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Richard Potter, Celebrity Black Magician of the 19th Century

Richard Potter, the son of a former slave, won fame and fortune with a bag of magic tricks and a voice that spoke from ladies’ purses and gentlemen’s pockets.

Born during the last year of the American Revolution, he trained as a magician and ventriloquist. He traveled the world entertaining enthusiastic audiences and settled on an estate in New Hampshire. The traces of Richard Potter’s life can still be found in an Andover, N.H., train station, in the pages of the novel Peyton Place and in the magical arts.

John Hodgson, who wrote a biography of Potter, called him the first black celebrity, the first American ventriloquist and the most famous performer in the United States.

Successful, wealthy, well-liked—all those words describe Richard Potter. So does another: tragedy.

Richard Potter

He was born in Hopkinton, Mass., in 1783 to a black mother and a white father. His mother, Dinah, worked as a servant in the estate of Sir Charles Frankland, a descendant of Oliver Cromwell and collector of the Port of Boston. Frankland had fallen in love with Agnes Surriage, a beautiful tavern wench in Marblehead, Mass. He paid for her education and kept her as his mistress. That did not sit well with Boston society, and so Frankland bought land in the distant town of Hopkinton. There he built a showplace mansion.

By the time of Richard’s birth, Sir Charles had died and the estate started to decay. Some people thought Richard’s father was Sir Charles’s son. But it was George Stimson, a randy revolutionary war veteran. Stimson, according to church records, had “made attempts on the chastity of several women.”

One of those women was Dinah. Slavers had captured her on the Guinea coast and sold her on a Boston pier. But in 1769, a slave in Cambridge, Mass., brought suit against his master. He won his freedom and payment for his work. Soon after, Frankland’s estate freed Dinah and her children and paid them for their work.

Youth

Richard Potter spent the first 10 years of his life between the Hopkinton estate and Frankland’s townhouse in Boston. He learned to read at the Hopkinton District School. At the age of 10 he went into service for two years with Isaac Surriage, Agnes’ brother. Then he engaged himself to a Boston merchant. At around age 16, he took a trip to Europe with the merchant’s son-in-law. There Richard, always nimble and quick, picked up skills as a ropedancer and tightrope walker.

A ropedancer

From there the outlines of his life get muddy. He went to work at the New Hampshire Hotel in Portsmouth. An Italian tightrope walker named Signior Manfredi brought his show to that city, and Richard Potter may have joined him then as a minor performer in the troupe.

Somehow, probably in Boston, he met a Scottish magician and ventriloquist named John Rannie. By 1804, he had a job as Rannie’s stage assistant.

19th-century Portsmouth

John Rannie

Rannie swallowed razors, turned a bottle of water into Madeira wine, smashed watches then restored them. He made voices talk from under furniture and gentlemen’s pockets. In one gruesome trick, he cut off a chicken’s head and reattached it. It then ran off unharmed. One of Richard’s jobs was to find two chickens with identical markings.

John Rannie had spent a month in an Inverness jail for his role in a food riot (called “meal mobbing”). Authorities then banished him from Scotland, and so he went on an extended tour of the United States with Richard Potter at his side. They performed from Maine to the West Indies to New Orleans.

The Exchange Coffee House

Rannie retired in Boston, then returned to Europe in 1811. Richard Potter took to the stage on his own with many of Rannie’s tricks, including ventriloquism. He often played Boston at such venues as the Columbian Museum, the Exchange Coffee House, Concert Hall and Julien Hall.

Richard Potter’s Act

“He intends to give an evening’s brush to sweep away dull cares,” proclaimed his handbills. He called himself “Mr. Potter, the Ventriloquist and Comedian, from Saddler’s Wells (London).” Many Bostonians considered the theatre disreputable, but Sadler’s Wells was a respectable house patronized by fashionable Londoners. Richard’s nod to the English theater told people he put on a sophisticated, European-style show.

Sadler’s Wells

In 1808, he married Sally Harris, described as “beautiful and graceful.” They lived on Beacon Hill, a tight African-American community with a meeting house, a school and Underground Railroad stations. In 1811 Potter joined Boston’s African Lodge No. 459, the first black Masonic lodge in America. Another well-known African-American belonged to it: David Walker, who advocated the violent overthrow of slavery in his incendiary pamphlet, An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.

But there was nothing incendiary about Richard Potter. One of the few black performers of his day, he presented himself as well-mannered, modest, charming. He dressed fastidiously in a neat frock coat, cravat and waistcoat with lapels, along with a flowing blue robe adorned with Masonic symbols.

