Nomination for Dorsey--Jones House

From the form

The catalogue entry the section above was filed under.

931 NPS Form 10-900 (Rev. 10-90) OMB No. 1024-0018 United States Department of the Interior National Park Service RECEIVED 2280 National Register of Historic Places Registration Form JUL 2 0 2005 This form is for use in nominating or requesting determinations for individual properties and districts. See instructions in How to Complete the National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (National Register Bulletin 16A). Complete each item by marking "x" in the appropriate box or by entering the information requested. If any item does not apply to the property being documented, enter "N/A" for "not applicable." For functions, architectural classification, materials, and areas of significance, enter only categories and subcategories from the instructions. Place additional entries and narrative items on continuation sheets (NPS Form 10-900a).

Use a typewriter, word processor, or computer, to complete all items. 1. Name of Property historic name Dorsey - Jones House (Underground Railroad Sites in MAMPS) other names/site number. 2. Location street & number 191 Nonotuck Street - not for publication city or town Northampton (Florence) - vicinity state Massachusetts code_MA county_Hampshire code 015 zip code01062 State/Federal Agency Certification Asthe designated authority under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1986, as amended, I hereby certify that this @nomination - request for determination of eligibility meets the documentation standards for registering properties in the National Register of Historic Places and meets the procedural andprofessional requirements set forth in 36 CFR Part 60. In my opinion, the property - meets does notmeet the National Register Criteria.

I recommend that this property be considered significant - nationallystatewide L locally. (L See continuation sheet for additional comments.) Betay tridlerg, Warimal Reginte Nanional Register Derector 7/12/05 Massachusetts Historical Commission State or Federal agency and bureau In my opinion, the property meets does not meet the National Register criteria. (] See continuation sheet for additional Comments.) Signature of certifying official/Title Date State or Federal agency and bureau 4. Natlonal Park Service Certification 1, hereby certify that this property is: Sfentered in the National Register - See continuation sheet. - determined eligible for the National Register - See continuation sheet.

- determined not eligible for the National Register - removed from the National Register - other (explain): Signature of the Keepey atuck nalus Date of Action 9/2/2005 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Name of Property 5. Classification Ownership of Property (Check as many boxes as apply) x private - public-local - public-State _ public-Federal HAMPSHIRE CO., MASSACHUSETTS County and State (Check only one box) x building(s) - district _ site - structure - object Number of Resources within Property (Do not include previously listed resources in the count.) Contributing 1 Noncontributing 0 0 0 Name of related multiple property listing (Enter "N/A" if property is not part of a multiple property listing.) The Underground Railroad in Massachusetts, 1783-1865 buildings sites _structures - objects Total 1 Number of contributing resources previously listed in the National Register none 6.

Function or Use Historic Functions (Enter categories from instructions) DOMESTIC, single dwelling Current Functions (Enter categories from instructions) DOMESTIC, single dwelling Z. Description Architectural Classification (Enter categories from instructions) CENTURY, Greek Revival Materials (Enter categories from instructions) foundationBRICK wallsWOOD, weatherboard METAL, aluminum roofASPHALT other Narrative Description (Describe the historic and current condition of the property on one or more continuation sheets.) NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA Section number Page 1 7.

NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION Location & Setting The Dorsey - Jones House is located at 191 Nonotuck Street in Florence, a small industrial village contained within the City of Northampton in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts. The Mill River, a tributary of the Connecticut, follows a winding course along the western limits of the village where it powered a series of factory sites. One of those was a cotton factory operated by the Bensonville Manufacturing Company. Its president was George W. Benson, Jr., a founder of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in 1841, a Utopian community dedicated to, among other progressive ideals, equal rights without distinction of sex, race, or religion.

Bensonville, the original development and name of Florence, was platted on a hillside northeast of the factory in the fall of 1846, and on 12 November 1849 Basil Dorsey purchased Lot No. 12 for thirty-five dollars.! The house was completed in time to be recorded by the Federal census in August 1850. The lot pattern was changed by a second subdivision recorded in 1925, but the house maintains its geographic and visual relationship to the factory site and houses of similar age on Nonotuck Street. Although the 1836 factory building was demolished in 1966, later buildings continue to distinguish the mill site. (PHOTO 4) A small, one-story medical center was constructed on the opposite side of the street in the 1970s, and early- and mid-20th - century single-family dwellings have been built behind the property on the hillside.

