 Hello everyone, my name is Angie Grove and I'm the executive director here at the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum and we are here today for our monthly lecture program. So we do community enrichment programs every month and we have rotating lecturers and at the end of this talk I will beg you to stick around for a few extra minutes so I can announce our upcoming lecture for next month as well as some of our other upcoming events. But I do want to start this program by thanking our sponsors for our community enrichment programs. It's AARP Vermont so we're very grateful for their support. And we also would like to thank our partner in all of this technology and that is CCTV, Vermont Public Television, and Kate is in the back recording and getting us all set up with that. So thank you to CCTV as well. They make this program available later on public television as well as on our YouTube channel so we can reach out to as many people as possible. And today we're also doing this hybrid so there is a bunch of remote audience members on my laptop in the back back there. So at the end when we do Q&A I'll also be trying to facilitate getting their questions into the speaker as well. Okay so that's just some of the logistics that I want to say. The last thing I want to say is thank you for coming to support the Homestead Museum. We are a private non-profit museum that is completely dependent on our community support. So at the end of this presentation whether you're here in person or if you are remote please consider stopping at the front desk or our website to learn more about becoming a member of the Homestead as well as how you might be able to volunteer. We have lots of different volunteer opportunities as well. Okay so I'm going to leave the stage now and I'm going to let one of my board members introduce the speaker. So let me please introduce one of our newer board members Terry Silva who has been such a great help on the board. Just giving us lots of great advice especially when it comes to legal matters and things so we can button up and make sure we're ready to go and weather any storm. So Terry is a great board member and if she doesn't say it then I'll also say you can ask her about how you can become a board member in the future too. It's not that bad right Terry? It's not that hard. You can talk to somebody who asks you if you'd like to be here. Okay so please give a warm welcome to Terry. I'll talk to you later Angie. Terry Silva, new board member, this is Dr. Elise Guyette and I'm going to introduce her. I've talked to her for about five seconds and it occurs to me that she's a very nice person and if you don't know her she just wants to be called Elise which is pretty cool. For my family the PhDs want to be called doctor and that's what they do. So here's the blurb. Elise Guyette is a historian, author and educator who currently works as a consultant on ethno history, social sciences and curriculum development for schools, theaters, museums and historical organizations. She has a passion for discovering and teaching about stories that were lost because of the traditional telling of history from the point of view of the wealthy and the powerful and we have that same passion here at the Ethan Allen homestead. We like to tell what really happened and Ethan Allen has many different sides to him. As a result she wrote and published Vermont, the cultural patchwork and discovering black Vermont as well as articles and curricula focused on diverse stories including teacher's guides for museum exhibits, artifact kits, theater productions and walking tours. She's led educational and history workshops in places as various as Kunming in China, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Durban in South Africa and throughout New England. She co-founded the Burlington Edible History Tour which told the stories of various Burlington immigrant groups and co-created a walking tour of the old north end for historic New England. And that's most of what I know about her so far but I'd like to learn more. Let's welcome Dr. Elise Guyette. Thank you all for coming and hi everybody at home or wherever you are. The people that I chose today, I think they're, I chose people who are examples of the really diverse history that Burlington has. And I hope I can show you the depth and complexity of Burlington's history that's sometimes missing from our written sources. Let's see if I'm going in the right direction. There we go. So I thought we might as well start with where we are at the homestead. We don't know very much about the black people who worked at the homestead. What we do know is we know a couple of names. We know Newport. He was the man who was supposedly with Ethan Allen when he died. And we also know an Eliza and her mother who were cooks for Fannie Ellen and for Fannie Ellen's daughter. So we only have first names so it's very difficult to find more about these folks. But I'm certainly hoping and I know that the homestead is that with further research they'll be able to find out more about the people who were working here. Whoops and I went backwards. There we go. So this is actually a picture of Hungerford in Vermont. There is no Hungerford in Vermont anymore. It's now called Sheldon. So the first named black person that I know was in Burlington in the 1790s was Mary who originally came from Connecticut. But let me read a little something about Mary. This is from the only reason I know her name and the next person's name is because of Hemingway's Gazetteer. So it's wonderful to know names. And in Hemingway's Gazetteer somebody wrote, in the spring of 1790, George, the youngest son of Colonel Alicia Sheldon, accompanied by a sturdy old Scotchman by the name of McNamara and his wife, together with several Negro servants, came to town as first settlers. There are only means of locomotion being a yoke of ox and a sled. And this person goes