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When Poor Apprentice Laborers Were 2 Years Old

In 1754, Boston’s overseer of the poor bound out Joseph Clifton, aged two, as an apprentice to Aaron Clinton, a brickmaker in Medford, Mass. Joseph, probably orphaned or abandoned, had no say in the matter.

For the next 19 years, Joseph couldn’t leave his master’s household without permission. He had to gladly obey all of his orders. In return, Clinton would provide room and board and teach Joseph his trade, along with reading, writing and arithmetic. When Joseph turned 21, Clinton would give him two suits, called freedom suits, one for Sunday and one for work.

Joseph wasn’t alone. Surviving records in Massachusetts show that from 1735 to 1805, Boston’s overseers of the poor bound out about 1400 children as apprentices. Rhode Island’s surviving records show 725 poor children were bound out during the second half of the 18^th century.

Apprenticeship contract for Sarah Scribner.

For some, like Isaiah Thomas, apprenticeship led to a successful career and a place in history. For others apprenticeship meant a lifetime of poverty and toil. And in the case of Nathaniel Sewell, it meant an early death.

Nathaniel Sewell, Smelly Apprentice

In 1643, a London street kid named Nathaniel Sewell arrived in Newbury, Mass., to work as an apprentice for William Franklin. The child had arrived with a batch of poor children sent to Massachusetts, where colonists had a pressing need for laborers.

It had been 24 years since English authorities shipped the first load of 100 homeless children to Virginia, where they labored as apprentices until they turned 21. The experiment succeeded, at least for the masters, and the next year another hundred kids arrived in Virginia.

Nathaniel Sewell, a smelly child, had the scurvy when he landed in Massachusetts. His master treated his young apprentice harshly. Franklin left him in the cold and wet, corrected him mercilessly and hung him in the chimney as punishment. But Sewell would not bend to Franklin’s will, and so Franklin took him to court in Boston.

On the way, Franklin had to tie the sick boy to his horse because he couldn’t sit up. Nathaniel begged for water, but Franklin refused. Hours after they reached Boston, Nathaniel Sewell died. Franklin was charged with killing his servant, found guilty and hanged for the offense.

The Family Apprentice

The Puritans believed servants, apprentices or employees had a duty to obey the master of the household, but the master also had a duty to them. He had to teach them to read Scripture, follow a trade and be a good person. He was also not supposed to kill them.

The practice of apprenticeship didn’t always work out, as in the case of Nathaniel Sewell. But the Puritans believed in the concept as sound. To their minds, an orderly society rested on the family – a family headed by a male. The single life inspired “sin and iniquity,” the Puritans believed.

In the 17^th century, Massachusetts, Plymouth and Connecticut colonies actually passed laws requiring single people to live with a family. If a single person didn’t find an established family, the local authorities would find one for him – or her.

That went for children, too.

Child Labor

From 1692 to the Revolution, Massachusetts took care of hundreds of poor children younger than 10 by binding them out as apprentices to families. (The maritime trades were the one exception to the family apprentice). About three dozen children hadn’t reached the age of five.

Most young girl apprentices spent a lot of time doing this.

In Rhode Island, very young children (who couldn’t be expected to work much) came with a premium paid by the town. Colored children made up 25 percent of all indentures in Rhode Island, where apprenticeships lasted longer.

Overseers of the Poor

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, poor families in Puritan New England could expect a knock on the door. The door would open to admit selectmen or overseers of the poor, who would inspect their home. Then they’d decide whether or not to take a child away from the family as a pauper apprentice.

In the case of craft apprentices, like Paul Revere (silversmithing) or Benjamin Franklin (printing), parents had a say in the terms of the agreement. Not so in the case of poor, abandoned, orphaned or illegitimate children.

