Window On The Past

A chance find by workers renovating a Beacon Hill townhouse in Boston is providing a very unusual window on a virtually undocumented group of people. Even though Boston was a hub of the abolitionist movement, almost nothing is known about the free blacks who lived there before the civil war. But when the floor of what was thought to be an old privy was removed, a trove of artifacts was discovered from what is thought to be a household of a man who was a butler for the governor of Massachusetts.

The shoes, doll fragments, hat pins, children's marbles and an empty sarsaparilla bottle, among other items, were found beneath the flooring of what once was thought to be a privy and could provide insight into the lifestyle of free black families in Boston during that time, experts said.

The house was built about 1840 by Robert Roberts, a free black man who was an active abolitionist and worked as a butler for Gov. Christopher Gore. He wrote "The House Servants' Directory" in 1827.

Despite the national influence of Boston's black families in the abolitionist movement, there is almost no record of their daily lives.

"It's a wonderful piece of history," Mary Beaudry, a Boston University archaeology and anthropology professor, who is helping lead the excavation, told The Boston Globe. "To get a look at a free African-American household — wow!"

Workers doing renovations for property owner Michael Terranova exposed brickwork beneath the floor of an attached shed.

Terranova consulted the staff at the 19th-century African Meeting House, the free-black church and community center whose Beacon Hill site is now affiliated with the National Park Service. They pointed him to Beaudry and Ellen Berkland, archaeologist for the city of Boston.

"I hadn't thought it was possible to get archeologists here," said Terranova, who was not legally obligated to report the discovery of historical artifacts on his property.

Good for the homeowner. He did the right thing here even though there is no legal requirement for him to do so. There's some additional history about the African Meeting House here.