The house is sited on the western side of the trapezoidal lot that has a frontage on Nonotuck Street (south) measuring 118.26 ft. and a rear (north) line measuring 167.46 ft. The present lot was created from the reconfiguration of lots made by the Corticelli Silk Co. in 1925.? In this plan old Lot No. 12 was voided and the house was assigned Lot No. 33, which shifted the property towards the east with the western line redrawn within a few feet of the building. This lot was enlarged in 1954 with the addition of Lot No. 34 adjoining it on the east; in 1966 Lot No. 34 was partitioned with the eastern half sold to its neighbor.? When the house was built on what then was Lot No. 12, an area was flattened towards the rear of the hillside lot for its site.

As a result there is a short, steep embankment behind the house where earth was removed; this soil was likely used to help level the site and fill around the basement. The property is devoid of vegetation with the exception of a large deciduous tree just east of the house and various ornamental shrubs. Because of its elevated situation, the house is prominent in the streetscape. (continued) 'Hampshire County Deeds, 115:360 and 130:464. 2 Hampshire County Records, Plan book 5, page 10. 3 Hampshire County Deeds, 1161:315 and 1558:651. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No.

1024-0018 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA Section number Page 2 The House Type: Upright-and-Wing The Dorsey - Jones House is composed of a 1½-story, front gable main section with a one-story cross- gable ell in a popular mid-19* century plan-form generally known as Upright-and-Wing. (PHOTOS 1 & 2) These small houses are common throughout the United States in both village and rural contexts, and represent a dwelling type usually associated with the laboring class.

They were widely promoted through builders' pattern books and domestic journals of the day, and they represent an early example of progressive affordable housing.* Upright-and-wing houses can be identified in most industrial villages in New England, and they are the precursor of the front-gable cottage that during the late 19" and early 20th centuries became a ubiquitous feature of urban landscapes in Massachusetts. Structure The house is constructed of a transitional wood framing system with a skeletal structure of heavy sawn timbers using traditional mortise-and-tenon joints with lighter sawn members, including studs, rafters and floor joists nailed in between to complete the frame. Horizontal board sheathing is nailed to the wall posts and studs and rafters to provide added rigidity. This frame is supported on a brick and stone foundation.

There is a small basement under the front half of the upright section of the house, the wall of which was constructed with stone with about three feet of brick on top for the portion exposed above ground. This brick capping also occurs on the inside (north) wall of the basement, even though it is not visible. The internal brick chimney for the house emanates from this interior wall, which may explain the continued use of the material in this location. Otherwise, there are crawl spaces under the rear of the upright section and the wing. The foundation for the wing is constructed entirely of stone; there is no brick cap. A stone pad exists for a brick stove chimney that stood roughly in the center of the wing. This chimney was dismantled in the 1970s.

Exterior conditions The exterior of the frame was sheathed with sawn wood planks, which increased its rigidity, and covered with wood clapboards on the walls and wood shingles on the roofs. The frame and exterior materials remain intact beneath a layer of aluminum siding added ca. 1960 and asphalt roof shingles of approximately the same age. The entrance into the upright section occupies the east side of the façade with two windows in balanced (continued) 4 Upton, Dell. "Pattern Books and Professionalism: Aspects of the Transformation of Domestic Architecture in America, 1800- 1860." Winterthur Portfolio 19, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1984), 107-150. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No.

1024-0018 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA Section number Page 3 placement west of it. (PHOTOS 1 & 2) Two windows are centered in the half-story above. The frames and architraves of the windows on this façade are intact; however, the original wood 6/6 vertical sliding sashes were replaced with wood 1/1 sashes of the same dimension. The entrance is intact with its plain shouldered architrave with battered sides. It has no transom, and the top panels have been removed from the door and glass panes inserted. Historic photographs indicate that a flat hipped-roof porch once sheltered the entrance abutting the front wall just above the top rail of the door surround and supported by square posts at the outside corners. (FIGS. 1 & 2) A delicate arcade distinguished the frieze beneath the shallow eave.