on to say that the first child born in Hungerford, now Sheldon, obviously the first child who was not a native person, was Old Mary, a servant of Colonel Sheldon who bought her in Connecticut. So we have this evidence that she was enslaved. We also know that she was a mother and we know that because of that she wasn't that old. Although I often find women being called old something, black women, not white women, but black women. And I don't know if that might be because of the stress of being enslaved, makes you look older. I don't know, but I do find that. But all of these black folks and the Sheldons, they all moved into Burlington for the summer, for the winter of 1790. So they were here for the winter of 1790 that made eight blacks in Burlington at the time, which was 2% of the population. They were probably all enslaved, but we have evidence only for Mary. This is, so 1790 and 1800 in the census, we know that these people, these white people, all the white people are in the names in black. We know that they all had black people living in their homes as servants or laborers. But we know the name of only one. We know the name of the woman who came with Phineas and Mary Loomis to Burlington. And this also comes from the Hemingways Gazetteer. Horace Loomis, one of their children, remembers that they were in Sholat the night before they came to Burlington. And he wrote, it took some time to get the children ready with old Jenny, the Negro woman, again, old Jenny. So she was with them in 1790, she was with them in 1800. She may have been with them in 1810, but that year the census taker only wrote a figure at the end of the census said 45 blacks. So we know absolutely nothing about them. We don't even know what home they were living in. They were 45 in 1810. So Jenny was with them for 20, maybe more than 20 years. We're not, we're not sure. We just kind of lose track of her. But if she was, if she died in Burlington, she's surely buried in Elmwood Cemetery. And this is a picture of all the Loomises. There are 10 Loomises in Elmwood Cemetery. There is no Jenny there. There could not have been any Jenny with the Loomises. And there's a very important reason why. Do you see where the cemetery is? I wrote cemetery. You can see, I kind of wanted to point out some things sometimes. I'm going to have to do this. So this is, that's Church Street. And then the road going to the cemetery was just a little wagon path at that time. So you can see that the cemetery was carved out of the forest there. And the part closer to town was the white section. This was a segregated cemetery. And the part north, the northern part closer to the forest was where the blacks were buried. So if Jenny's buried here, that's where she is. But I didn't, but I don't know. She may be there. She may not have been there. Here are the names of some of the bigwigs in Burlington who during the early years all had black people who came with them to Burlington. They were domestic servants. They were farm laborers maybe. We don't know exactly. But you can see some pretty bigwig names here. Van Ness is interesting because a little bit later I find a black Janet Van Ness who was a popper. So my assumption is she worked for the Van Ness's when she couldn't work for them anymore. They removed her from the household and she became a popper. So there's a number of folks here that all had black help helping them build wealth and getting settled in Burlington. We don't have names for them in the early. They don't start recording the names of everybody in the home until about 1850. So we don't have any names for these folks. We just know that they were living in these homes. And in 1820 there were 26 white households that had 30 black people in them. I can tell you a little bit about those 30 people. 19 of them were girls. And they were quite young. Eight of them were below 13. And 13 of them were somewhere between 14 and 25. Probably on the lower end that's the pattern for the entire state of Vermont. So there were a lot of young girls living in white households. Generally the only black in the household. And my assumption is that they were isolated and they may have been lonely. And my assumption also is that they were probably enslaved because it was legal to be enslaved before you reached your age of majority. And even after the age of majority in Vermont we had plenty of evidence that people were kept enslaved. So I'm assuming that most of them were probably enslaved. So that's what we know about people with no names. However in 1820 we find the first independent black households. And so this is great because we actually have a name. We have a last name. Now we can look them up. And I did look up Caesar Jackson. You can see his death certificate here. It says he died in 1828. It's about all they know about him. They even say they don't know when he was born. But if he was 83 years old in 1828 you can guess he was born 1745. So and he is supposed to... This little laser doesn't work when I go on to the screen so I can't use it. But you look at the cemetery. There are the four stones in the front. That's a black family and I'm going to talk about them a little bit later. But Caesar is supposed to be buried in that empty area. And yes I've been there when there was no snow on the ground. I couldn't find his grave but he's supposed to be buried there somewhere. It could be that he just has a very little flat stone and the grass grew over it or I don't know but I can't find him. But I can tell you a couple things about him. First of all the name Caesar tells me that this was an enslaved man because whites loved to name their people that they trafficked after powerful men for some reason. I guess they liked the irony of it. So I'm thinking that Caesar Jackson had probably been enslaved in his younger days and that he probably came from Massachusetts. Most of the people I'm going to talk about were northern