Puritan town officials even took children from their homes if they thought the parents immoral. Around 1644, for example, they took two children away from Ruben Guppy of Salem and apprenticed them to another family. Guppy had gone to court many times for stealing fences, lying and accusing his wife of a “wanton dalliance.” He’d also said something blasphemous to Puritan ears. God, he believed, found his nail parings as acceptable as a day of Thanksgiving,

Heartfelt Pleas

But town leaders also seized children from their parents because of their poverty. In Northampton, Mass., town officials in 1680 took two sons and one daughter away from Robert Lyman and his wife. They apprenticed the children to other families despite the parents’ heartfelt pleas to the court to keep their children.

It could have been worse for Mr. and Mrs. Lyman. In 1756, Massachusetts passed a law that ordered selectmen to bind out adults as workers for one year if they couldn’t support their children. Three years later, the colony passed another law allowing an unmarried mother to be indentured for five years if the child went on the dole before the age of five. Those two laws only took effect for a few years, and the Legislature did not reenact them.

Isaiah Thomas, Success Story

For some poor children like Isaiah Thomas, apprenticeship was the best thing that could happen to them.

Success story Isaiah Thomas

Isaiah Thomas’ father abandoned the family, leaving his wife to support five children. Isaiah went to live with a family in the country between the ages of two and six. At seven, he returned to Boston, where authorities drew up an apprenticeship contract on July 7, 1756, to a printer named Zachariah Fowle.

Until he turned 21, Isaiah had to obey Fowle, keep his secrets, leave him only with permission and avoid gambling, taverns, fornication and matrimony. In return, Fowle had to teach him printing, to cipher, read and write, and to give him two freedom suits when he turned 21.

Freedom suits, by the way, had considerable value. In 1761 a freedom suit was worth about five months’ wages. A few poor apprentices also received freedom dues in the form of cash, land or tools.

Isaiah Thomas ran away from Fowle at age 18, but returned to Boston and started an influential newspaper, The Massachusetts Spy. Thomas took up the patriot cause and emerged as the foremost publisher of his age. He was an ally of John Hancock and Sam Adams and friend of Paul Revere.

During the Siege of Boston, Thomas smuggled his printing press out of town and settled in Worcester. There he published the Bible, almanacs and the History of Printing in America. He also formed the American Antiquarian Society.

From Boston to the Boonies

In 18^th-century Boston, children could end up as apprentices far from home and family. Hard economic times had fallen on the town after a series of wars and smallpox epidemics. Impressment of sailors by the British Royal Navy had also scared off shipping.

But settlers spreading out into outlying towns needed plenty of help. They looked to Boston’s poor to get it.

In 1745, Edward Holin was apprenticed in Boston at the age of 18 months to Robert Anderson, a housewright in Chester, N.H.
Five years later, five-year-old Mary Hermon left Boston to apprentice as a household servant to a trader named Joseph Langeret in Lebanon, Conn.
In 1765, seven-year-old Thomas More departed Boston for Pownalborough, Maine, as an apprentice housewright for the next 14 years to James Flagg.

Conversely, Rhode Island’s economy thrived, and the colony’s wharves and workshops needed cheap labor. Perhaps that’s why Rhode Island’s pauper apprentice boys didn’t win their freedom until 24, girls until 21.

Mary Butcher, 7, Apprentice

Few poor boy apprentices came close to Isaiah Thomas’ success. Historian Lawrence Towner found only three apprentices listed as masters of their own trade in 1796 out of 60 boys bound out to tradesmen between 1760 and 1790. They worked as a tailor, a hairdresser and a tobacconist.

The best that could happen to a poor servant girl was marriage to a decent husband. Other than that, she’d spend her life in service or, like Mary Butcher, end up in the poorhouse.

In 1754, Boston authorities bound seven-year-old Mary Butcher as an apprentice servant to Richard Storkney, a yeoman farmer in Stoughton, Mass.

The Idle Servant by Nicholas Maas.

For the next 11 years she had to work for him in exchange for room, board and a rudimentary education.

Storkney, like all masters, had to produce letters testifying to his good character (the Nathaniel Sewall case had apparently proved instructive). Then Mrs. Storkney had to train Mary to spin wool, to keep house and to read. (Girls didn’t need writing or math.) When Mary got her freedom at 18, the Storkneys had to give her two freedom dresses.