The porch base was a square wood platform two or three wood steps above ground level. For unknown reasons, this distinguishing feature was removed in the 1960s and replaced with the present concrete deck spanning the front of the building. A distinguishing feature that does remain intact and exposed on the façade is the slight wood cornice along the raking edge of the roof with short returns at the eave line. The metal siding conceals corner pilasters beneath these returns. The cornice continues on the side walls at the outside edge of a narrow eave above a tall frieze board. (FIG. 1) A plainer, flatter cornice with returns details the raking roof edge of the rear façade.

There are two windows on the west side, each with wood 1/1 sashes, and four windows on the rear end, two on the ground floor, although it is claimed that a third one was covered by the metal siding, and two in the upper half-story. The windows on the lower level contain wood 1/1 sashes, while the closely- spaced pair above retain their original wood 6/6 sashes. (PHOTO 3) The one-story wing section abuts the east wall of the upright section towards the rear so that their north walls were nearly in line when first built. The ridge of the wing section's gable roof meets the side wall of the upright section just below the eave and cornice line. An original window unit with wood 6/6 vertical sliding sashes is located in the exposed front section of the east wall where it was placed to illuminate the interior of the entrance and passage.

(PHOTO 2) The horizontal wall sheathing on the east wall of the upright section terminates just inside the portion of the wall captured within the roof of the wing leaving an the framing exposed. This material-saving technique, now visible because the kitchen ceiling has been removed, confirms that the two sections were constructed in a single campaign. The front façade of the wing section was altered with extensions in 1952. (PHOTO 2) It appears that the original façade consisted of a doorway and window on the west side, which remain intact within the added enclosure, and a second doorway leading into a wood shed on the east end. An open porch spanned the (continued) Interview with Havelock J. Purseglove, III, resident in the house 1942 to 1950, January 13, 2004.

NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA Section number Page 4 entire façade. The eastern third of the porch was enclosed and joined with the interior by the demolition of the exterior wall. The porch space survives on the west side of the wing where the doorway and window are intact, butthe porch was pushed further out and enclosed with metal frame storm windows. The entrance into this enlarged porch, which is in line with the original wing door within, is recessed under the roof of the addition. A hand-dug well is now concealed under the porch floor.® Two small, wood sash windows were inserted in the reformulated front wall.

The rear wall of the wing was also pushed out to create more space in the east end and create another enclosed porch on the west side. (PHOTO 2 & 3) New, smaller sash windows were added to the east and north walls. In the process an original window on the east end was walled over. A window with its original 6/6 sash was retained in the rear wall. The intended appearance of these alterations has been concealed by the aluminum siding installed in the 1960s. Interior features: the floor plan The floor plan of the house reflects the repatterning of space in the mid 19t century in response to advocates for the improvement of domestic activity and the relaxation of restrictive and inefficient traditional functions. (FIG. 3) As more of the middle and laboring classes were able to own and support houses of their own, more economical and livable plans developed.

The Dorsey - Jones House by no means represented a radical rearrangement of space, rather it was designed to provide a diversity of spaces within a small, affordable dwelling that were not present in earlier times. The Upright-and Wing plan separated the living and kitchen spaces in what was a traditional rural manner. Likewise, the upright section maintained side-passage plan that was a common feature of front-gable Greek Revival houses. The scale was greatly reduced, however, and planning was more creative. The first floor of the upright section contains rooms positioned in each corner with a central chimney that touches upon them all making heating more efficient. The entry is in the southeast corner. It is a narrow rectangular space that contains a staircase to the second story. (PHOTO 5) It is illuminated by a window in the east wall at the foot of the stairs.

(PHOTO 7) A small closet is fitted around the chimney at the north end. A large square parlor occupies the southwest corner in the front of the house, and it is distinguished by three windows, two with southern exposure on the front wall and one on the west wall. (PHOTOS 6 & 7) A room of similar proportions, although smaller is situated in the northeast corner (continued) Ibid. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number Page 5 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA behind the stair passage. It contains the only fireplace in the house, and was intended to function as a dining room as it connects with the kitchen in the wing. (PHOTO 8 & 9) There are two windows on the north wall.