blacks. There were not blacks coming from the south. Most of them were from the north. I think he was from Massachusetts. My only evidence for that is there was a Caesar Jackson from Massachusetts who fought in the Revolutionary War. He was a Revolutionary War vet. So if he was the same person it would be wonderful to find his grave and put a flag on it because he's a Revolutionary War veteran. The picture is of a Rhode Island regiment which was a black regiment although most of all the regiment they were not segregated regiments in the Revolutionary War the way they were in the Civil War. They fought together. So that Caesar may or may not have been a Revolutionary War veteran. We do know other Revolutionary War veterans however. In 1830 we find Wyman and Calvin Virginia in Burlington. They each have married a white woman. They each have children so obviously biracial children. We know very little about them because they disappear after 1830. I can't find them even though I know their names I can't find them. But I know a lot about their father and this is supposedly a picture of their father and his name is Jeremiah Virginia and he had been enslaved in Connecticut and trafficked a number of times before he finally ran away, came to Vermont and this is when he enlisted in the Army during the Revolutionary War. So we know that their father was a Revolutionary War veteran and they lived in Northern Vermont. They moved around so that would have included Calvin and Wyman. They lived in Fletcher for quite a while. But that's what we know. We know a lot more about Jeremiah than we do about the sons Wyman and Calvin. We also know that nearby here in Hinesburg that Prince Peters was a Revolutionary War veteran. So there's a number of Black Revolutionary War veterans buried in Vermont. It would be nice to find them all and make sure they had some flags. We don't know where Prince Peters was buried so we can't do that for him. And I like this the Hessian officer saying, no regiment is to be seen in which there are not Negroes in abundance and among them are able-bodied strong and brave fellows. There were thousands of Black men who fought in the Revolution for freedom from slavery. The Patriots told them that if they won the war they would get rid of slavery. That slavery came with the British. So of course they were incredibly disappointed with the Constitution that made Blacks three-fifths of a human being. And there are a lot of veterans who came to live in Vermont after that. One of the themes that I discovered was that there were a lot of Black men and women living in hotels in the early days. The Burlington Hotel, the little arrow points there to where the men's clothing store is on Church Street, Kehoe I think is the name of it. There used to be a Burlington hotel there that was a tavern and a stage house, which just meant that's where the stagecoats stopped. And there was a Henry Thomas who owned it. But Henry was listed as white in the census, and we find a lot of Black Thomases too in Burlington and in the area. But he had a Black man living with him. And this was 1830s so we have no names and we also have no occupations. But I kept finding Black people living in hotels. There was another Black man I know because he was born here in 1830 in the Champlain Hotel down on the waterfront on Lake Street. And they were cooks, they were waiters, barbers, laundresses, coachmen, porters, stewards, hostlers who took care of the guests' horses. These hotels needed to have stables behind so that the horses could stay there and there was somebody there taking care of the horses. So I find a lot of these people. So to me this is, so there were Black people here working and starting with the nascent tourist industry in Burlington. And it continued for quite a long time. We'll meet some of these folks as we continue here. I want to talk a little bit about Levinia because she was enslaved in Burlington. We know she was enslaved. She was freed when she was 35 years old. So we know that people who were supposed to be freed at the age of majority were not. An interesting point I want to make about folks like Levinia is she's listed as free in the census, although she wasn't. I'm going to read you her Manumission statement from her owner. Her owner was Lucy Hitchcock who was the daughter of Mary and Ethan Allen. So here's a connection to the Allen's. Levinia, when her husband died, she moved to Alabama to live with one of her sons. And while she was there in 1833 she bought a human being and she bought Levinia Parker. Didn't say anything about buying her son, but she has a son he comes with. When they moved back to Vermont, the reason the ski rack is there is because that's the house that the Hitchcocks lived in when they came back. This is the house where Levinia was enslaved and her son was enslaved. And if you go to the front of the, when the sidewalk doesn't have snow all over it, right in the front you'll find two, they're called stopping stones. They're memorial stones. And one of them says Levinia and one of them says Francis. So they're memorials to people who had been enslaved. So this is, this is what Marshall True, Professor Marshall True a number of years ago, discovered this. And this is Lucy Hitchcock who says, and I quote, I am the lawful owner of a female slave named Levinia Parker, now age 35. And whereas the husband of said Levinia has paid to my satisfaction for my interest and claim in her services, as for the goodwill I have for her on account of her integrity and faithfulness, I'm desirous that she should be manumitted and become a free woman. So here's an example of a woman designated as free on the census, but obviously enslaved. You will never see the word slave in the census for Vermont. They're always free. It doesn't matter if they're enslaved or not. And the reason for that is that slave to people meant for life. And in Vermont, they were not supposed