Fifty years later she reappeared in the record, poor, single and lame in Canton, Mass. The overseers of the poor wrote, “She is a person whom nature has not been over bountiful in furnishing her mental faculties.” They sent her to the Boston poorhouse, where she presumably died.

End Notes

With thanks to: Markets for Children in Early America: A Political Economy of Pauper Apprenticeship John E. Murray and Ruth Wallis Herndon in The Journal of Economic History, 2002. Graham Millar, The Poor Apprentices of Boston: Indentures of Poor Children Bound Out Apprentice By the ‘Overseers of the Poor of Boston, July 4, 1958. And The Indentures of Boston’s Poor Apprentices: 1734-1805 by Lawrence W. Towner, 1962.

Images: Young Girl at Spinning Wheel By https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/0a/28/c704a981cdb6bf5f30d829506d67.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0039573.html Wellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-23): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/th7sdqf4 CC-BY-4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36633776. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Buzzards Bay Leper Colony: Tragic Exile

Around the turn of the 20^th century, a terrifying new kind of immigrant arrived in Massachusetts: the sufferer of Hansen’s disease. A person who had it was stigmatized as a leper and cast out of society.

Doctors knew little about the disease. Obviously it caused ugly sores and scales, disfigured the face and sometimes led to blindness and deafness. But many doctors thought, incorrectly, that leprosy resulted from living in filth or in sin or in both. They also thought, incorrectly, that it was extremely contagious and invariably fatal.

Under Biblical law, priests declared people with leprous sores ‘unclean,’ and exiled them. In the Middle Ages, they had to wear a bell and a clapper to keep others away. In 20^th century Massachusetts, they were forced to live out the rest of their lives on a remote island in Buzzard’s Bay, denied almost all that life held dear.

“The strength of this stigma is almost unique in the history of Western medicine,” wrote Ron Amundsen, who equated the word ‘leper’ with racial epithets.

In 20^th century Massachusetts, no one wanted to care for the outcasts. Except for a successful and socially prominent Malden couple, Dr. Frank and Marian Parker.

The Disease

Leprosy, a bacterial infection, attacks the skin and the nerves in the victim’s hands, feet, nose and eyes. According to the Boston Public Health Commission, about 95 percent of all adults have an immunity to it. It doesn’t spread easily, either. It requires prolonged contact with bodily fluids, usually through coughing or sneezing.

Another kind of leper

People can, in rare cases, get leprosy from armadillos, the only other animal known to be susceptible to the disease.

Leprosy develops slowly and takes two to ten years to manifest itself. It can cause nerve damage that leads to injuries the sufferer doesn’t notice. And, until the development of antibiotics in the 1950s, it eventually killed the sufferer.

Father Damien

Leprosy didn’t exist in Massachusetts until the late 19^th century, when it began to arrive on a wave of immigration and military conquest. People knew the disease from the Bible and from the contemporary controversy over Father Damien.

Damien, a Roman Catholic priest, ministered to sufferers of Hansen’s disease on Molokai, Hawaii, until he died of it himself in the spring of 1889. However, he had his critics who condemned him as coarse and ignorant. (The Roman Catholic Church has since sainted him.)

Robert Louis Stevenson, visiting Hawaii later in 1889, ferociously attacked one of Father Damien’s critics in a letter.

“You make us sorry for the lepers, who had only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father,” Stevenson wrote. “But you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of culture?”

Stevenson paid to publish and distribute the letter, which added to Father Damien’s fame – and to the awareness of leprosy.

In 1895, Boston health officials diagnosed an East Boston sailor with Hansen’s disease. For many years the sailor had sailed on a ship that “carried lepers from various islands of the Hawaiian group to Molokai.” They quarantined him on Gallop’s Island in Boston Harbor, where he died two years later.

