A Preliminary Circular:

Activities and Mission of the David Ruggles Center for 
Early Florence History & Underground Railroad Studies

We invite you to join us in an exciting project—the founding of the David Ruggles Center for Early Florence History and Underground Railroad Studies. Over the last fifteen years it has become increasingly clear that the history of Florence, Massachusetts, with its stories of resistance to slavery and struggle for human rights and freedom of expression inspires students, citizens and visitors to investigate and honor the founders work for equality and social justice. Each year has brought larger attendance at guided tours of abolition era sites. Teachers at all levels have come to appreciate how this rich lode of local history helps illustrate the tides of national history in the anti-bellum North.
Interpretable sites and structures abound. The home of fugitive slaves Basil Dorsey and Thomas H. Jones on Nonotuck Street is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The Ross Homestead on Meadow Street, in addition to its recent National Register designation, is listed on the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. In the village where Frederick Douglass first met Sojourner Truth; where William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips spoke beneath an old growth pine tree which rose 150 feet only yards from our proposed site; where Lydia Maria Child and her husband David grew sugar beets in an attempt to compete with slave-grown sugar cane, it is easy to see how teachers can invigorate their discussions by visiting the well-organized displays and archives of the proposed Ruggles Center. In a very real sense we would like the area’s teachers to make this center their own and to help in crafting the curricula and collections most useful to them.
The David Ruggles Center and the Save 225 Nonotuck Street Project
The establishment of the Ruggles Center at this time is tied to the necessity of finding a new site for the house now at 225 Nonotuck Street. The house’s current owner has agreed to donate it to an entity committed to preserving and interpreting Florence history. With a timetable of the fall of this year a subcommittee of the Northampton Historical Commission has been charged with finding a proper site and facilitating the move of the building. The subcommittee has chosen to help create the Ruggles Center to be dedicated to interpreting this critical period of Florence history. It is important to find a site near Nonotuck Street where Florence developed. The Florence Community Center property has been a center for education in Florence since the 1850s when political rivals Samuel L. Hill and J. P. Williston joined together to build a school and meeting hall for the early residents of Florence. We hope to place the center on the Community Center property overlooking the mills of the former Nonotuck Silk Company.

Mission of the David Ruggles Center 
Archives
The current generation of local Florence historians have amassed volumes of primary source reference material that currently reside in separate, uncollated private collections. They have maintained connections with academic and published historians who have added to and helped interpret this body of material. Differing from most museums who emphasize collections of original documents and artifacts the Ruggles Center will collect and organize copies of all materials pertinent to the early history of Florence and the Underground Railroad in Western Massachusetts. Files on individuals, businesses, buildings, and institutions will be as comprehensive and accessible as possible. Student researchers will be encouraged to fill in gaps in this collection. Making this material available digitally will also be a priority. 
We will develop extensive archives on national figures who lived and worked in Florence—Sojourner Truth, Lydia Maria and David Lee Child, David Ruggles, Calvin Fairbank, Thomas H. Jones, Anna Garlin Spencer and Charles Burleigh among others. Copies of documents relating to the Florence connections of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Theodore Weld, Bronson Alcott and other national figures would also be collected and organized. Comprehensive files on local figures Samuel L. Hill, Elizabeth Powell Bond, Alfred P. Critchlow, Frances Judd, Alfred T. Lilly, and others would be developed. 
The overriding goal would be to have as much information as possible about a fairly narrow time period (1840-1900) available in one place. Cooperative relationships would be developed with Forbes Library, Lilly Library, The Florence History Museum, Sophia Smith Collection, Historic Northampton and local churches with roots in Florence. The records of historical societies throughout Western Massachusetts would be combed for threads in the fabric of the local Underground Railroad. While museums generally have concentrated on acquiring original objects for their collections which range widely in subject matter and time period, we would concentrate on developing a comprehensive collection of high quality copies of materials relating to this specific period. In addition to historical archives we imagine a center to keep papers relating to specific preservation projects like ongoing Massachusetts Historical Commission Form B research, Park Street Cemetery renovation and documentation, digitization of archives, etc.