“While other magicians catered to the enlightened and up-to-date, Potter presented a family entertainment,” wrote Paul A. Johnson. He played to children, who he admitted for half price. Those children included Oliver Wendell Holmes and George Hill, who became a comedic actor known as Yankee Hill. Both fondly recalled Potter’s shows later in life.

George Hill

The Magic

Richard Potter promised “100 curious but mysterious experiments” in the broadsheet advertising his show.

He did card tricks, made coins pass through wine glasses, broke eggs into a hat and then turned them into pancakes. One of his most popular acts was the enchanted egg, which magically traveled from one hat to another and then to his shoulder.

Map mmarked with the Columbian Museum, one of Potter’s Boston venues.

He threw his voice into a teapot, mimicked birds and animals, made a child speak from a ladies purse. So strange and startling were his effects they sometimes caused people to faint.

He also acted out scenes from plays like the Wag of Windsor with his wife. They sang comic songs like “Giles Scroggins’ Ghost” and “Barney Leave the Girls Alone.” Sally sang “The Nosegay Girl.”

Playing with Fire

For seven years he played mostly before audiences in New England and the Hudson Valley. He earned as much as $250 a day, worth about $3,000 in today’s money.

By 1819, his act evolved to include knife throwing and playing with fire. He appeared in Providence as the “Anti-Combustible Man Salamander,” bending a red-hot iron bar with his bare feet and drawing it over his tongue. He walked on hot coals in his bare feet, plunged his hand into molten lead and climbed into an oven where meat was roasting—always emerging unscathed.

His reputation grew with his fame, and it was said he could crawl through a solid log. Some believed he and Sally had performed the Hindu Rope Trick—throwing a rope up into the open air, then climbing it and disappearing.

Advertisement for a reproduction of the trick by stage magician Howard Thurston.

In 1820, he embarked on a four-year grand tour that took his show to the South, the West, Europe and the Caribbean.

Discrimination

Surely he knew of the dangers of travel for a black man. Sometimes he wore a turban when performing, suggesting he came from the West Indies or even India.

Once, in Mobile, Ala., Potter got kicked out of a hotel because of his race. He moved to another hotel, played for 12 nights and took in $4,800 in silver, which he carried in a nail cask. Upon his departure he learned highway robbers planned to waylay him. So Richard Potter let it be known he was going one way the next day, then left that night in the opposite direction.

Word of a planned slave uprising preceded his arrival on the eastern seaboard. Dozens of plotters, including Denmark Vesey, were arrested and executed. Richard Potter decided to bypass Savannah, Ga., and Charleston, S.C., lucrative venues but dangerous for a free black man.

He faced discrimination in the North as well.

In a New Haven hotel, the proprietor wouldn’t let him into the dining room because of his skin color. But when the host started to carve the roast pig for dinner, Potter threw his voice so the pig seemed to squeal.

New Hampshire

In 1814, he bought 175 acres in Andover, N.H., a small town on Ragged Mountain. He may have chosen Andover because of his friendship with Benjamin Thompson, a tavern owner who traveled with him as his assistant. The town of 1,800 had only 17 black residents in 1830, but he won the respect and trust of his neighbors. One described him as “public spirited, honorable in business, prompt to pay, a kind neighbor and trusted friend.”

Ragged Mountain

Richard Potter built a large, ornate house on his property and hired laborers to farm it. He only lived there intermittently, until about 1823. The Potters entertained frequently. One night, a guest complained about the alcohol served at dinner. So he broke the bottle and presto! He produced a baby chick—then made it speak.

The house no longer stands, but the neighborhood is still known as Potter Place. Richard and Sally Potter are buried on his former property, and the Andover Historical Society planted a garden where his house once stood.

Family Trouble

At some point, Sally stopped performing with her husband. She begin to drink and spend extravagantly. Richard Potter returned from the road in 1825 to encounter debts and lawsuits caused by his wife. He almost lost his house. The sheriff did seize his livestock, furniture and hay and oats. Potter published a notice saying that only he could buy anything on his account.

Tragedy, however, had already followed Richard Potter. He and Sally had two sons and a daughter. Their son Henry died at age seven in a wagon accident.

Daughter Jeanette was described by a local historian as “a half-idiot, given to uncontrollable lewdness.” She died in 1831 at age 16.

Their son Richard, Jr., took after his mother, turning to drink and squandering money.

Richard, Sr., died on Sept. 20, 1835 at 52, leaving an estate worth $6,000. Richard, Jr., took over the Andover farm and cared for his mother. Sally died a year later, on Oct. 24, 1836. Richard, Jr., ran up debts and auctioned off the farm in 1837. He had his father’s magic kit and knew his act, so he went on the road as “Little Potter.” He failed and returned to Andover only to face lawsuits for unpaid bills. Then he mortgaged the magic kit. When it was seized for nonpayment, Richard, Jr., stole it back and disappeared from the historic record.