The remaining northwest room is a narrow chamber with a single window on the west wall. A closet fills the north end of the room. It is relatively new but replaces an enclosure of similar size that contained a closet that opened on the chamber and a closet that opened on the dining room. The second story is divided into three bed chambers and a stair passage. The stairs land in a small passage that connects to a chamber in the front of the house, two chambers in the rear and a closet beside the stairs. (PHOTO 10) The front chamber is skewed to the west side of the house. It contains part of the roof slope in the ceiling on that side, and the two windows are not balanced on the south wall. Closets are fit under the roof on both sides of the room. (PHOTOS 11 & 12) The kneewall on the west side also encloses the closet for the west chamber in the rear of the plan.

That chamber is equivalent in dimension to the northwest chamber on the ground floor, although it is mostly contained under the roof slope. (PHOTO 14) A smaller third bed chamber occupies the northeast corner of the plan at the head of the stairs. Its closet is built out into space in the passage. The wing contains three rooms. A spacious kitchen occupies about two-thirds of the plan on the west side and connects to the upright section via a doorway into the dining room. (PHOTO 15) It has exterior doors as well as windows on the front and rear walls. A partition divided the kitchen from a wood shed in the front of the wing and a pantry in the rear, each with a doorway to the kitchen. (PHOTO 16) The wood shed had an exterior door on the front wall and a window on the east wall. A brick chimney was located behind the kitchen partition in the wood shed. These features have been removed.

There are crawl spaces beneath the floor and above the ceiling. Interior conditions Like the exterior of the house, the interior floor plan and finishes of the upright section are essentially intact, while the wing have experienced alterations. In the upright section, all the interior walls and ceilings of the house were plastered over sawn wood lath. The flooring is tongue-and-groove pine boards of a uniform, moderate width. In three of the ground-floor rooms new layers of flooring have been installed. Window and door openings are framed above the sills by simple board trim on the sides and top, with the top board overlapping the sides slightly to form a shoulder. (PHOTO 7) Doors, where they still exist, have four panels, cast iron butt hinges and cast thumb latches. (PHOTOS 12 & 13) The chimney and fireplace remain in place.

A hot water heating system with free-standing radiators was installed on the (continued) NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number Page 6 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA ground floor probably during the 1920s and is still in use (the present furnace is a replacement). The existing electrical service appears to date to this period as well, although it has been partially upgraded and somewhat expanded. In the entry space, the stairs have been altered by the removal of the wood balustrade and the replacement of treads and risers on the stairs. (PHOTO 5) This change was made in the 1950s.

In the same effort, the original entry to the basement stairs beneath the staircase in the passage was closed and a new doorway cut in the exterior wall so that basement access was made from the enlarged porch area in front of the wing Narrow-width, tongue-and-groove oak flooring was installed in the passage at this time. The front door and the window with its 6/6 sash remain intact; the simple shouldered trim for the openings on the exterior and interior walls are intact, although the tops were squared off when sheet paneling was installed over the plaster walls in the 1970s. Oak flooring was also installed in the parlor, but otherwise the wall and ceiling finishes and woodwork are intact. (PHOTOS 6 & 7) The original 6/6 sashes in the three windows have been replaced, and a door that connected the parlor with the chamber in the rear has been infilled with a bookcase.

Neither of the doors remain in the house. If there was a mantelpiece or hearth on the north wall for a stove, they are not evident. The dining room was renovated during what appears to have been a substantial effort to improve conditions in the house during the 1920s. (Heat and electricity were also installed at this time.) Wood moldings were applied to the plaster wall to give the effect of a high paneled wainscot and Douglass fir flooring was laid over the original. (PHOTOS 8 & 9) A decorative brick face with pebble-dashed panels and a wood shelf was applied to the front of the fireplace; what preceded it was removed from the house. The imprint of a patched stove thimble in the wall above the fireplace suggests that a stove or gas heater had supplanted the fireplace at some point prior to the 1920s.

The narrow beadboard on the ceiling seems inconsistent with the design of the wainscot and fireplace additions, and it is supposed to be an original feature to the room. There had been a second doorway on the north side of the existing one into the rear chamber, but it was removed in the 1970s with new moldings applied to the patch to extend the wainscot. Remaining door and window trim are intact; 1/1 sashes were installed during the 1942 renovations. Doors have been removed from all three of the openings in this room. The surface finishes in the rear chamber on the ground floor were substantially altered in the 1970s. Plastic sheet panels were applied to the plaster walls, and the original doorway into the parlor was covered in the process.