Father Damien shortly before he died

The Price of Conquest

The United States annexed Hawaii in 1898 after setting out on a course of military expansion throughout the globe. The only people in Massachusetts who contracted Hansen’s disease were immigrants and people who had traveled in places – like Hawaii, China and the Caribbean — where the disease had spread.

Over the next six years, Massachusetts doctors diagnosed a half dozen or so cases of Hansen’s disease. A gardener in Salem who’d spent time in Hawaii ended up dying in the poor house. A Swedish woman discovered on entry into the port of Boston was sent back home. A British West Indian was confine to Gallop’s Island – and escaped.

Then in April 1904, Dr. Louis Edmonds reported another case of Hansen’s disease in the town of Harwich.

Sympathy for the Leper

Edmonds diagnosed a 38-year-old stevedore named Frank Pina who had lived in New Bedford’s Cape Verdean community. He had an advanced case of the disease. Pina lived apart from his wife and eight children, and Harwich officials asked the state Board of Charity to do something with him. Dr. Edmonds quarantined him in Harwich as officials wrangled over his fate. The neighbors threatened to drive Pina from town.

The state Board of Charity argued the patients should go to the state infirmary in Tewksbury. At least there the nearness to friends and relatives would soften the rigors of their disease.

The infirmary trustees said no — adamantly.

Then the commonwealth decided to build a leprosy hospital. Massachusetts bought a farm for it in the Cape Cod town of Brewster. So many panicked Cape Codders flocked to the Statehouse to object that the railroad had to add a special train.

“I am full of sympathy for them [the lepers],” a Rhode Island judge told lawmakers. “My heart is warm for them, but I, for one, do not want to see them on Cape Cod.”

Finally, Massachusetts settled the matter by buying Penikese Island, 74 acres of rock and grass 12 miles off Cape Cod. Harvard University had used the island as a natural history summer camp. Adding some cottages made it a leprosy hospital — only the second leprosy hospital, after Louisiana, in the country.

The treatment resembled that for tuberculosis in the age before antibiotics would cure both diseases. Penikese’s doctors believed in bathing, light clothing, ointments and tonics, fresh air and a nourishing diet.

Newspaper story about New England’s Leper Island

Penikese Island Leper Hospital

Dr.Edmonds supervised the first five patients, including his own, Frank Pina. Of the rest, two were Cape Verdians — Jose Rogeriquez and Isabella Barros — and two Chinese – Yee Toy and Goon S. Dub. Later exiles to the island came from Italy, Portugal, China, Japan, Greece, Russia, Latvia and Barbados. Few spoke much English.

Isabella Barros was a pregnant 26-year-old Cape Verdean woman taken from her husband and three children in Wareham. She had dark olive skin, and “her eyes are large and darkly eloquent and her teeth beautifully even and white,” reported the San Francisco Call in a story headlined “New England’s Leper Island.” Recent pictures “show her with a melancholy, despondent expression,” the newspaper reported.

Isabella Barros gave birth to a healthy baby on Penikese Island. Twenty days later, officials sent the infant to the Boston Poor Department, along with her other children.

That sent her husband, Napoleon Barros, to an insane asylum. After his release, he no longer had any interest in her or their family.

In 1906, a rumor spread that Isabella Barros had been cured. Suddenly people feared the hospital would send her back to what was left of her home. But the disease had only gone into remission, and she died after 10 years of exile on the island.

Frank and Marian Parker

After two years, Dr. Louis Edmonds left the island, unable to stand the isolation. Dr. Frank Parker took his place, and his wife Marian came along and helped with the patients. He abandoned a lucrative 22-year practice, and she left her prominent social circle.

Both Parkers tended to the patients. The hospital averaged 14 patients over the years. Parker earned $2,000 a year, organized a farm and did carpentry and electrical work. The Parkers paid for food and medical supplies with their own money. In the 13 years they lived on the island, they only took three weeks’ vacation.

Penikese Island in 2005, sit of the Penikese Island Leper Hospital.