to be enslaved for life. And this is the rest of New England too. They were not supposed to be enslaved for life, but they were enslaved, some of them for their entire lives, some of them just for a period of time. So when you see free on the census for a black person, it doesn't necessarily mean they're free. And she's a good example of that. Jeffrey Potash has done a lot of research on this family, and he discovered that after the Civil War, they're back in Alabama. And this is Levinia's gravestone. You can see on it that she died in 1907 at 104 years old. I think it's amazing that she lived that long. I mean, she had obviously had a stressful life. So they all went back to Alabama. And they were there during Reconstruction, which despite what many of us may have been taught or not taught in school, Reconstruction was a time of black power in this country. So that was a good time to be. I know other people who were actually born in Vermont, black people born in Vermont who went south after the Civil War, because it was a great time. It was a great time of hope. And so that's what happened to them. We don't know exactly what happened to Frances, her son, but I'm sure that Dr. Potash is continuing his research. Is that the one? That's not the one I want. Oh, I hope those people aren't missing. Looks like there might be a slide missing. It's too bad. Wait a minute. Well, I'm just going to go. This is really weird. This is the Engelsbees. What are they doing there? All right, we'll go with the Engelsbees. We'll go with them. What's after this? Oh, okay. All right, we'll go with the... This is a white family. This is the Engelsbees family. And the reason I chose them, because they're a good example of how immigrants unemployed black people as the century went on. In the 1840s, we find in their household the Engelsbees household two black domestic servants. Anybody know why I have the UU church up here? So Ebenezer Engelsbees was a very wealthy merchant, and he bought 40,000 bricks in order to build this church in 1816. And he was the project manager. So he was a very wealthy and powerful guy. He certainly could afford enslaved people. The two domestics may have been enslaved. It was 1840, but we know Labinia was enslaved, so she may have been too, but we're not sure. But the point is that in 1870, Adela is a widow now, a very wealthy widow. She doesn't have black domestics anymore. She has Irish domestics now. And it reminded me of the quote by Frederick Douglass that blacks were being unemployed because they switched to some newly arrived immigrant whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him better title. So the same thing was happening in Burlington. By 1850, Burlington was 11% foreign born. Many of them Irish, of course, escaping the man-made famine in Ireland. So that's another we see as the decades continue, more and more Irish and French servants and fewer black servants in the households. The Holly's is interesting. I love it that this is by 1850 now. We're getting people's first and last names. And I found Jane Holly in the census with her two sons, one of them James and the other one Joseph. And it was wonderful to be able to look them up and try to find out something about them. They came from Washington, D.C. The sons were bootmakers and shoemakers. They had learned the trade from their father. And they came to Burlington. And I found a letter in 1850 written by James Holly. And he wrote it to the American Colonization Society. And he said, this is interesting what was going on in Burlington in the 1850s. I have succeeded in creating quite a spirit of inquiry in relation to colonization amongst my associates here by debating the following question with my brother before several meetings. Can the colored people of the U.S. best elevate their condition by remaining in this country or by emigrating to Liberia? He supported the first proposition from Ernest's conviction and in like manner I advocated the latter. So they were going around Burlington having debates. Should we stay here and try to fix the United States or should we go to Liberia? At one time James was saying Liberia, but he actually ends up not going to Liberia. He goes to Haiti. And the reason for that he clearly wrote here. He said, the blacks have a most inveterate prejudice against being separated from the New World that has been the field of their labors and sufferings for the past three centuries. Nevertheless they will easily reconcile themselves to the irresistible fate of separation from the whites of this country when they can locate within a few days sale of the scenes of their nativity. So he marries Charlotte, I don't know her last name, a woman from Vermont. And in 1861 he and his wife and his mother, his brother had died, he died early. Along with 100 other people moved to Haiti. And the first year they're there, James's mother dies, his wife Charlotte dies and 39 other people that had moved with them. So almost 50% of the group that moved down to Haiti had died in that first year of diseases, there were different diseases. But he stays, he became a Haitian citizen. And in 1870 he was designated as the missionary bishop of Haiti. This is the first time a black person has ever been designated a bishop in the Episcopal Church. I'm not sure about all the other churches but I think maybe the first time is the bishop of any Christian church. He became an Episcopalian, he was brought up a Catholic but Catholics refused to ordain black people. So he switched to Episcopalian and he became a bishop. He eventually married a woman down there, Sarah, they had nine children, he's buried in Port-au-Prince and he's remembered as a saintly person in the Episcopal Church down there. Every March 13th he's remembered in all of the services as a saintly person of Haiti. So last week the Haitians were down there remembering James Holly who was a shoemaker in Burlington, Vermont. Another