Inside the old walls of the small, gray, two-story building located on a side street in Medford Square, artifacts and letters written by slave traders help tie together the present with the past. Amidst the clutter and dust surrounding the regular collection, the new exhibit at the Medford Historical Society unveils startling and lesser-known facts about Medford's role in the slave trade, while tracking the history of a family which came to the country enslaved, and lives here in Medford today.
The exhibition, entitled "Distilling Medford's Past: Rum, Ships and Slaves", shows the role the slave trade had on the political, economic and social aspects of Medford in the 18th and 19th centuries. Photographs and documents taken from shipbuilders and rum distillers are featured in the exhibition, in an effort to educate the community about Medford's history. The show is a joint effort between volunteers at the historical society and Tufts University graduate students in the Museum Studies Program.
According to Susan Bowditch, an organizer of the exhibit and a Tufts graduate student, slavery in Medford was "more prevalent than people would like to believe. People are in denial about that." The exhibit will "open people's eyes to what Medford was doing in the 1700s," Bowditch said.
Medford had the second largest slave population in Massachusetts in the 18th century. The Massachusetts Bay Colony had about 96,000 people in the 1700s, of which 2,000 were slaves. Boston had the second highest number of slaves in New England.
"A lot of people got very wealthy in New England and it's hard to believe that the slave trade did not contribute to that," Bowditch said. Even though slavery was not as prominent in New England as in the South, much of the wealth stemmed from the trading of rum for slaves.
"Most people don't think of the slave trade being associated with Medford or New England. The slave trade is kept out of the limelight," Bowditch said.
Kenneth Turino serves as Director of the Lynn Historical Society, while also teaching the Tufts Museum Studies course entitled "Exhibit Planning and Design for the Small Museum." He said that the students involved in the exhibit are developing "new conclusions" about the richness of Medford's history. Tufts students were given a $2,000 grant from the University to put together the exhibit.
The students in the class are responsible for organizing the show. Turino said the exhibit shows that "every community has many different sides to it that make up the whole." Most of the items on exhibition belong to the historical society, but they have never been put into a coherent, focused exhibit.
The exhibit is divided into three sections: shipbuilding, rum, and the Triangle Trade, each of which is headed by one of the 13 graduate students involved. The Triangle Trade is named after the triangular route that the slave, molasses and rum traders used to exchange goods in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Medford's role in the triangular trade consisted of shipping rum from Medford to Africa in exchange for slaves. The slaves were then brought to the West Indies for molasses, which was brought to Medford to make more rum. The exhibit is organized so that the three sections form a triangle, to reflect the routes taken by the traders.
"Medford was quite famous in its day," Turino said.
A focal point of the exhibit is a desk that contains a number of letters written by ship captains and traders. Bowditch said, "The letters were the inspiration for creating the exhibition." These letters were written between 1759 and 1769 and reflect the horrible events the slaves endured amidst the economic security their suffering provided slave owners and others involved in the trading. The letters include slaveholders "instructing the captains of ships what to look for when buying slaves." The slaves were being traded for bottles of rum. "They're pretty harsh to read," she added.
The letters were a part of the historical society's stock since the 1930s but were not ready for viewing until recently. Turino said, "someone stumbled upon them." The letters were not on display until this collaboration because the society did not have the funding to get them cleaned and put into protective covers by the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover. Furthermore, members of the historical society were uncertain of the authenticity of some of the documents.
The documents found in Medford from the past are very important to American history. The historical society was the source of the third largest Civil War photograph collection in the country, with over 5,000 prints. The photographs were reproduced in a book entitled "The Landscape of the Civil War."
Timothy Fitch was a ship owner who wrote a number of the letters on display. In the letters, Fitch describes how the slaves were to be priced at auction and how to make them appear desirable by oiling their bodies at auction.
A contract sent by Fitch to a sea captain in March of 1764 shows the prices for which slaves were auctioned. Slave traders would give 26 pounds and ten shillings for men or women who were at least four feet, four inches tall and anywhere from 17 to 21 pounds for boys and girls who were shorter than 4'4".