Potter Place railroad station

Remembering Richard Potter

He may have been forgotten elsewhere, but New Hampshire remembers Richard Potter. The village in Andover where he had his estate is still known as Potter Place, and a train station bears the name.

In 1965, the Manchester chapter of the International Brotherhood of Magicians officially name themselves the “Black Richard Ring.”

New Hampshire writer Grace Metalious modeled a character after Richard Potter in her novel Peyton Place: Samuel Peyton was a wealthy black man who built a castle on a hill in a small New Hampshire town.

For years, a magician named Robert Olson has re-enacted Richard Potter’s magic show. See it here.

Much of Richard Potter’s early life was an enigma. In 2018, John Hodgson cleared up a lot of the mystery in his 2018 book, Richard Potter: America’s First Black Celebrity. You can help independent bookstores and the New England Historical Society by buying it here.

With thanks also to Playing with Race in the Early Republic: Mr. Potter, the Ventriloquist by Paul E. Johnson, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 2016), pp. 257-285. Image of Ragged Mountain By Tom Morgan – Self-photographed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5121853. This story was updated in 2022.

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Helen and Sophia Thoreau, Henry David’s Amazing Sisters

Henry Thoreau wouldn’t have been Henry Thoreau without his sisters, Helen and Sophia Thoreau. Or his brother, for that matter. But John Thoreau got plenty of ink in the book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Helen and Sophia, not so much.

Helen and Sophia played huge roles in shaping the writer, naturalist and author who influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Helen believed in him when others thought him a kook. He and Sophia grew so close toward the end of his life that a friend called them ‘like twins.’

Sophia Thoreau’s favorite image of her brother Henry

None of the Thoreau children married, and most of them, for most of their lives, belonged to the family household in Concord, Mass., along with aunt, uncles and servants. By all accounts, they had a happy home, marred only by early death.

During Henry’s two years, two months and two days at Walden Pond, Helen and Sophia came to visit him. And he often came home to visit them.

“Without such a stable and contented home life, Thoreau could not possibly have pursued his career in the way that he did,” wrote his biographer Laura Dassow Walls.

The Yellow House

The entire Thoreau family loved nature, and Sophia Thoreau in particular shared Henry’s passion for botany. As children they hiked together around Concord, collecting rocks, lichens and plants. Henry liked to collect arrowheads.

Henry left Walden in the fall of 1847 to babysit Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children while Emerson lectured in Europe. When Emerson returned in the summer, Thoreau went back to live with his family and help with the family business – making pencils.

The Yellow House today. Image courtesy Google Maps.

In 1850, the family had a stroke of good fortune with the development of a new and lucrative use for the plumbago used to make pencils: electrotyping. The Thoreaus began selling their ground plumbago to commercial customers. That allowed them to move to the Yellow House in one of Concord’s best neighborhoods. Henry had the attic, which stretched the length of the house, and there he kept his bed, his writing desk, driftwood book shelves, manuscripts and specimens. (The house, by the way, went on the market in 2019 for $2.6 million.)

A family friend called the Thoreau house a “haven,” a place of “undisturbed orderliness,” with a sunny sitting room filled with Sophia’s plants.

“I recall the reading aloud of fresh new books, the evening games of chess and backgammon; the bright, often distinguished people who came to the house; the tea-parties and evening visits; the lyceum lectures on cold winter nights, the walks by field and river.”

Underground Railroad

The house served as a haven of another kind: a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Helen and Sophia Thoreau, like nearly all the women in Thoreau’s life, held strong anti-slavery views considered radical at the time. His mother, aunts and sisters belonged to the Concord Ladies’ Antislavery Society, one of the first in the country.

The family proudly displayed on its mantelpiece a Staffordshire figurine of Uncle Tom and Eva, the main characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Legend has it that a fugitive from slavery gave it to them as a thank you for their help.

Staffordshire figurine of Eva and Uncle Tom.

When fugitives arrived at the Thoreau household, Henry often took them to the railroad station, bought them tickets and gave them money. Sometimes he got on the train with them, either in Concord or in Fitchburg.

During his stay at Walden, Thoreau sheltered runaway slaves during the day in his cabin and escorted them to his family home at night.

Though the Underground Railroad conductors and safe houses operated in the strictest secrecy, Henry Thoreau occasionally slipped. On Oct. 1, 1851, he wrote, “Just put a fugitive slave who has taken the name of Henry Williams into the cars for Canada.” Williams may have given them the Staffordshire.