theme I discovered when studying black folks in Burlington was there was a lot of movement back and forth across the lake. Sometimes they'd be in Burlington, sometimes they'd be at Plattsburg or Osable, Kasem or somewhere and then another decade they'd be back in Burlington. So there was a lot of movement back and forth between Burlington and upstate New York and a lot of relatives moving back and forth and living with each other. So this is an example of one of those families. Tony Anthony, we first find in the census in 1850, he's living at the Exchange Hotel downtown. The Exchange Hotel was on Water Street which is now Battery Street. It used to be called Water because the water used to come right up to the edge of that road but then that changed. But we know that he was here earlier because we know that his son Abiel Anthony was born in Burlington in 1830 in another hotel in the Champlain Hotel. So here's another example of they were here in the 1830s. They left, they came back. Abiel came back without his wife. He came back with his niece. They left with the Exchange Hotel. But eventually they do come to Burlington and they stayed in Burlington on Locust Street which is now Elmwood. It used to have a lot of Locust trees on it but they died and then it became Elmwood and maybe it's time for another name because the Elms are all gone now but still Elmwood. His son Abiel, their son Abiel lived long enough to tell stories that they used to help people on the Underground Railroad coming through Burlington. So there were people in the household of Eliza and Tony Anthony who were not related to them, who needed help. This is Blacks Helping Blacks which is not something that we hear very often in our Underground Railroad stories, is it? But he becomes a renowned cook. So I'm assuming when he was living in the Champlain Motel when he was living in the Exchange Motel he was a cook. And when they come back here in 1866 this ad was in the newspaper. If you look at the very bottom, the last paragraph, E. M. Sutton wrote, having secured the services of the excellent cook, Anthony the subscriber feels confident in suiting the public. So he actually, does anybody know where the first door west of the Old Baptist Churches? That's where this coffee house was. The Old Baptist is now Manhattan Pizza. So they're all rolling over in their graves, right? But one door west of it is Alibaba's now. So that's where Tony Anthony was cooking in the 1860s at Alibaba's. He was still a hotel cook in 1870. It actually says they're collecting more information and it says hotel cook. Does it just say cook? So he's in another hotel. He dies in 1872. 1872 he could be buried in Lakeview Cemetery. I think that's the year that Lakeview started. But I'm not exactly sure where he's buried. His wife Eliza got married 15 years later. Usually women in those days married much quicker than that. But she, 15 years later, married another black man in Burlington, Mingo Niles. And she died in 1900. So she's certainly, and I think she's in Lakeview Cemetery. This is an interesting family that has, I chose them because there's like three different themes that they can illustrate in Burlington. One of them is black diversity. I mean, sometimes people think, oh, we had blacks in Burlington in like 1830s. They probably all came from the south. They were probably enslaved. You know, it's sort of a, I think, something that a lot of people think about. But it's not true. So I'll just talk about Alexander Curtin for a minute. In 1850, he was living in Burlington with his sister, who was a widow. Carrie Queen was her name. She had two kids. They had come from Quebec. Their father originally from Barbados. And he was a stevedore up in Quebec City in the harbor there. His mother, Mary, was a black from Quebec, who the marriage certificate said she was a spinster at age 19. But anyway, so now we have Barbados and we have French Canada. And I also found a lot of blacks in Burlington from Mexico, a lot from different countries in the Caribbean, from Ireland, from France, from other European countries. So there was great diversity among the blacks who came, who came to Burlington. And many of them were born in Vermont or born in upstate New York, you know, and moved back and forth. So there's really great diversity among these folks. So Alexander meets Carolyn Crabtree, and they got married in 1853. He was working in an iron foundry. So this is another theme I wanted to point out, that I found a number of blacks working in the beginning industries, the tourist industry. Now we have an iron foundry. He also later on was a machinist. They moved to Platsburg. There's that theme again, moving back and forth across the lake. They moved to Platsburg. He was a machinist, and then he moved to Osable, New York, and he was a miner there. So here we have an example of people, you know, helping the new, the industries in Burlington. Alexander died in 1888, and Carolyn was the administrator of his estate. So I guess she paid for this very nice monument to her husband. His birth and death date are on there. Her name is on there with her birth date, but not her death date. So she's not buried there, although I don't know why. I mean, I know why, but I don't know why her body wasn't brought back there and put there. This was expensive, putting up a monument like this and having a plot. You know, normally, I mean, I ran into people, black folks, as far away as California. Their bodies come back and they're buried in Lakeview cemetery, you know, because they had that land and it was expensive to buy more. However, I do find, and this is another theme, she ends up later in life, she has all of her children have died, all of her grandchildren have died. She's alone. She comes back to Burlington and she lives with a family with the last name of Bland. The reason she lived with them, Jacob Bland had married one of her granddaughters. She