Exhibits and Programs
The downstairs rooms will provide gallery space where the early history of Florence would be illustrated. There could be two principal galleries on the model of Historic Northampton. One would provide a permanent display telling the broad story of the years between 1840 and 1900. The other gallery would rotate displays and feature more detail on a specific person or institution e.g. David Ruggles, Sojourner Truth, the Northampton Association of Education and Industry or Cosmian Hall. 
Displaying original materials would initially be beyond the resources of the Center. Well researched and rotating displays of copies of photographs and documents would be used to tell the story of early Florence. For the last six years, with the support of Collective Copies, the Florence History Project has accumulated color photo copies of Florence documents, mounted them on foam core and made portable table top displays to illustrate the subject of various lecture that have been presented. These materials are available to the Center. 
The involvement of the Florence History Project and the Sojourner Truth Memorial Statue Committee in the Massachusetts Underground Railroad Network, and with historians and educators has led to many fruitful associations. For example, in 2007 Horace Seldon of the African American National Historical Site in Boston brought fifteen of the Beacon Hill Scholars with him to Florence. He presented the lecture, “Learning from W. L. Garrison’s Example: What is the Role of Taking an Uncompromising Position in Relation to Social Change?” Kathryn Grover, historian and author of The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts has successfully applied on behalf of the Massachusetts Historical Commission for National Register designations for both the Dorsey/Jones House and the Ross Homestead. The Hampshire Educational Collaborative has used its creative programming to bring the Northampton Association and the early silk industry alive through day long programs and multimedia presentations as part of its “Emerging America” program. The Springfield Public Schools’ “Teaching American History” program in collaboration with the Five College Public School Partnership has arranged for its teachers to tour the abolition era sites as part of their summer conferences at Smith College.
Graham Russell Hodges, author of Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 has spent many hours in Florence and in correspondence with Florence historians to fine his upcoming biography of David Ruggles. Chistopher Clark author of the definitive history of early Florence The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (1995) continues to correspond with us and contribute to our understanding of fresh discoveries. He has now moved to Connecticut from Warwick, England. Bruce Laurie of UMass Amherst, author of Beyond Garrison: Anti-Slavery and Social Reform has been on the walking tour of Florence and has added insight into the political and evangelical abolitionists’ contribution to Florence. Both Nell Painter, author of Sojourner Truth: A Life A Symbol and David Blight, author of Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee are also aware of our project. We will appeal to these and other historians for support.
Linda Ziegenbein, doctoral candidate in archeology at UMass, Amherst is writing her dissertation on David Ruggles and has joined our planning committee. Perhaps most exciting is Paul Gaffney’s upcoming dissertation on the period after the Northampton Association up to the turn of the century, tracing the transformative echos of this utopian community. Gaffney founded the Florence History Project and his counsel will be invaluable. 
Entomologist Faith Deering would like to explore establishing a cocoonery in the ell at the DRC if we can successfully aquire and site the 225 Nonotuck Street House. Her program “Cultivating Silkworms and Making Silk Cloth” is well received at Historic Deerfield. Faith too has joined our committee. 

Publications
Given the efficiencies of print-on-demand technology and high speed scanning the DRC could offer any number of titles, maps, and facsimile editions to the general public relating. These could be for sale through its website, at the Ruggles Center itself and at larger venues where lectures and events benefiting the DRC take place. Examples might be: reprints of the monographs of Samuel Whitmarsh and Alfred Lilly on the silk industry; Thomas H. Jones and Sojourner Truth’s slave narratives brought out with new introductions; The National Register and Underground Railroad applications as chapbooks; curricula developed by the Sojourner Truth Curriculum Committee and local teachers for education about African American and multi-racial history, and much more

Now is the time — you can make a difference 
Building on the momentum created by these historians, preservationists, and educators, the time is right to establish the David Ruggles Center. Your tax deductible donation will allow us to move the house, place it on the new site and renovate the structure for its new purpose as the David Ruggles Center. Join us in helping to pass this inspiring history forward. 

Why Honor David Ruggles?
In 1849 David Ruggles died in Florence (then Bensonville) at the age of 39. Perhaps his early death has led to his relative obscurity as an historical figure. By rights he deserves to be remembered as one of the most courageous champions of the anti-slavery cause. As Samuel J. May remembered in his Some Recollections of Our Anti-Slavery Conflict, Ruggles was “a most active, adventurous and daring conductor on the underground railroad. He helped six hundred slaves to escape the Southern States into Canada.” One of these fugitives was Frederick Douglass. In My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass recalls Ruggles as “a whole-souled man, fully imbued with a love of his afflicted and hunted people...This brave and devoted man suffered much from the persecutions common to all who have been prominent benefactors. He at last became blind and needed a friend to guide him, even as he had been a guide to others...In search of health he became a physician [and] established, at Northampton, Massachusetts, a large ‘Water Cure,’ and became one of the most successful of all engaged in that mode of treatment.”
Ruggles, in addition to being the first known African-American bookseller, published one of the earliest black periodicals, The Mirror of Liberty. He was Secretary of the Vigilance Committee of New York City and coadjator with Isaac T. Hopper for the rights of slaves brought into New York. When he became ill Lydia Maria Child, then editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, arranged for him to join the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. He learned the watercure techniques of Priesnnitz, applied them to himself over eighteen months and then began, informally, to treat members of the Northampton Association. After his recovery he gained a sensitivity to what he termed the “cutaneous electricity” of a patient whereby he was able to diagnose illness and determine whether the watercure would be helpful as a treatment. Such was his success that he established the Northampton Watercure as one of the first hydorpathic hospitals in the United States.
William Lloyd Garrison, himself one of Ruggles’ patients, was stunned by his untimely death. He took on writing the obituary in the Liberator, “We have not the materials for a biographical notice of this remarkable man, such as deserves to be written, and preserved in a permanent form. Identified with the colored population of this country by complexion and destiny, he contended successfully with difficutlties, he conquered obstacles, he performed exploits, he encountered perils and sufferings, in the spirit of a hero, and with the courage of a martyr. He came into the field of labor and conflict from the first hour that the anti-slavery tocsin sounded, and in his adherence to the principles and measures of our sacred cause, in their most radical form, was as fixed as the North Star.”
You can help make this happen.
You can make a tax deductible donation to:
The David Ruggles Center
Box 60405
Florence, MA  01062