Helen Thoreau

People suspected that Helen, of all the Thoreaus, “had more sympathy in his [Henry’s] peculiar way than perhaps any other.”

Helen Thoreau

As Henry neared graduation from Harvard, he asked his mother what he should do after college. His mother, who had a biting wit, said, “You may buckle on your knapsack, dear, and seek your fortune in the world.”

Helen, the eldest, knew the remark stung. She put her arms around him and said, “No, Henry, you shall not go; you shall stay at home and live with us.”

All four Thoreau children – including Henry – worked as schoolteachers during their lives. Helen, born in 1812, did it first. Walls described her as ‘a bookish young woman – elegant, graceful, earnest, and quiet, the family’s moral lodestar… she took the outrages of social injustice most deeply to heart, dedicating herself to ending slavery in America.’

She befriended Frederick Douglass and exchanged letters with him. William Lloyd Garrison published her obituary in his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.

Helen had as independent a mind as her little brother. In 1842, the local First Parish and Trinitarian churches banned women from speaking against slavery. Helen, furious that the churches opened their doors to slaveholders but not to people who defended slaves, stopped going to services.

According to one story, it was Helen who brought Henry to the attention of their famous Concord neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Helen showed Henry’s journal to Emerson’s sister-in-law, who then showed it to Emerson.

Helen died of the Thoreau family illness, tuberculosis, in 1849 at the age of 37.

Sophia Thoreau

For the last 13 years of his life, Sophia Thoreau was Henry’s only remaining sibling and probably his closest friend and confidante. When he saw something interesting or unusual, he told Sophia.

They were very much alike: musical, witty and intensely interested in botany. A family friend observed they both had “a certain gravity of thought and utterance.” Sophia also had an artistic temperament and created the famous frontispiece of Walden.

Henry was picky about who he spent time with. “I know of but one or two persons with whom I can afford to walk,” he said. “The wood-path and the boat are my studio, where I maintain a sacred solitude and cannot admit promiscuous company.” Sophia made the cut.

For her part, Sophia adored her older brother. “Henry’s whole life impresses me as a grand miracle,” she said after his death. “I always thought him the most upright man I ever knew and now it is a pleasure to praise him.”

The first night he spent away from home in his Walden cabin, Sophia worried so much she couldn’t sleep. The next day she brought him lunch, which he didn’t appreciate.

When they lived in the Yellow House, Sophia would play old Scottish melodies on the piano. Henry would come down from his attic and sing, and sometimes pick up his flute and play.

Protector of Henry’s Legacy

When Henry took to his bed with the tuberculosis that killed him at 44, Sophia not only cared for him but helped him edit his manuscripts. She also negotiated with publishers and made sure the Atlantic magazine printed several essays after his death.

She had to deal with about 60 volumes of his manuscripts and several thousand pages of notes. Thoreau’s early biographers didn’t believe Sophia was up to the task, and credited Emerson and Ellery Channing with helping her. Kathy Fedorko set the record straight.

Sophia Thoreau

“Sophia kept those manuscripts in meticulous order, selected an editor for her brother’s journal, and, on her own, edited four posthumous volumes of henry’s essays,” she wrote.

She also ran the family business after Henry died, rare for a woman in those days. A family friend remembers she had “a fine, gentle, sweet nature.” However, said the friend, “she possessed great firmness of character and was always on the side of justice.”

Every so often, Sophia visited the abandoned cottage near Walden Pond where her brother had lived. Once, she ate her dinner there, alone but for the mice.

Sophia Thoreau died in 1876 at the age of 56, the last of the Thoreau siblings.

With thanks to Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books by Annie Russell Marble and Little Known Sisters of Well-Known Men by Sarah Gertrude Pomeroy. Also, ”Henry’s brilliant sister”: The Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her Brother’s Posthumous Publications by Kathy Fedorko for The New England Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 2016). Finally, Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls. This story was updated in 2022.

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Discover the Hidden History All Around You

You wouldn’t want to see one of New England’s historic buildings, landscapes or icons without knowing about its hidden past, would you?

New England has plenty of landmarks with obvious history, from taverns and meetinghouses to mill yards and monuments. But New England is even more drenched in history than you might imagine.

That road you take to work might have once been trod by French soldiers during the Revolutionary War. A child might have gone to the gallows by that statue you just passed. A world-famous architect, now forgotten, might have designed that pretty church you saw.