only lived two years, she died of consumption and then he remarried, has six kids, you know, with this other woman, so they've got six, seven, eight, they have eight people living in the household, they take in Carolyn Crabtree and she lives with them, Carolyn Crabtree, Curtin, and she lives with them for the rest of her life. So she's probably buried in Elmwood. The Bland's obituary says they're buried in Elmwood, although they're not in the Elmwood list, but the obituary says they were there, so I think if Carolyn died and was buried in Burlington, she's probably with the Bland's, wherever they are, because I can't find them, because they're not in the list. So she's probably there. This is another really big theme in Burlington and that's black barbers. Of all the occupations, there were more black barbers than any other occupation that I found in the census. And you can see this, the ode to the barber of Burlington. And this is Abiel Anthony, I've already mentioned him, Tony Anthony was the cook, next door to the old Baptist church. Abiel Anthony becomes a barber, he lives to ninth, this is an ode to him on his 99th birthday. So I'm going to go through a number of barbers who were here, but the first one before Abiel Anthony was Henry Christopher Alan Smith. His wife Lucinda was from Castleton, Henry was from Boston, there's that theme, they're Northerners, these folks are Northerners. By 1840 I find him, he's a barber in Burlington, and it says that his barbershop was on Church Street on the corner of Mechanic. So somewhere on one of those two corners, I don't know which building, was his barbershop, and he was there for over 40 years as a barber in Burlington. And he had a home on Pine Street with a quarter of an acre, which is quite a big piece of property, and that was on Pine Street. His obituary, when he finally did die in 1833, says that Mr. H. C. A. Smith, whose death has been announced, was one of the best known of our colored people. By industry and frugality, he had acquired quite a handsome property, and his funeral was very largely attended. I find that our colored people a bit patronizing, but I find that a lot in the newspapers, they're always our colored people. So these are the graves of Henry, Lucinda A., his wife, his daughter Emily, who died young, and his daughter Lucinda W., who, this fits into another theme, and that is people who are being entrepreneurs. Lucinda A. lived with her daughter for the rest of her life, and her daughter Lucinda W. was a caterer. She had her own catering business, and she lived in that house on Pine Street until 1928. So it's interesting to find people who are also being entrepreneurs. Another entrepreneur was Abiel. Here's Abiel, the barber of Burlington. He was born, of course, I mentioned previously, in Burlington, in a hotel in the Champlain Hotel. He learned to be a barber from one of his brothers, who had a barber shop, guess where? Upstate New York. So he learned to be a barber with his brother. He eventually ends up back in Burlington in 1864, and he's working for an ES Weeks, and I couldn't find anything about ES Weeks, except that he was a barber once in Burlington. So I don't know anything about him. I don't know if he was black or if he was white. But he came back, he's working for ES Weeks. He meets a woman, Clara Delia Smith, who was from Buford, South Carolina. This is the first one that I've discovered. She came from Buford. She was born in 1854, almost surely enslaved in South Carolina before the Civil War. But somehow she makes her way up here by the 1860s, and she marries Abiel. And sometime in the 1880s, well even before that, you can see here Anthony and Williams. So there's Abiel Anthony, and he has a partner by the name of George Williams, and they have their fashionable barbers, and they apply their tonsorial arts on Church Street, and this says across from City Hall. So it's a great place to have a barber shop, right? Crestman City Hall. The building across from City Hall at that time was called the Allen House. Right now it's where Honey Road is. It's called Allen House, and they were barbers there until the building burned down. And then they had to move, and then the building that's there now was built that actually became a Greek candy shop at one time. But so as soon as that building burned down, they had to separate. So Abiel moved to Church Street to 102-104 Church Street. You have to go upstairs. I think it's a coffee shop now. Orbit, is there some sort of an orbit coffee shop or something? It's that, and you have to go upstairs. So that's where his barbershop was. And as I said, he lived to be 99. He lived to 1938. So we know quite a bit about him. Every year on his birthday there were newspaper articles about him because he was getting so old. But we know that he worked 10 hours a day, sometimes longer on Saturdays. He would work until midnight in order to get everybody shaved and their hair cut for Sunday, because he refused to work on Sunday. So he was even fired from a job once in Rutland because he refused to work on Sunday. So he was a very religious man. He wouldn't work on Sunday. He was a major entrepreneur. He created something called Anthony's Hair Luster. And what this was supposed to keep your hair nice and thick, or if you've lost your hair, it would bring it back. It was wildly popular. He was shipping this to New York City and to Boston. I don't know if it worked, but he seems to, he's 99. That picture, he seems to still have little hair, right? Maybe it worked, I'm not sure. He also had a secret formula for his razor straps, keeping them ready to sharpen his razors. And he had, he lived at 195 Elmwood. All these barbers I'm going to talk about lived on Elmwood Avenue. I think there should be a sculpture of a barber, black barber on Elmwood Avenue. There were so many of them, except for the first one, the smiths I talked about. They were on Pine