Staff turned over frequently. As Parker explained, “The task for those who must bathe the patients, bind up their wounds and care for their quarters is sufficiently distasteful to explain their reluctance to remain long.”

Plus, he said, the isolation got on the nerves of even healthy people. But for his patients, “some insight is readily gained into the broodings of the leper, ill as he is, racked often with rheumatic pain and burning with leprous fever, — a person without hope, committed against his will to this no-man’s land.”

Nighttime Funeral

The island had few visitors, but a Catholic priest came to say Mass once a month. In 1914, Dr. Parker pleaded with a group of Protestant ministers in New Bedford, asking them to lead services on the island. He told them:

Last summer, a West Indian leper died at Penikese. He was a Catholic and we were unable to get Father Bernard until night…Picture then this burial by lantern in the dead of night. We went to the western end of the island, where the burials are made. There are no gravestones there, because the lepers do not like to see these reminders of what they are coming to. It was the month of August, when flowers were many, and each one had his little bunch of flowers. You have never seen a more striking scene.

Ornery

Solitude and injustice made the patients ornery, Parker reported to the Board of Charity in 1915. “Weak though he be he will wage such war as he may,” Parker wrote.

The patients threw away food or they opened a faucet and let water run all night, knowing of its scarcity. Since the Parkers would fulfill any reasonable request, the patients asked them to furnish all sorts of delicacies they discarded, pets they neglected and gardens they forgot.

Louisiana Leper Hospital

The Carville, La., Leprosarium. Courtesy Public Health Image Library.

Meanwhile, the federal government made plans to build a leprosy hospital in Carville, La. World War I delayed those plans, but by 1921 the government was building the Louisiana facility.

Massachusetts Gov. Channing Cox then decided to close the Penikese Island Leper Hospital. He wanted to send the 13 patients to the unfinished facility in Louisiana, far from their friends and families. Parker publicly criticized him for closing the island.

On Thursday afternoon on March 10, 1921, a harbor tugboat arrived at a New Bedford coal wharf. The patients disembarked as a crowd of gawkers and newspaper reporters looked on. Then they boarded the hospital train.

Sorry, Very Much

Dr. Parker wept as he said goodbye to his patients on the wharf, and they, too, had tears in their eyes. The doctor shared a letter from a patient with a newspaper reporter.

“My dear Mr. Parker,

I am here now 15 months with you, and now I go away from her I am sorry, very much, because I can’t repay that help you did for me. I thank you very much for your benefit you do to me and my sister. We never forget your noble feeling for us unhappy people.

I wish the God to help you and all your people as you desire, and I wish to meet you again outside some day. I say again I thank you very much. Excuse me because I can’t write very well to write you a few line words pleasant to you.

Farewell, Dr. Parker. Good-bye.

Gratefully yours,
John Marketakis”

Without a Rudder or a Job

Nurses Hall

Frank Parker said he felt like a ship without a rudder now that the patients left the island. He turned down a job with the Louisiana hospital, not wanting to move south or work in a large institution. But he couldn’t restart his practice because people feared he’d contracted Hansen’s disease after 14 years on the island. Hospitals wouldn’t employ him for the same reason.

Governor Cox stripped him of his pension in retaliation for his criticism. So Frank and Marian Parker moved to Montana to live with their son. Frank Parker died five years later, a victim of another, more contagious disease: whooping cough.

The state couldn’t find a buyer for the island, so it burned and then dynamited the hospital.

Today, a combination of antibiotics will cure Hansen’s disease. Patients can go to outpatient clinics for treatment.

In 1996, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts honored Frank and Marian Parker with a plaque in Nurses Hall at the Massachusetts Statehouse.

Images: Nurses Hall By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1410477; Armadillo By http://www.birdphotos.com – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4325104.

With thanks to Ron Amundsen, A Wholesome Horror: The Stigmas of Leprosy in 19th Century Hawaii, in Disability Studies Quarterly, and to Paul Cyr, author of The Exiles of Pekinese Island for the New Bedford Historical Society. This story was updated in 2022.

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