According to historians, one of the ships mentioned in the letters, the "Phillis," is the ship that acclaimed slave poet Phillis Wheatley was named after when it brought her to Boston in the 1760s.
Perhaps the most striking artifacts on exhibit are shackles used to tie down slaves. The shackles are on loan from the Isaac Royall House, a historic house in Medford, that contained slave quarters for as many as 27 slaves.
The objective of the exhibit is not only to reveal some of the hidden facts about Medford, but also to trace an African-American family's history in Medford, the Kountze family, who contributed pictures of their ancestors.
The Kountze family moved to Medford in the 1700s as freed slaves. However, enslaved blacks still lived in Medford at the time, which placed the ancestors in awkward circumstances. Bowditch said that by including the Kountze family in the exhibition, the museum was showing "something positive," because the slaves' "descendants made their contributions here." The pictures and documents are focused in the center of the exhibit, with the information about the ships, rum and slavery surrounding them, both in the literal and symbolic sense.
A scale model of the ship "Don Quixote," drawings of ships made in Medford, and tools used to make the ships help recreate the shipbuilding enterprise. Ship cards on display, index card-sized advertisements, publicized the sailing of the sea vessels to places such as California, for the Gold Rush, Asia, for the Asian Trade and the Beirut Strait, also for gold. These cards are colorful and the pictures depict successful voyages full of wealth, prosperity and conquests. World maps constructed by the grad students, highlight the routes taken by the merchants.
The success of the shipbuilding empire in Medford ended in 1873 with the finishing of the construction of the Pilgrim. The impact on the local area was devastating because much of the area's economy revolved around shipbuilding. Ship models and a half hull (a ship replica with exact proportions) are on display, as well as tools used for shipbuilding.
The rum produced in Medford was arguably the best in the United States. It was considered both a drink and a medicine. Drinking rum was often a part of the shipbuilders daily routine before they arrived at work in the morning. There is no direct evidence that slaves helped produce the rum, but evidence does exist that the slaves were traded for the rum produced in Medford.
In 1715, John Hall built Medford's first distillery on Distilling House Lane, now Riverside Avenue, and in 1830 Daniel Lawrence took over the business and created Daniel Lawrence & Sons. It was under Lawrence's supervision that the recipe for Medford Old Rum was perfected. Historical accounts show that Paul Revere drank Medford rum there just prior to his famous mission in which he warned Samuel Adams and John Hancock in Lexington that the British were marching to arrest them.
A re-created bar ledger helps place the importance of the rum industry in early Medford citizens' lives. Rum distilling containers and wooden pipes used for rum-distillation appear across from the bar along with copied advertisements and posters for rum. Authentic receipts from rum purchases and rusted keys from distilleries sit across from the containers.
Since few large cargoes were brought to Medford from the West Indies in the triangle trade, many people are disillusioned about the slavery. The ratio of citizens to slaves in 1765 was 45 to one, which translates to about 49 slaves in the town, or 2.2 percent of the population. Currently, African Americans constitute 3.9 percent of the population in Medford, while whites make up 92.2 percent.
The students did most of their research in Medford, the Boston Marine Society, The Peabody Essex Museum, and public and Tufts libraries. The entire exhibit was conceived and built by volunteers at the historical society and by Tufts students. "It has been an enormous amount of work," Bowditch said. "We had to learn about everything."
Graduate student Julia Stitson said of creating the exhibit, "It's a real shame the history you never learn about your own background. The little gems that we have here, you have to polish them."
Although slavery was abolished many years ago, the remnants of slavery can still be uncovered beyond the walls of the historical society. There are two distinct reminders of the slavery in Medford that still exist. The Old Slave Quarters of the historic Isaac Royall House and the "slave wall" on Grove Street, which was built in 1765 by a slave named Pomp.
The exhibit is on display at the Medford Historical Society, 10 Governors Avenue, Medford, MA (781) 391-8739, from May 8th until September 12th. It is open only on Sundays from 2-4 p.m. Admission is free.