Street, all the rest were on Elmwood. He actually had three acres. It was a very, if you were a barber, you had a very nice middle-class life. Your wife didn't have to work out of the home, like a lot of black wives needed to do. So they were very middle-class, very comfortable middle-class life. There were two occupations where blacks were paid, equal to whites. One of them was barbering. Anybody know what the other one was? You couldn't do it in Burlington, the other one. The other one was whaling. So, I mean, your life depended on what all of your mates were doing, right? And everybody got paid equally on whaling ships. So those are two places. Clara died in 1916, a long time before Abial did. And he moved in with his daughter, Grace. Grace was listed as a nurse on the census. I'm not quite sure what that meant at that time. She's listed as a nurse. And he always attributed his longevity to Grace's cooking and to her dietary advice. I think there were some other things working for him. He never smoked. He never drank, although he sometimes used Bay Rum as an aftershave in his barber shop, but he did not drink. And for 70 years, he walked from Almond Avenue to Church Street and up and down those stairs, right? And he didn't stop working until he was 99 when he had gangrene. And he couldn't walk up and down the stairs anymore and he died soon after that. When he died in 1938, the Free Press said, we have all lost someone infinitely fine. And his obituary said that he was a genial philosopher and it talked about people who came to visit him to have their hair done, including President Grover Cleveland. But his claim to fame was always that he had shaved PT Barnum. His partner, George Williams, this is George Williams. He lives at 205 Elmwood Avenue, very close to each other. Annette, his wife Annette, last name Anthony, Abial Anthony's sister. George Williams came from a black farming community in Heinsberg. He's third generation black farmers from Heinsberg. Moves into Burlington, as there are a lot of people leaving the Hill Farms and moving into the city. He moves into Burlington, learns to be a barber. They became partners. His barber shop after the Allen House burned down was at 52 Church Street. So he lived here for 45 years with their three children and with Eliza, Annette's mother. Eliza Anthony, Annette's mother. So I have this little red and blue thing down here, independent order of good Templars. The reason that's there, the Good Templars was a temperance organization and they picked that name because the old Knights Templars used to just drink sour milk. So they didn't drink. So this family, George Williams, his mother-in-law, his wife and a number of other relatives in Burlington started an independent order of good Templars in Burlington for blacks. They had an international order of good Templars for whites, but they couldn't meet together apparently. They met in the exact same room but on different nights. The blacks met on Mondays and the whites met on Tuesdays. So we know these people were all, we know they were hard workers, we know they were also sober, and we also know that they were generous because we find a lot for this church, the First United Methodist Church on Bewell Street, when that was being built, people donated money and we know that all of these relatives and the business of Anthony and Williams donated to this church. So when you walk by this church, you can think, yeah, there were black hands that helped build that church. Probably literally, I'm sure there were probably black laborers who worked on it too, but there was also black money that built that. This is George William's son, George Walter Williams, who went to the University of Vermont, became a doctor in 1909. So he wasn't the first either. At first, I thought he was the first one, but he wasn't the first, he was one of the first. There were two or three black men before him. But every year, he was at the medical school at UVM. His father advertised in the aerial the yearbook for his barbershop, hoping to attract customers. As soon as George graduated, George W. had graduated, George the barber retired, they all moved to Medford, Massachusetts. Not absolutely sure why, maybe because that's where George got a job. But I know that he was not working as a doctor in Massachusetts, which is sad to say. Here are the plans where Carolyn Curtin lived at the end of her life. This is the plans. They were also on Elmwood Avenue. I'm assuming that when they lived here with their six children and Carolyn, that they were in the front part of this house, the little Greek revival part in the front. That red part in the back, by the way, was just added a couple of years ago. And I was walking by it one day and went back to see what was going on. They had found bones in the backyard. So they had to stop the construction and try to figure out what the bones were. They ended up being soldiers from the War of 1812. This is interesting. I like to point this out. Jacob Bland marries Delia after his first wife died. Kerry Curtin's granddaughter. After she died, he marries Delia. They live in this house. By this time, the Old North End has a couple nicknames. One of them is Frenchville. There's so many French people moving into the Old North End that it was Frenchville. There were also a lot of Lithuanian Jews in the Old North End at this time. So those are the barbers so far. Although, I forgot to point out, George Williams had Arthur Davis an apprentice living in his house, too. So there were apprentices, black barbers who had come through town as apprentices. Rachel Williams, George Williams' sister from Heinsberg. She marries Erin Freeman, who's from Schalat. And he became a soldier in the Massachusetts 54th. And what does Rachel do while he's gone? She does what all women do when the men went off to war. She held down the home front. She took care of whatever business they were