The New England Historical Society has regularly posted a feature listing six such noteworthy items, hidden or otherwise. Each New England state gets one. The Six Oldest Houses. Six Mysterious Stone Structures. Six Landmark Signs. Six Irish Landmarks. You get the picture.

New England’s Hidden Past

Now, New England Historical Society authors Dan and Leslie Landrigan have compiled 60 lists of six landmarks into a book called, New England’s Hidden Past: 360 Overlooked, Underappreciated, and Misunderstood Landmarks. If you travel anywhere in New England, this would be a handy book to have around. Looking for a scenic drive for some leaf-peeping in fall? You could take an old Indian trail. Fascinated by the Underground Railroad? Here are six stops.

Trying to find one of each hidden landmark in each New England state can be tricky, especially when Vermont and Rhode Island are so small. But a list of revolutionary forts takes you to the top of Mount Independence in Orwell, Vt., for one of the largest, least disturbed revolutionary sites in America. A list of places where gallows once stood takes you to the spot on a Rhode Island sidewalk where 26 pirates met their maker – all in one day.

New England’s Hidden Past takes readers to the grave sites of revolutionary heroines, Loyalist houses, stagecoach stops, historic department stores, ghost towns and Little Italys. Anyone who loves New England history will love this book.

Order it here and you’ll help local bookstores and the New England Historical Society.

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Frederick Douglass’ Fifth of July Speech Asks ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? is the popular name of a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass on the Fifth of July 1852 in Rochester, N.Y.

The most famous speech of the orator’s career, it marked a departure from his mentor, Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In it, Douglass expressed his desire to participate in the political life of the nation, while the more radical Garrison rejected it outright.

Frederick Douglass in 1848.

Garrison thought the U.S. Constitution supported slavery, that the country was built on slavery and that free states should secede from the Union.

Douglass’ Fifth of July speech argued people could interpret the Constitution as opposed to slavery. And it expressed his hope and desire to share in the freedom and justice sought by the Founding Fathers.

In other words, Garrison wanted out of the government created by the Constitution, while Douglass wanted in.

The Fifth of July speech, at 10,000 words, probably took Douglass over an hour to deliver. His sponsors, the ladies of the “Rochester Anti Slavery Sewing Society,” had 100 copies printed of his ‘most able and eloquent oration’ in pamphlet form.

Fifth of July Speech

Douglass starts the Fifth of July speech by telling the white audience that the Fourth of July is the birthday of their independence and freedom. And he tells them their celebration, their ‘jubilee shouts,’ make the chains of the enslaved ‘more heavy and intolerable.’

He acknowledged the achievements of the country’s founders, and his audience’s right to celebrate them:

They succeeded; and today you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary.

But then he asks the rhetorical questions, What am I doing here? Should I celebrate this day?

…why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?

No, he answers just as rhetorically:

The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

“What to the slave…”

The 46^th paragraph of the speech was perhaps Douglass’ most famous passage.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which lie is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity…

Engraving from the Anti-Slavery Almanac

He grows more and more furious, more and more vituperative:

…your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence.

Shout of liberty and equality, he stormed, are “hollow mockery.”

…your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

The Constitution

He then excoriates religions for their silence on the subject of slavery. But, unlike, Garrison, he defends the U.S. Constitution as a document that rejects slavery.

“Now, take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro . slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

Douglass ends the Fifth of July speech on a note of hope. He predicts the Civil War – and the end of slavery.

The Road to the Fifth of July Speech

Born into slavery in Maryland, Douglass rode the Underground Railroad to freedom in 1838 at the age of 20. He settled in New Bedford, Mass., a good choice of residence. The whaling city’s maritime industries were open to African-Americans, and many who escaped from slavery put down roots there. New Bedford by 1853 would have the highest population of African-Americans in the Northeast.

Douglass had taught himself to read while enslaved, and eventually he began to speak out against slavery at abolitionist meetings in New England. He gave his first speech on Nantucket, describing the cruelties of slavery.

William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrison, leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, heard him speak. He decided to put him on the broader abolitionist circuit. Garrison, 13 years older than Douglass, mentored him as he rose to stardom as an abolitionist lecturer.

Douglass moved to Lynn, Mass., in 1841, and then to Rochester, N.Y., in 1852.

Burning the Constitution

Two years later, Garrison publicly burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution. On a hot July 4, 1854, at the Harmony Grove picnic area in Framingham, Mass., he began with a speech. Much as Douglas had, he questioned Fourth of July celebrations.

“To-day, we are called to celebrate the seventy-eighth anniversary of American Independence. In what spirit?” he asked. “With what purpose? to what end?”

He then burned a copy of the hated Fugitive Slave Act as the abolitionist crowd cried “Amen.”

