she did a great deal of good in her day.”
Antrim did not have a doctor living in town until 1786. Before that time, the closest physician was in Hillsborough and only called upon for the most-severe cases. Abigail Stuart was certainly a well-known and vital person in the community. While it is rare and wonderful to have a vivid description of this 18th-century Black woman’s personality and contributions to the community, the difficulties of researching John and Abigail’s lives are typical of 18th-century research, particularly for people of color in New England.
We found a marriage record for John Steward and Abigail Phipps who were married in Ipswich, Massachusetts in January of 1755. The marriage record does not indicate their race, while other marriages recorded by the Ipswich town clerk document race. The names John and Abigail Stuart present an obstacle because these names are very common in 18th-century New England. To complicate things even more, Stuart can be spelled many ways, like the variant spelling found in the Ipswich marriage record. Whiton and Cochrane describe John and Abigail in terms of “having blood” rather than saying John was Indian and Abigail was Black. It is likely that both of them were mixed-race and may have been very light-skinned. They could have appeared white and therefore not recorded in documents as Black or mixed-race. We can’t say if the 1755 marriage record is theirs until we find other documents that can help us piece together more of John’s and Abigail’s story.
Elijah Dunbar wrote in 1819, “Dinah Freeman, admitted to full communion…She was a colored woman.” This was the first record we found for Dinah Freeman. Then we examined censuses, church records, vital records, school records and land deeds to piece together her story. The deaths of two children provide the earliest evidence. In July 1803, Rev. Dunbar conducted the funeral service for Dinah’s 7-year old daughter, Phila. Dinah lost her 15-month-old son, Oliver, in 1810. Dunbar gave us the name of a third child, Peggy, who was baptized in 1812. He noted Dinah’s death in 1834 at the age of 66.
Dunbar recorded the funeral of Dinah’s 38-year-old son Loring a year later in 1835. The 1840 census shows Peggy Freeman living in Peterborough with a female child under 9 years old. By 1860, Peggy was living at the poor farm. She died at 73 in 1866 and is buried in the Village Cemetery on Concord Street where her grave is marked with a simple marble stone.
An early 20th-century article in the Peterborough Transcript revealed where Peggy Freeman lived and gave us a vital clue to uncover how the Freeman family came to Peterborough. The Freeman house was located near one of Peterborough’s district schoolhouses. An alumnus wrote a school history that included information about who lived in the district over time. He noted that Peggy Freeman’s house had been previously occupied by “the widow Dinah Alld.”
This was a light bulb moment. Albert Smith’s History of Peterborough notes that at least five Peterborough men owned slaves in the 18 th century. Samuel Alld owned two people. There were no women in the Alld family named Dinah. Dinah was an extremely common name given to female slaves. Many formerly enslaved people adopted the last name Freeman rather than retain the name of their enslaver. Although we haven’t found a document that proves it definitively, additional primary and secondary sources support the idea that Dinah Freeman was Dinah Alld.
The story of the Freeman family has been pieced together through official documents but they don’t tell us anything about the personalities of Dinah and her children, how they supported themselves or their experiences living in Peterborough in the early 19th century. Although we have found lots of information, we are left with a bare-bones picture.
Unlike Dinah Freeman, Baker Moore’s life as an enslaved person and a free man has been documented in remarkable detail. Smith’s “History of Peterborough” records the names of two of the eight people who were enslaved in Peterborough, Baker Moore and Rose. Baker and Rose were owned by Deacon Samuel Moore (1727-1793), who settled in Peterborough about 1751.
We know little about Rose. In his will, Deacon Moore bequeathed Rose to his widow and instructed his son Ebenezer to support her for the remainder of her life. In 1755, Samuel Moore’s sister Mary, a weaver in Londonderry, took a load of cloth to sell in Boston. On completing her transaction, the buyer offered her an infant boy born of one his slaves. Mary took the boy back to Londonderry and named him Sam Jones after the Boston merchant. Sam lived in Mary’s household for a number of years and she sent him to school. The other boys in the school nicknamed him Baker and he used that name for the rest of his life.
When Baker was 10 years old, Mary sold him to her brother Samuel for $250. A provincial census from 1767 shows one enslaved male in Samuel Moore’s household. Samuel and his wife Margaret were exacting masters. If Baker neglected his work or disobeyed, Samuel beat him with a rod.
A family story, passed down through the generations, says Deacon Moore sold Baker his freedom in 1777 for $200, but Baker never paid. In 1790, two people of color were living in Moore’s household, indicating that Baker may have continued to live with the Moores after gaining his freedom. Later, in 1820 and 1830, Baker is listed as living by himself in his own household.After Baker gained his freedom at the age of 22, he made his living as a fiddler. In an 1889 article in the Peterborough Transcript, Judge Nathaniel Holmes (1815-1901) wrote, “The old inhabitants of Peterboro’ who were residents there 60 or 70 years ago, will remember with pleasure the name of Old Baker. He was a welcome guest in every household, and especially among the children, as he always carried a little green flannel bag containing his fiddle; and always met the children with a pleasant smile, and the children were always sure of a fine frolic when Old Baker was in the neighborhood.”
Dancing was an important part of social life during this time. Fiddlers performed an essential function in the community by providing music for formal dances, house dances and in the taverns and taprooms. Selinda Hill Holt (1809-1891) wrote a series of reminiscences about town life in the 1820s and 1830s. She said Baker often called at the various taverns and boardinghouses in town to play. When visiting the boarding houses, he would say to the young mill girls, “Come girls, have a dance. What tune will you have?”
Selinda Holt’s reminiscence also gives us a picture of Baker, in more ways than one. She says that his dark face was framed by curly white hair and he was rarely seen without his green flannel bag and fiddle. She also tells us that Baker’s portrait was painted by an itinerant artist in the early 1830s. The picture was “paid for by subscription” (in other words, people chipped in to raise the artist’s fee) and the portrait hung for many years in French’s Tavern on Main Street, now the site of today’s Peoples United Bank.
When Baker’s health failed him and he could no longer support himself, he lived at the town’s poor farm until his death on February 20, 1839. The church record reads, “Baker Moore, 84, decay – Negro- a slave when young of Deac. S. Moore.”
On March 1, Eliza Morison Felt (1815-1867) wrote in a letter to her brother, .“..old Baker died last week. He had been in a wretched suffering condition all winter. I was glad when he was dead and released from suffering. I believe he had more friends than many white people and better improved the talents given him, and now has gone where there will be no distinction made in regard to color.”
Baker Moore is buried in an unmarked grave in the East Hill Cemetery in Peterborough.
The Historical Society of Cheshire County and the Monadnock Center for History and Culture are working collaboratively to recover the history of Black people who lived in the Monadnock Region from the 1700s through 1930. A group of 18 volunteers, the “citizen-archivists,” are conducting the research using primary and secondary sources. If you are interested in becoming a citizen-archivist for the project, please contact Michelle Stahl at director@monadnockcenter.org.