in. She took care of the farm. She would take care of everything in addition to making things to send to him on the war front. But the issue with that is that blacks didn't get paid as much as whites. Blacks actually got paid $10, $3 deducted for uniforms. So they got paid $7. Whites got paid $1650 plus $3 for their uniforms. So they were paid for their uniforms. So the black soldiers were always running home. And Erin was one of the ones who wrote home. He talked about how terrible they were treated in the Massachusetts 54th. He talked about the pay. He said, I don't want to stay down here and get killed or get my legs broken and have nothing for it. So they were always writing home. After the war, he went to New York City for work and died there. And Rachel's living here at 208 Elmwood across the street from her brother. So they were all living together. Here's another. Here's a Civil War veteran that I know is buried. Aaron Freeman was not buried in Burlington. He's buried in a popper's grave down in New York City. But I do know that Leander Freeman is buried in Lakeview. He's a Civil War veteran. There are quite a few black Civil War veterans buried in Lakeview Cemetery. I don't know if you can see this. His papers here say, first of all, he was drafted. And he was sent to the Vermont Second Regiment. And he gets there. And I guess they were quite shocked because they said he transferred on account of being black. So he gets to his white unit and they see him and they say, what? You're in the wrong place. So he got transferred to the Massachusetts 54th. And he was wounded at Boykin's Mill. He survives. He comes back to Burlington. And he lives first with his mother. And then at 47, he got married and lived with his mother and his wife and they have a daughter. He died in 1917 of an infected foot. I found a lot of people dying of infections in those days, knowing antibiotics, dying of infections. When he died, they said in his obituary that he was a familiar figure in Burlington Memorial Day parades, which I found interesting. And a member of standard post number two of the GAR. And he was also in the Methodist Church. I found a lot of these folks, they were in area churches. Two more. I don't know if you noticed, but I cheated a little bit. And on the title slide, I was supposed to go to 1860. I changed it to 1870 on the title slide. Just because I wanted if I had time. Okay, I'm going to do real quick two more slides. The theme that this brings up is that I found evidence of black kids being taken away from their families. And they were taken away from their families, the black people said, because we're black. And there was still this idea of white supremacy that whites can do a better job raising blacks than their own family. So these kids, you see four children here, all from the Maryfield family, they were taken away from their family. Their father was, they were from Waybridge. Their father was black, their mother was white. In 1875, the overseer of the poor took those kids and brought them to Burlington to the home for destitute children. They didn't have an easy time there. Emma was the oldest. Emma, according to the log book of this home, Emma was sent out to many families. What they did with these kids was they sent them to families to be indentured servants. They sent them to work for families. So Emma kept going back and forth in these families. She never seemed to settle anywhere. Finally, we find her burning a barn down to the ground. And then at 15 years old, we find her in reform school. I mean, this is an angry child, right? She's very angry. Then she has brothers Walter and Wallace. They were twins. They come to the home too. They're sent out. They are indentured. One of them in Heinsberg, one in Macando Falls. So they're totally separated from each other. These are twins. Nellie Jane was the youngest, and she actually got adopted by a family named Smith in Montpelier. But the very last thing in this log book says, these children went to their own father, he having enticed them to leave their places. Which for me brings up so many questions. Did he go to four different towns? These kids were in four different towns, right? All over Vermont. That was hard work. Indeed, if he had to go to four different towns. Did Nellie, who was adopted, was she included? Did she leave the house that she was adopted in? I don't know. Was he still with his wife? I don't know, because generally, records don't mention the women. They're there, but they don't get mentioned. But to me, this is like, this father and perhaps some other went through an awful lot to gather the family back up and be together. And my last one, and I really wanted to use this one because I love the picture of the baby. So I really wanted to use the baby. But Jenny Green, whose gravestone that is, this is Jenny Paxton, Jenny Green was also descended from the black farmers in Heinsberg. She meets Madison Paxton in Burlington. He's a janitor at schools for 33 years and a carpenter. So he was keeping the schools, some schools running for 33 years. They had one child, and that was Francis, and that's the baby. And when baby Francis grew up, this is what she looks like all grown up on the other side. And she was working in an overgator company in Manuski. And I put a picture of an overgator, so we would all know what an overgator was. But there were fancy coverings for people's boots. So there's also women, black women in industry in Burlington. And this is an example of one of them. And you can see that that picture was taken in a Burlington Photoshop. So that's it. I hope you notice the wide variety of experiences, the wide variety of even accents and languages that you can hear in the black community in Burlington. And of course, migration is a universal human, part of the universal human story. And that continues today with lots more accents as you walk around Burlington. Thank you.