Anti-slavery poster. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Then he burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution. He called it “the source and parent of all the other atrocities–‘a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell’.'” As it burned, he cried out: “So perish all compromises with tyranny!”

Douglass and Garrison broke over their different views of the Constitution. Douglass later explained:

When I escaped from slavery, and was introduced to the Garrisonians, I adopted very many of their opinions, and defended them just as long as I deemed them true. I was young, had read but little, and naturally took some things on trust. Subsequent experience and reading have led me to examine for myself. This has brought me to other conclusions.

Eventually the two men reconciled after the abolition of slavery.

Such actors as Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones and Danny Glover have delivered the Fifth of July speech. Watch James Earl Jones read excerpts here. Or watch Douglass’ descendants read excerpts here.

Read the whole speech here.

This story was updated in 2022.

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David Ruggles, the Go-To Conductor on the Underground Railroad

David Ruggles helped 600 enslaved people to freedom during the 1830s despite attempts to kill him, kidnap him and burn down his business. A free black man born in Connecticut, he ultimately paid for his courage. He suffered ill-health, character assassination and a shortened life.

David Ruggles,

David Ruggles wrote fiery articles on the evils of slavery, antagonizing moderate abolitionists as well as slaveholders and advocates. He opened the first bookstore and published the first periodical by a black American. He printed, published, worked as an agent and sold copies of abolitionist newspapers.

Though he mentored such activists as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, David Ruggles has received far less attention, perhaps because of his early death.

He defended his radical views by writing that no one could be neutral on the moral issue of slavery.

David Ruggles

Born to free African-American parents in Lyme, Conn., in 1810, David Ruggles eventually had seven younger brothers and sisters

His family moved to the elite Bean Hill section of Norwich when David was very young. David Ruggles, Sr., his father, worked as a woodcutter and a blacksmith, and his mother a celebrated cook who made fancy cakes. His devout Methodist parents had him educated at the Sabbath School for the Poor in Norwich, a religious charity school.

He was so bright as a young boy that white Bean Hill residents paid for a tutor from Yale to teach him Latin.

At 16 he moved to New York, where he worked as a mariner, a common occupation for black men. Then he opened a grocery store in an African-American enclave in Lower Manhattan. At first he sold liquor, but then he realized the damage it did to the black community. So he stopped selling it.

In New York City, he began to connect with abolitionists of all kinds — black, white, male, female, rich and poor.

And so David Ruggles became active in the temperance and abolitionist movements.

Radical Abolitionist

David Ruggles believed the printed word was an essential tool against slavery. His grocery store at 1 Cortlandt St. started to sell books, pamphlets and periodicals, until a white mob destroyed it.

He began writing for radical abolitionist newspapers and for his own pamphlets against slavery. He enraged moderate abolitionists by attacking the American Colonization Society, which aimed to relocate African-Americans to Africa.

Then in 1835 he began his most dangerous work against slavery. He and several other young black men formed the New York Committee of Vigilance, an interracial group. They put their lives on the line to free kidnapped blacks. They also attacked slavers and helped escaped slaves traveling on the Underground Railroad.

Slave catchers patrolled the streets of Manhattan then, trying to kidnap fugitive slaves or free blacks and then to send them into bondage. David Ruggles and the other members of the Committee of Vigilance confronted the slavers on the streets.

Narrow Escape

In 1836, David Ruggles heard that a Portuguese sea captain held five kidnapped Africans in his ship, planning to sell them in the South. At that time slave trading was illegal but practiced clandestinely. Ruggles obtained a writ of habeas corpus and demanded the authorities take the captives to a local jail until they had a hearing on their status.

He also got the captain arrested on charges of slave trading. Then one night the captain, free on bail, and a slave catcher knocked on David Ruggles’ door and demanded to speak to him. When he refused they tried to break down his door. David Ruggles escaped, returned with a watchman and revealed the two planned to grab him and sell him into slavery.

At that time in New York, any slave brought to the state was free after nine months. Ruggles would go to private homes to tell people they were free.

Frederick Douglass

In 1838, Frederick Douglass escaped bondage in the South, arriving in New York friendless and broke.

“I had been in New York but a few days, when Mr. Ruggles sought me out, and very kindly took me to his boarding-house at the corner of Church and Lespenard Streets,” wrote Douglass. He noted David Ruggles was ‘watched and hemmed in on almost every side,’ but ‘he seemed to be more than a match for his enemies.’

Frederick Douglass

David Ruggles put up Frederick Douglass for a few days and helped him bring his fiancée to New York so they could marry. They wed in his parlor.

