Glimpses of Early Blandford

As long as we’re out in Blandford with Henry Knox, we might as well enjoy the town’s eighteenth-century history.

Most of the first British settlers in the area were Scotch-Irish, moving west in a bunch from Hopkinton in 1736. They named their new community “Glasgow” or “New Glasgow.” The town’s first meetinghouse was Presbyterian rather than New England Congregationalist.

However, when the Massachusetts government formally incorporated the town in 1741, the new governor, William Shirley, insisted on naming it after the ship that he had just arrived on—the Blandford. Reportedly he had leverage because the town proprietors had claimed more land than they were entitled to, so they needed the governor’s approval more than the inhabitants’.

The name “Glasgow” survived in a few geographic names such as the “Glasgow or Westfield Mountain” that Knox referred to in his diary. The town reportedly lost a church bell that the city of Glasgow, Scotland, had promised if it kept its original name.

Blandford was on the Massachusetts frontier, thus at risk from the French and their Native allies. During 1749, almost every household fled to other towns for safety. In 1755, as war loomed again, the town petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for a swivel gun, a type of small cannon. It was stored at the house of the Rev. James Morton.

The town straddled one of the few roads through the Berkshire Mountains, so it saw a lot of traffic. In 1762 a tavern keeper named Joseph Clark petitioned the legislature to be forgiven for selling alcohol without paying the excise tax. His excuse:

That in the Year 1760 He purchased a licensed House and purchased a barrel of Rum, but being sick in August when he should have applied for a license, and his House lying in the Road used by Soldiers sold the same, out to them: and he boght the said Rum of a Retailer who had paid the Duties of excise thereon—

The Massachusetts House bought that argument. The Council disagreed.

Blandford grew quickly after the Revolutionary War. Growth brought change, as preserved in this family anecdote from local historian William H. Gibbs. He said that around 1791 Isaac Gibbs (1744-1823)

brought into town the first single wagon used here. The neighbors regarded it as a curiosity, and their horses as he drove to church the first Sabbath, being affrighted, fled with as much precipitation as they do in our own day at the sight of the steam engine. It was a matter so strange to the people, that they actually proposed to call a town meeting to prohibit the use of wagons.

But the problems of growth didn’t last long. In the 1800 U.S. Census, Blandford had a population of 1,778—the largest the town ever was.

A Bite of Joel Christian Gill’s Strange Fruit

As I mentioned back here, I scripted one of the stories in the new anthology Colonial Comics: New England, 1620-1750. I wrote that script with the artist Joel Christian Gill in mind, and was lucky enough that he agreed to work on the project.

Joel is a professor and now chair of the Foundations Program at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. For years he was creating and publishing short comics about African-American history. As part of the process that led to Colonial Comics, the same publisher saw Joel’s mini-comics and signed him up for multiple books.

Strange Fruit, Volume 1: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History came out earlier this year. It has a foreword by Prof. Henry Louis Gates and has been getting fine reviews. Its subjects include Marshall “Major” Taylor, a cycling champion; Theophilus Thompson, a child born into slavery who became a chess master; the Malaga Island community of Maine; and more.

One of those stories has its roots in Revolutionary New England: the career of Richard Potter, America’s first professional magician. Potter was a light-skinned African-American, able to portray a “Hindu” in his performances during the early 1800s.

According to traditions going back to the late nineteenth-century, Potter was raised in Hopkinton, son of a servant woman or slave named Dinah and a baronet, or hereditary knight. Hopkinton was home of the baronet Sir Charles Henry (Harry) Frankland, and in the past authors have suggested Frankland was Potter’s father. However, the magician’s gravestone indicates he was born in or around 1783, and Frankland died in 1768, so that’s out.

The 2004 book Black Portsmouth suggests that Potter’s father was Henry Cromwell, a young man in the Frankland household. Most sources identify Cromwell as Sir Harry Frankland’s illegitimate son (though one says he was the illegitimate son of the previous baronet, Sir Harry’s uncle). As for Henry Cromwell’s mother, most sources suggest she was Sir Harry’s mistress before he met the love of his life, Agnes Surriage, in a Marblehead tavern. In Marblehead’s Pygmalion: Finding the Real Agnes Surriage (2010), F. Marshall Bauer digs deepest into those relationships and concludes that Agnes, the future Lady Frankland, probably bore Henry Cromwell out of wedlock as a teenaged mother.

That still leaves the question of how Henry Cromwell might have fathered Richard Potter. Cromwell left America with Lady Frankland during the siege of Boston. At the end of the war, he was busy as a captain in the Royal Navy, participating in the Second Battle of Ushant. He was unlikely to be found in Hopkinton in 1782 or ’83.

Eventually Cromwell became an admiral and retired to the English countryside. In 1805 Sir Harry’s younger brother William left his estate to Cromwell on the provision that the retired admiral change his surname to Frankland, as he quickly did. Thus, although Henry Cromwell Frankland was never a baronet, he was the son of a baronet, an admiral, and a big English landowner, which added up to nearly the same thing.

