Recovering Home

by SCOT MCFARLANE Research Scholar, Recovering New England’s Voices

Anarrative starts up in my mind whenever I drive onto the bridge across the Presumpscot River in Maine, a waterway that could be easily missed when traveling at seventy miles per hour. Researching Indigenous history related to Historic New England’s Marrett House in Standish, I learned about Chief Polin from the writings of the scholar Lisa Brooks. Polin, the Wabanaki sagamore on the Presumpscot, protested when the river became so dammed and logged that few salmon could travel upriver. In 1739, Polin walked from Maine to Boston to petition the Massachusetts governor regarding the depravations the colonists wrought upon the land and water. After no improvements were made, Polin went to war to protect his people’s ability to sustain themselves from the river. The Presumpscot was, Polin had said, “the river which I belong to.”

Today, the Friends of the Presumpscot River have installed a marker to commemorate Polin and share the complete silence, performing lockstep movements from 4:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week while wardens armed with rifles and bayonets kept watch. The buildings cannot tell us the story of legislative reforms New Hampshire passed in 1812 that transformed the state prison into a completely self-supporting, revenue-generating business meant to maximize profits extracted from incarcerated humans. Nor can they tell us about people like Robert Burroughs, who in 1832 began a seven-year sentence at the prison for stealing $5.10 worth of food and stockings. It is up to us to tell those stories now. long history of river defenders. Though I have crossed the Presumpscot countless times, after learning about Polin’s history of belonging, I no longer take this river for granted.

Recovering New England’s Voices teaches me that historical research can and should be an act of love that brings us closer to our kith and kin who sleep in the dusty pages of history, waiting for recovery. Coming from a family of origin impacted by systems of incarceration, I never expected to find solidarity and connection with the inmates at New Hampshire State Prison who lived and worked in stone trenches nearly 200 years ago. But they called to me from Historic New England’s records and now they are part of the teaching we must do to make more reparative and just futures a reality.

I have a newfound appreciation for the history of my home in Maine because of my work as a research scholar for Historic New England. As my research becomes incorporated into tours, the remaking of sites, and even this article, I hope that it will expand New Englanders’ concept of their home, one still familiar but full of new perspectives and surprises we can all learn from. As part of a wider community of people seeking to learn about our home, I relied on collaboration to find and interpret so many engaging stories. Most of my more significant findings have been long hidden from a wider public view, buried in old account books, or passed down as oral histories within families. This single year at Historic New England is only the beginning of a process that has already changed my understanding of New England.

Much of my work involved correcting errors from the past when initiatives like Recovering New England’s Voices were not a priority and led to not only missing voices but mistaken histories. For example, a report from the 1980s suggested that Jonathan Hamilton—the merchant who built Historic New England’s Hamilton House in South Berwick, Maine—had owned several plantations in Tobago, but I realized it was in fact a different person, named John Hamilton, who owned those Caribbean properties. Still, there is much we can say about Jonathan Hamilton’s active trade with the West Indies, and his clear understanding of the cruelty of plantation slavery that fueled the trade in rum and molasses.

Nothing has been more powerful or exciting than recovering the names and stories of individuals who had lived and labored at these properties. In my academic training, I constantly had to justify my reasons for studying a specific topic by explaining how my approach contributed to a new historical understanding. The work of recovery does contribute to learning about topics such as slavery, but its importance is far more immediate than a historical theme: recovery insists that an individual’s story matters in its own right and that no one should be erased from history.

Locating names, details, and narratives about enslaved people like Cicero and Titus requires persistence, but also luck. A key component in the study of history is contingency. Unexpected events change the course of history. Yet my work recovering stories made it clear to me that this work is itself contingent. There were no guarantees that I would ever find any information that would reveal Titus’s name after he drowned in the river next to Gilman Garrison House in Exeter, New Hampshire, or describe the clothes that Cicero wore as he ran away from Bowman House in Dresden, Maine, to join the Continental Army and fight in the Revolution.

By collaborating with individuals and organizations around New England, I managed to compensate

Laundering was a source of income for longtime Jackson House renter Isabelle Tilley and she may have hung these clothes to dry in this c. 1900 photograph of the c. 1664 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, dwelling. The watercolor painting on the back page of this issue shows a similar scene and was made around 1900 as well. (Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress) for some of the limits of recovering stories. Whenever I believed that I had exhausted a topic or site, it was through conversations with other researchers that I learned of another archive or approach to take. Prior to my arrival at Historic New England, the organization already had some evidence concerning a woman called Dinah who we thought might have been enslaved at Bowman House. Last winter I learned that the Lexington (Massachusetts) Historical Society had undertaken its own recovery project centered on Dinah. She had been enslaved in Lexington by John Hancock’s grandparents until his grandmother emancipated Dinah in her will. Shortly before the Revolution began Dinah left Lexington and ended up at Bowman House. Hancock continued to pay Bowman for half of Dinah’s board until 1787 and Dinah would have been required to work in Bowman’s household despite her emancipated status. Only with the support of my colleagues, countless archivists, and a network of researchers in New England could I have achieved so much in a single year. In the process, I became a part of a community that will endure when my work is complete.

Historic New England’s own history inevitably intertwines with many of the stories I recovered, and the Recovering New England’s Voices initiative provides an opportunity to reinterpret the definition of historic preservation beyond the wealthy families who formed the organization’s original membership. One woman’s story in particular highlights this possibility. Isabelle Tilley came to Jackson House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from Virginia as a teenager in the 1850s; she may have remained enslaved there for a brief period before being emancipated, and she recalled meeting Abraham Lincoln when he visited Dover. I spoke with her descendants living in Greater Portsmouth and they described her legacy in their family and the community. As evidence of her prominence in the Christian Shore neighborhood, an 1899 Portsmouth newspaper article noted that Mrs. Tilley might leave for Massachusetts but then retracted it a few days later.

After her husband died and her children had grown up, Mrs. Tilley continued to live in a small cottage adjacent to Jackson House and often took in boarders to pay rent to the Jacksons, supplementing the income she earned from washing laundry. After Historic New England bought the property in 1924, she paid the organization $1 a week in rent, an amount that far exceeded the income from tour admissions in the 1920s and 1930s.

Though Historic New England attributed Mrs. Tilley’s vegetable garden in front of Jackson House as giving the property an old-time appearance, it did not credit her as a preservationist, even though she lived on this historic site and her rent funded the organization’s preservation efforts.

When I began looking, I found plenty of evidence of Mrs. Tilley’s presence. Late-nineteenth-century tourists took a picture of Jackson House that included her husband sitting in front of the house. Another image from the turn of the century shows a line of clothes hanging next to Jackson House that Mrs. Tilley would have laundered. Alongside letters describing her “very sharp” personality and memories passed down in her family, we have a vivid if still incomplete portrait of this remarkable woman.

Mrs. Tilley died in 1937 at 100 years of age, still living in the small house right next to Jackson House. Given the fact that the physical building she lived in was in very poor condition, I wondered why in her eighties or nineties she did not choose to live with her son Clarence, who resided just a block away in the same neighborhood. In part, the explanation lies in the ways she valued her independence and freedom, particularly after having been enslaved as a child. Yet the main explanation is much simpler: Mrs. Tilley had lived on the site of Jackson House for most of her life, probably as long as anyone had ever lived there. This was her home.