The Darg Affair

When Douglass showed up in New York, David Ruggles was enmeshed in a furious controversy involving a slave owner along with two other radical abolitionists, Barney Corse and Isaac T. Hopper. Virginia slaveholder John P. Darg had arrived in New York City with his slave, Thomas Hughes. Hughes came to Hopper’s house asking for help, but Hopper said no. The next day, the New York Sun reported that Hughes stole about $7,000 from Darg.

Corse and Ruggles urged Hughes to return the money, but insisted he should remain free. But Hughes had given or gambled away some of the cash. He returned what he had left to Darg, who then had Corse and Ruggles arrested for grand larceny. Though Ruggles only spent two days in jail, the press trashed him. A cartoon appeared, called ‘The Disappointed Abolitionists,’ suggesting the three had only wanted the reward money.

Moderate abolitionists, fed up with Ruggles’ radicalism, drove him out of the movement. He had written a story in an abolitionist newspaper that a black innkeeper was helping slavers. The infuriated innkeeper sued the newspaper for libel and won a judgment of $600.

The newspaper owner, nearly bankrupted by the fine, began a print campaign against Ruggles. He demanded an accounting of the Committee of Vigilance’s books. When an audit showed $400 missing, David Ruggles had to resign his position with the committee.

Abolitionist Utopia

At just 28 years old, David Ruggles’ crusade against slavery took a heavy toll on his health. He had nearly gone blind and suffered severe bowel problems. A prominent white abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child, invited him to join an abolitionist utopia in Florence, Mass.

The Northampton Association of Education and Industry centered on a community-owned and operated silk mill. Its members sought to create a society in which ‘the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, color or condition, sect or religion.’

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth belonged, and Frederick Douglass often visited.

David Ruggles moved to the Florence utopia in 1842. Within 18 months he recovered some of his health through the then-popular water cure, or hydrotherapy. He began studying hydrotherapy, then practiced it on wealthy members of the utopia as well as on William Lloyd Garrison.

The utopia disbanded by 1846, but David Ruggles stayed in Florence running his own hydrotherapy hospital. His health, however, declined rapidly in late 1849. He died on Dec. 18, 1849, not yet 40 years old.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Apple Orchards You Can Visit

Trying to pick six historic apple orchards in New England may be a fool’s errand. As Maine apple expert John Bunker explains, the notion of a commercial orchard is relatively modern.

“At a certain point, everyone had an orchard,” Bunker told the New England Historical Society. “Everyone lived on a farm, and every farm had an orchard.”

In the 1920s, a New Hampshire farmer came up with the idea of bringing tourists from Boston to pick their own apples in the fresh air and sunshine. The idea took hold. Today, 200-year-old farms are weathering developers (if not the weather) by diversifying with farm-to-table meals, cider, kids’ play areas, ready-to-eat food, hayrides, sleigh rides and even seasoned firewood.

Agritourism today is just as much a feature of the New England landscape as history tourism. Here, then, are six historic apple orchards, one in each New England state.

Lyman Orchards, Middlefield

Lyman Orchards can trace its roots back more than 275 years to John and Hope Lyman, who bought 37 acres of land in 1741 to establish their farm. Today the huge farm covers more than 1,000 acres, with a big history to match.

In 1830 the farm was headed by William Lyman, who became a leader in the abolitionist movement and a supporter of the Underground Railroad. The original 1785 Lyman homestead still stands on the property (though it’s been moved – pulled to its present location by oxen). The family tree sprouted a host of entrepreneurs who helped incorporate the town and build railroads, washing machines and gun sights.

The farm itself took on many flavors over the years, producing peaches, lambs, cattle and even supporting a golf course. Today it’s one of the most popular family attractions in Connecticut.

Lyman Orchards is located at 3 Lyman Rd., Middlefield, Conn.

Jonathan Fisher House, Blue Hill

Jonathan Fisher House

Parson Jonathan Fisher was the first Congregationalist minister in Blue Hill, Maine, serving from 1794 to 1837. He was also a jack of all trades, a scientist who farmed, surveyed, wrote, bound his own books, made buttons and hats, built furniture, painted sleighs, reported for the local newspaper and helped found Bangor Theological Seminary.

Today his homestead is a house museum on the National Register of Historic Places. Around 2010, Leslie Cummins and Tim Seabrook of 5 Star Nursery in nearby Brooklin replanted his orchard around a 200-year-old pear tree still standing. They planted three trees he wrote about in his journals: Ribston Pippin, Golden Russet, and Roxbury Russet. The heritage orchard includes a group of apple trees that existed in New England before 1800, including the Rhode Island Greening.