So did Henry Cromwell leave Massachusetts with the enslaved woman Dinah, and they had Richard Potter far away from Hopkinton? Was Potter born in Hopkinton to another couple altogether, and did he later add an aristocratic pedigree? Did Potter shave a decade off his age, meaning he was really born in 1773? Firm answers are illusory. In Strange Fruit, Joel Gill focuses instead on Potter’s theatrical career, conjuring feats, and manipulation of racial identities within nineteenth-century America.

Joel’s second book this year, Bass Reeves: Tales of the Talented Tenth, Volume 1, tells the life of a highly successful Texas lawman. It makes some remarkable uses of the comics form, especially in conveying racist language without using it. That book makes its debut this weekend at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo in Cambridge. Right now, as I understand it, Joel is touring the Midwest, wowing audiences with his talks before returning to New England in time for that exposition. Richard Potter would be proud.

Searching for Mrs. Seaver

Yesterday I quoted from the page of the Hopkinton meetinghouse records shown above, photographed this week for the New York Times:

February 26th. 1763. The Church met at the meeting-house (pursuant to adjournment) and unanimously Voted, That the Charge brought against Mrs. Seaver, appear’d to them to be Sufficiently prov’d; and that therefore they could not Consent to her owning the Covenant, and receiving Baptism for her Child.

Who was Mrs. Seaver? What was the charge against her? Obviously her Hopkinton neighbors were convinced she’d done something wrong—but what?

The first place I went looking for Mrs. Seaver was in those same Hopkinton meetinghouse records—the part published within the vital records of Hopkinton for genealogists. They show that on 11 Sept 1763, or six and a half months later the church vote, two children of Moses “Sever” were baptized in that meetinghouse: Nabby and Amos Carril. A third Seaver baby, named Moses, was baptized in October 1765. The mother of those children isn’t named, but other baptism records from the same decade also omit the mother’s name, so that may not be significant.

The Westboro birth records say that Abigail (Nabby) Seaver was born 8 Mar 1761, so she was two and a half years old when she was baptized in Hopkinton. That delay points to her mother being the “Mrs. Seaver” whom the Hopkinton church didn’t want to admit.

It looks like Mrs. Seaver was born Lucy Carril(l) in Hopkinton in November 1737. On 21 Aug 1755, she married nineteen-year-old Hezekiah Johnson of Southboro, according to records from Hopkinton. This Johnson genealogy says Hezekiah died near Albany during the war against the French in 1756.

The Johnsons had a child named Miriam. Westboro records say she was born on 28 May 1756. But she was baptized on 5 September in Hopkinton, listed as “child of Lucy” with no father named. Evidently Hezekiah was no longer alive, or no longer present.

In May 1758, Lucy Johnson remarried to Moses Sever or Seaver, as recorded in the Hopkinton and Westboro records. Their first child, Lucia, was baptized in Framingham the following March. In 1762 they were living in Sudbury. During that period Lucy gave birth to Nabby, Amos Carrill, and Moses.

Sadly, according to this webpage, as of 1766 the family consisted of “Moses Sever from Hopkinton, his wife Lucy, Lucy’s daughter Merriam Johnson, and his daughter Naby.” So it looks like three of those five children died very young.

By that year, Moses and Lucy Seaver had gone back to Westboro, and they finally seem to have achieved some stability there. They remained in that town for the birth of three more boys and a girl, all of whom lived to adulthood. Moses Seaver died in 1809 or 1810. Lucy died in 1816.

What was “the Charge brought against Mrs. Seaver” that the Hopkinton church felt should bar her from admission? I couldn’t find a clear answer. One might lurk within the meetinghouse records, though more often such details were left out.

One common problem was sex outside of—usually before—marriage. For example, the Seavers’ first child, Lucia, might have been born well within nine months of their wedding. The surviving records don’t tell us her birthdate, so it’s possible the Seavers took her to Framingham to be baptized some months after she arrived.

Eighteenth-century New England congregations were quite used to dealing with brides who had been pregnant at the altar. They usually required one or both parents to admit that they had strayed before they were admitted into church membership, thus allowing their children to be baptized. And after that no one cared. Was that what ultimately happened in this case? Or was Lucy (Carrill Johnson) Seaver denying some greater scandal?

Preserving New England’s Church Records

Yesterday’s New York Times had a front-page article about an ongoing search for old New England church records. Many churches still have those records, but in less than ideal conditions.

The region’s Congregationalist heritage means two things. First, every town’s meetinghouse kept its own records, and New England towns have a tradition of not giving up such things to a central authority. Second, with the number of Congregationalists diminishing, there aren’t that many people left to keep track of these documents.

The article follows Prof. James Fenimore Cooper, Jr., of Oklahoma State University, and Margaret Bendroth, Executive Director of the Congregational Library in Boston, as they seek out those documents and seek to convince churches to send them to the library for digitization and safekeeping.