Existing trim around the west window was replaced or covered with a narrow wood (continued) NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 7 Page 7 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA surround; the single-pane sashes installed in 1942 remain in place. (PHOTO 8) Vinyl tile covers the wood floor and cellulose acoustic tiles conceal the plaster ceiling. A solid plastered partition that once divided a closet area on the north side of the room was demolished, and another closet with sliding track louvered doors opening into the chamber was recently constructed. The original closet connected only to the dining room and, according to an informant, contained a window on the north wall, now walled-over.

With the exception of window sash replacement on the front, the second-floor spaces are completely intact including the intricate plan of rooms and closets, plaster wall and ceiling finishes, pine flooring, door and window trim, doors and hardware, and 6/6 sashes in the rear windows. (PHOTOS 10 -14) In addition, the original turned newel post at the top of the stairs and the balustrade along the side of the stair hole survives on the second floor providing an indication of how the rest of the stair rail would have appeared. (PHOTO 10) The brick chimney is exposed in a corner of the stair passage. A small hatch in the second- floor stair passage provides access to the small attic within the peak area of the roof. Rafters are visible, and they are square in section and butted and nailed at the ridge.

They are the same dimension and nailed in the same way as those now visible in the kitchen wing. Holes were cut and metal louvers fitted in the gable peaks of the exterior ends to vent this space when the aluminum siding was installed. The basement has not been altered and the original sawn heavy framing members and floor joists are exposed. These show evidence of having been whitewashed along with the stone and brick exterior walls. Framing visible in the crawl space under the rear half of the house also appears intact. The chimney is based on the earthen floor of the crawl space and is incorporated in the brick cap wall on the north side of the basement. A corbelled projection in the front of this wall, where the present oil-fired furnace is vented suggests that some kind of stove or furnace was originally present here.

The hearth for the dining room fireplace is supported by a platform of heavy timbers integrated into the floor framing, which indicates that the fireplace is indeed an original feature. The existing basement stairs date from the alterations made to the staircase and basement entry above. There is no exterior exit for the basement. In the wing the plaster ceiling has been removed, and interior partitions that once defined the three interior spaces have been demolished. (PHOTOS 15 & 16) Flooring also has been removed in the eastern section of the room. Exterior walls are intact where they have not been altered by the alterations described on the exterior. The brick chimney that serviced this section has been dismantled.

(continued) Ibid NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA Section number Page 8 Archaeological Description While no ancient Native American sites are recorded on the Dorsey-Jones House property, sites may be present. One site is recorded in the general area (within one mile). Environmental characteristics of the property indicate locational criteria (slope, soil drainage, proximity to wetlands) that support the presence of Native American sites. The house is located on a well-drained terrace within 1,000 feet of the Mill River, south of the house. Portions of the property include level to moderately sloping topography; however, steeply sloped areas are also present.

Given the size of the property (less than one acre), the removal of earth from the lot to level the ground surface prior to construction of the house, and the presence of a steep embankment, a low potential exists for the recovery of ancient Native American resources on the property. A moderate to high potential exists for locating historic archaeological resources on the Dorsey-Jones House property. Additional documentary research combined with archaeological survey and testing may locate structural evidence of stables or sheds located east of the house on 1895 maps of Florence. Stables or sheds are not shown on earlier or later maps of the area. Archaeological evidence of occupational related features (trash pits, privies, wells) may also exist.

Careful systematic historic, architectural, and archaeological study should be made of the Dorsey-Jones house to identify potential architectural and archaeological characteristics unique to dwellings built and resided in by fugitives. Potential archaeological resources may exist for this property type that have until now not been identified. (end) DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Name of Property 8. Statement of Significance

Statement of significance

Applicable National Register Criteria (Mark "X" in one or more boxes for the criteria qualifying the property for National Register listing.) xA Property is associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history. X. B Property is associated with the lives of persons significant in our past. _ C Property embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction or represents the work of a master, or possesses high artistic values, or represents a significant and distinguishable entity whose components lack individual distinction. - D Property has yielded, or is likely to yield, information important in prehistory or history. Criteria Considerations (Mark "x" in all the boxes that apply.) Property is: _A owned by religious institution or used for religious purposes. _ B removed from its original location.

