[Antiracism] Florence Fugitive Slave House on National Register

[s.strimer at excite.com]

--FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE--

Black History Month Program Celebrates Two Fugitive Slaves 
Their Florence House Listed on National Register of Historic Places


A program by Northampton resident Steve Strimer will celebrate the lives of fugitive slaves Basil Dorsey, Thomas H. Jones and their families. Dorsey’s original 1850 house at 191 Nonotuck Street, Northampton, has been accepted as a site of the National Register of Historic Places. Only six other individual Northampton properties have been recognized. The talk will take place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, February 21 at the Florence Civic Center and is co-sponsored by the Northampton Historical Commission and the Sojourner Truth Memorial Statue Committee.

In 1854, two years after Dorsey moved to his second house still standing at 4 Florence Road, the family of the fugitive Rev. Thomas H. Jones, from Wilmington, N.C. acquired the Nonotuck Street house. The flight from slavery and lives in the North of both fugitives are remarkably well documented. Dorsey escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1836, traveled to Bristol, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and New York City where he was aided by Joshua Leavitt, whose family lived in Charlemont, MA, and the African-American David Ruggles, then secretary of the New York Vigilance Committee. Dorsey then came north, passing through Northampton on his way to Charlemon. After his first wife Louisa died he settled in what became Florence in 1844. Ruggles had preceded him there, having become a member of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in 1842. Dorsey became the teamster for the Greenville Manufacturing Company and lived in Florence until his death on February 15, 1872.

Thomas H. Jones, even as a slave in North Carolina, was able to raise enough money to purchase the freedom of his second wife, Mary and three of their four children. Mary went ahead to New York City finding refuge with the African American Robert H. Cousins. Jones stowed away on a ship bound for New York and was reunited with his wife in 1849. They came on to Hartford, Springfield, and Boston where he began a career as a Methodist preacher and lecturer against slavery. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 Jones fled to Nova Scotia returning to Massachusetts in 1853. He learned of Florence during a convention in Cummington that year. The Jones family lived in Dorsey’s former house from 1854 to 1859.

The nomination to the National Register was a project of the Massachusetts Historical Commission who employed historian Kathryn Grover of New Bedford and architectural historian Neil Larson of Woodstock, NY to research and prepare the application. Grover is author of The Fugitive’s Gibralter: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and a member with Strimer of the Massachusetts Underground Railroad Network. The Commission selected the Florence house from a number of possible sites statewide as representative of African-American contributions to the Underground Railroad in Massachusetts. You can read more about the site at http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/feature/afam/2006/dorsey.htm


 


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