01945 Summer 2021

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Lauren McCormack, Marblehead Museum executive director, shows a historical photograph of the grave of Agnes, a slave in the 1700's who is buried in Old
Burial Hill with the family that owned her.
PHOTOS: JULIA HOPKINS
Museum unearths town's slavery history
BY SAM MINTON
It might come as a surprise to some,
but slavery was alive and well in
Marblehead in the days before the
Civil War.
When it comes to the historical
American practice of slaveholding, a lot of
the focus seems to go toward the southern
United States — but the northern United
States is not without guilt. Lauren McCormack,
executive director of the Marblehead
Museum, noted that it wasn't uncommon for
upper-class families in town to hold slaves.
While the environs were not similar to the
plantations of the South, the upper class
could typically have a few enslaved people in
the household.
"I don't think it would have been seen as
unusual or strange to find enslaved people in
Marblehead — which is true for all of New
England," said McCormack. "That's a story
that we're finally starting to tell correctly: that
slavery was not absent from New England
and certainly was not absent in Marblehead."
The first ship that brought slaves to
Massachusetts colony was built right in Marblehead.
Built in 1636, the "Desire" is viewed
as the first ship to traffick enslaved people of
color into and out of Massachusetts Bay, and
was just the third ship built in the colony.
As the Marblehead Museum director,
McCormack was able to recount specific
disputes between the Native Americans and
the colonists in various parts of New England
around the time. There was one "skirmish" in
Connecticut that colonists won, which led
to Native American boys and women being
put onto the ship and sent to the Caribbean,
destined to become slaves. When the
"Desire" returned, the ship brought with it
the first slaves of African descent to Massachusetts.
McCormack said that it has been hard to
pinpoint the amount of enslaved people who
lived in Marblehead at any given time.
"It was not an unusual thing; the records
are a little spotty," she explained. "It's a hard
history to get at because the documentary
sources are not always present to really find
the exact numbers or anything more than
a name of somebody, unfortunately. We are
working on a database that will capture what
SLAVERY HISTORY, page 28