Here’s one vignette:

A few hours later, Dr. Cooper and Dr. Bendroth visited an evangelical congregation in Hopkinton, Mass. Faith Community Church is the successor of the original Congregational church in town, founded in 1724, and had the original records carefully cataloged, boxed and stored in a locked basement room, alongside an early pastor’s 1740 Queen Anne side chair with a bullet hole in the back.

The documents included a list of excommunicants and notification of a fine levied against a local man who resisted joining the Army during the Revolution, as well as multiple “relations” — letters describing faith journeys. They include one from Benjamin Pond, who described how, despite being raised in a Christian home, he had fallen “into a state of stupidity and wickedness” until, after multiple deaths in his family, including of his child, he had a conversion experience. “That’s the first time that’s been heard in 200 years,” Dr. Bendroth said after reading Mr. Pond’s relation. “I just think that’s really amazing.”

The Times article doesn’t say it, but the researchers’ work leads to the Congregational Library’s New England Hidden Histories project, discussed in this Religion News article last year.

The Times illustrated its story with a photograph from those Hopkinton records, showing a church decision on a delicate matter:

February 26th. 1773. The Church met at the meeting-house (pursuant to adjournment) and unanimously Voted, That the Charge brought against Mrs. Seaver, appear’d to them to be Sufficiently prov’d; and that therefore they could not Consent to her owning the Covenant, and receiving Baptism for her Child.

So immediately I wondered what that was about.

TOMORROW: Tracking down Mrs. Seaver.

1735 Wedding Dress on Display in Boston, 13 Nov.

On Tuesday, 13 November, the Bostonian Society is hosting a special event focused on this dress, embroidered by Elizabeth Bull before her wedding in 1735. The dress will be on display in the Old State House for that night only, and textile expert Kathryn Tarleton will describe the challenges of researching and conserving it. Then it will go off for treatment under a grant from the Stockman Family Foundation.

The society’s announcement explains:

Miss Bull began designing, sewing, and embroidering her own China silk wedding gown while in school, a project undertaken by young women to practice and perfect the advanced needle arts. She had already been working on the gown for several years when, in 1734, she met Reverend Roger Price at Trinity Church. The gown was still not completed when Miss Bull wore it to their wedding the following year.

The minister was in his late thirties; Elizabeth was still in her teens. Here are some close-ups of the embroidery. That page suggests that the dress was altered to conform to later fashions, as folks who know about sleeves probably already guessed. Here are some of the caps Elizabeth Price sewed for her babies.

The family moved to England in the 1750s when the Rev. Mr. Price sought a better living within the Anglican Church. He died unexpectedly in 1762. Elizabeth lived until 1780. Two of the couple’s children moved back to Massachusetts after the war, settling on property from their mother’s family in Hopkinton. Daughter Elizabeth, known as “Madam Price,” lived until 1826. Presumably she and her brother had brought the gown and other family items back to the United States.

Elizabeth Bull’s gown will be displayed from 5:30 to 7:30 P.M. Space is limited, and admission ($5 for Bostonian Society members, $15 for non-members) can be arranged through this Eventbrite page. There will be refreshments, presumably not near the fabric.

from Henry Wiencek to Richard Potter

Common-place offers a terrific interview with Henry Wiencek, author of The Hairstons and An Imperfect God, about his research on how George Washington managed and lived with his slaves. Wiencek also talks about an intersection that can be equally awkward: between genealogy and history.

I think the topic of Washington as a slaveholder is fascinating because of how the first President struggled with the issue all his later life (and even, in a way, beyond). Washington always wanted to do the right thing by his society's standards. But on this question what was the right thing? The way he and his relatives and his peers in Virginia all lived, or what his principles told him to try? Occasionally I help perform a presentation on Washington and slavery assembled by ranger Paul Blandford at Longfellow House that looks at Washington's words and deeds on slavery.

The New England population contained fewer slaves than the colonies to the south, and the plantation system didn't dominate society here. As a result, there were fewer enslaved children identified as the children of their white masters, the topic Wiencek explores in his books. One notable New England said to have that background was Richard Potter, often called the first American magician. At least, he was the first American to make a good living performing ventriloquism and conjuring on the stage.

Potter was born in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Traditions in the magic community, exemplified in articles here and there and in this book reviewed on the Magic Cheese blog, say that Potter was the son of an enslaved servant named Dinah and Sir Charles Henry (Harry) Frankland, a British Customs official who had a country home in that town. For all sorts of reasons people might want to believe a prominent man of color was descended from a British baronet: the appeal of celebrity and transgressive gossip, racism (crediting Potter's success to noble European blood), a simple answer to who in Hopkinton had the power to impregnate an enslaved woman.

The only problem is that Potter, according to his gravestone, died in 1835 at age 52, meaning he was born in 1783. Sir Harry Frankland died in 1768.