The Jonathan Fisher House is at 44 Mines Rd., Blue Hill, Maine.

Lookout Farm, Natick

John Eliot

In 1650, Natick, Mass., was founded by Puritan missionary John Eliot and a small group of settlers who paddled down the Charles River in canoes. The settlers established a farm on the banks of the river in 1651. They planted beans, turnips, strawberries, grapes – and of course grew apples. In 1761, Capt. David Morse bought the farm, and he and his family lived and worked there for nearly 75 years. It got the name Lookout Farm in 1894, when Charles Whittemore and his brothers took over.

After a series of owners worked the farm, Joan and Steve Belkin bought it in 2005.

Today the farm comprises 180 acres with 60,000 fruit trees, a pick-your-own fruit business and a hard cider taproom. The Belkins also sell holiday pies and seasoned firewood.

They grow 11 varieties of apples, Asian pears, pumpkins, peaches, plums, strawberries and nectarines.

Lookout Farm is at 89 South Pleasant Street, South Natick, Mass.

Lookout Farm

Applecrest Farms, Hampton Falls

In the late 19th century, the railroad came to New Hampshire’s seacoast. It let farmers ship milk, apples, potatoes and lumber to Boston. A Hampton Falls farmer had another idea. He brought tourists once a week from Boston via an ‘Apple Train’ – one that stopped near his farm – so they could pick their own apples.

It was a novel idea back in the 1920s, but it worked. Four generations of the Wagner family have farmed the land, and today, Applecrest claims to be the oldest continually operated apple orchard in America. At the very least, it’s probably one of the oldest agritourist destinations.

Today, as many as 15,000 people visit Applecrest Farms on an autumn Sunday. There’s a 200-year-old barn on the 225-acre farm and buildings that date to the 18^th century. The farm offers pick-your-own apples, hayrides in season, apple cider and farm-to-table dining at its Farm Bistro. Their Idared apple dates to 1942, developed in Idaho as a cross between the Jonathan and Wagener.

Applecrest Farms is at 133 Exeter Rd. (Rte. 88), Hampton Falls, N.H.

Jaswell’s Farm, Smithfield

Historic Smithfield, R.I., once had so many orchards it was known as ‘Apple Valley.’ Apple growing reached its peak in Smithfield during the 1930s, but the Great Hurricane of 1938 wiped out many trees. Real estate developers wiped out many of the orchards that the hurricane missed.

Jaswell’s Farm in Smithfield dates back to 1899, started by Nicholas Jaswell after he emigrated from Italy. The orchard says in the 1930s Nicholas’ son Joe took over the farm and primarily sold apples at the farmer’s market in Providence. In 1967 Joe’s son Richard took over and began developing the retail facilities at the farm. The store sold directly to consumers and began offering cider and other products. Since 1999 the farm has been placed in the hands of a fourth generation, and the 100-year-old-plus company is still going strong today.

Jaswell’s Farm is at 50 Swan Road, Smithfield, R.I.

Southern Vermont Orchards, Woodford

Northern Spy apples

Edward Hamlin Everett established Southern Vermont Orchards in 1910. He made millions in the glass business. He built a baronial mansion in his hometown of Bennington, and planted 75,000 apple trees, 3,000 plum trees and 2,000 quince trees. The orchards covered 10 miles. He planted 65 varieties of apples, cherries, quince, pears and plums. It was said to be the largest privately owned orchard in the world.

Everett died in 1929. He left most of his estate to his second wife and shortchanged his three daughters by his first wife, or so they thought. The daughters challenged the will after he died, and during the trial one of his daughters stayed at the family mansion. (He also had a house in Washington that is now the Turkish Ambassador’s residence.)

Hamlin Mansion

One night she heard weeping coming from her father’s study. She went to the room and found her mother lying on the floor, clearly a murder victim.

Today, Southern Vermont Orchards operates over 300 acres of orchard remaining from Everett’s original spread. Among the varieties they grow are Northern Spy, which originated in upstate New York in 1800; the 17^th-century Gravenstein; and the Paula Red, discovered in Michigan in 1960. The orchard’s Apple Barn offers beer, wine and cider tastings. They’re at 604 US Rt 7S, Bennington, Vt.

Read more surprising apple history along with historic apple recipes in the New England Historical Society’s e-book, 29 Historic New England Apple Recipes. Available now for only $2.99 from Amazon.

Photos: Jonathan Fisher House, By Choess – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33634734; Northern Spy apple by Royal C. Steadman and Spray Russet apple by James Marion Shull, courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705. This story about historic apple orchards was updated in 2022.

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