- C a birthplace or grave. _ D a cemetery. - E a reconstructed building, object, or structure. _ F a commemorative property. _G less than 50 years of age or achieved significance within the past 50 years. HAMPSHIRE CO., MASSACHUSETTS County and State Areas of Significance (Enter categories from instructions) ETHNIC HERITAGE, Black SOCIAL HISTORY, Underground Railroad Period of Significance 1849 - 1859 Significant Dates 1849 1854 Significant Person (Complete if Criterion B is marked above) Basil Dorsey Thomas H. Jones Cultural Affiliation N/A Architect/Builder unknown Narrative Statement of Significance (Explain the significance of the property on one or more continuation sheets.) 9.

The rest of the file

Bibliography, boundary description, and the people who prepared and reviewed the nomination.

Major Bibliographical References (Cite the books, articles, and other sources used in preparing this form on one or more continuation sheets.) Previous documentation on file (NPS): Primary location of additional data: - preliminary determination of individual listing (36 - State Historic Preservation Office CFR 67) has been requested -Other State agency - previously listed in the National Register _ Federal agency - previously determined eligible by the National - Local government Register - University - designated a National Historic Landmark _ Other _ recorded by Historic American Buildings Survey Name of repository: #N/A - recorded by Historic American Engineering Record # -N/A NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No.

1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 8. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE Summary The Dorsey-Jones House is historically significant as the home of two notable fugitives from American slavery, Basil Dorsey and Thomas H. Jones. The escapes of both men are fully documented and were well known in their own time, and both participated in events that are significant in the history of the Underground Railroad. While in national terms Jones was by far the more prominent in abolitionist circles, Dorsey affiliated himself in Florence with the founders of a utopian community that opposed the slave system in word and deed and that both sheltered and otherwise assisted fugitives from that system. The Dorsey-Jones House meets National Register assia ia ion with African-American hisory annchea endorgrouind kaitroad.

thpiroperiy fe fos the Registration Requirements defined in the Underground Railroad in Massachusetts Multiple Property Submission for Property Type #3, a dwelling in which fugitives lived in Massachusetts. The Dorsey-Jones House retains sufficient integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association to convey its significance under the context. Its period of significance is from 1849, when Basil Dorsey purchased the property on which he soon built the house, to 1859, to when the Jones family sold it. No other Massachusetts property associated with Jones is known to survive. Basil Dorsey's Escape from Slavery Basil Dorsey (ca. 1810-72) escaped from Maryland to New York with the assistance of Robert Purvis, one of the most prominent black abolitionists in the United States.

Purvis credited Joshua Leavitt, the western Massachusetts native who edited the abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator, with managing Dorsey's move to Massachusetts. It seems highly probable as well that David Ruggles, the African American journalist and fugitive assistant who lived in Florence by 1842, also aided in Dorsey's flight from bondage. (continued) NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 2 Dorsey himself left no direct account of his escape, and those narratives that exist differ in important respects.

The account of Purvis, involved with Dorsey from the moment his presence in Pennsylvania became known, found its way into print at least twice, once in 1883 and again in 1898. These too differ: the former, recorded in a letter to historian R. C. Smedley, appears to be somewhat more reliable. With three of his brothers, Dorsey escaped from the district of Liberty in Frederick County, Maryland, on the Pennsylvania border, in the summer of 1836. Accounts of the brothers' origins vary, but it appears that once promised and then denied their freedom they chose to escape.' At that time, enslaved persons were an increasing minority of the population of Liberty and Frederick County at large. As the county and the rest of northern Maryland focused on growing wheat and corn - which, unlike tobacco cultivation, did not require full-time labor - the population of free people of color rose swiftly.

Between 1790 and 1850 the number of free blacks in Frederick County rose from 213 to 3,760 persons, or 1665%; over that time the number of enslaved persons increased from 3,641 to 3,913, or only 7.5%. In Liberty by 1850, only 376, or 34%, of 1,103 black residents remained enslaved.' In light of these changing demographic circumstances the Dorseys must have regarded the broken promise as especially staggering. (continued) l"Basil Dorsey," Hampshire Gazette 81, 36, 2 April 1867, stated that Dorsey's grandfather was English and his grandmother a black Marylander. The Gazette continued that Dorsey's owner, "Tom Saulers," had agreed to sell him his freedom for $350, but that after Dorsey had found someone to be his bondsman Saulers refused to honor the agreement. The newspaper set the date of escape at 14 May 1836, a date it might easily have derived from Dorsey himself. Purvis, in R. C.

Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania (Lancaster, PA: Office of the Journal, 1883), 356, stated that the Dorsey brothers were all said to have been the children of their master, whom he did not name, and "and after his death, finding themselves slaves, when they had been promised their freedom, they took 'French leave,'"meaning "unauthorized departure." Swarthmore College dean Elizabeth Powell Bond stated that among her papers was the bill of sale (a "printed" copy) for Dorsey, which asserted that he was a "mulatto man named Ephraim Costly, otherwise and now called Basil Dorsey, aged about forty-three years, a slave for life" and born a slave of Sabrick Sollers, of Frederick County and owned by him until he died, after which he became the property of Thomas Sollers, a son of Sabrick, "and is now a fugitive from service from said State of Maryland." Bond cited in Edward H.

Magill, "The Underground Railroad," Friends Intelligencer 55 *Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryiand during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 2-5, 12-13; "Beneath the Underground: The Flight to Freedom and Communities in Antebellum Maryland / An Archives of Maryland Electronic Publication http://mdslavery.net/html. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No.

1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 3 In 1867, safely settled in Florence, Dorsey himself may have told the Northampton (Massachusetts) Hampshire Gazette that he traveled at night from Liberty to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, then eastward to Harrisburg, and further east to Reading. No evidence has surfaced to date that Dorsey's escape from Maryland was assisted, but his route suggests his reliance on places of known Underground Railroad activity.? The Gazette stated, "He found employment in Bristol, Penn." Purvis stated that between Reading and Bristol, however, the brothers went to Philadelphia, where they added the Christian names Basil, Thomas, Charles, and William to their existing Dorsey surname. Their presence there was brought to his attention.

Purvis brought all but Thomas Dorsey to his farm at Bristol in Bucks County, found nearby farms on which Charles and William could work, and himself employed Basil. Basil's wife Louisa, who was free, arranged with her brother-in- law to come to Philadelphia in August, and then came on to Bristol. Dorsey's situation soon became known in the abolitionist community when Louisa Dorsey's brother-in-law betrayed him to his claimant Thomas Saulers (or Sollers) in Maryland, whereupon Saulers, several associates, and a local constable seized him while he was plowing in one of Purvis's fields and jailed him in Bristol.

Purvis followed upon learning of the seizure, arranged counsel both locally and in Philadelphia, helped Charles and William Dorsey escape their pursuers, and rallied the local African American community to be present at Basil Dorsey's upcoming trial and assist in "liberating him" should the court decide to return him to slavery. Just before the trial, when friends offered to purchase his manumission, Dorsey refused; "if the decision goes against me," Purvis quoted him to have said, "I will cut my throat in the Court House, I will not go back to slavery." On the grounds that the plaintiff' s evidence that slavery was the law of Maryland was not an authoritative compilation of state law, Dorsey's counsel won a dismissal of the case, and Purvis drove Dorsey to his mother's house in Philadelphia.

"I afterwards accompanied him to New York, and placed him in the hands of Joshua Leavett, the editor of The Emancipator, who sent him to Connecticut to find employment on his father's farm."4 (continued) 3Christopher Densmore, curator, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, e-mail to Steve Strimer, Florence (MA) History Project, forwarded to Kathryn Grover, 4 February 2004. *Purvis quoted in Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad, 356-61. "Basil Dorsey," Hampshire Gazette, states that "gentlemen connected with the Anti-Slavery Standard sent him [Dorsey] to Northampton," but the National Anti- Slavery Standard, the newspaper to which the Gazette must refer, did not begin publication until 1840, four years after Dorsey's escape.

NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 4 Purvis erred slightly in one particular: Leavitt's father's farm was in Franklin County, Massachusetts, in the northwestern uplands of the state. Leavitt (1794-1873) had been born on his grandfather's farm in Heath and graduated from Yale in 1814. Though trained as a lawyer, he returned to Yale to the divinity school, from which he graduated in 1825, and in 1831, the same year William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator, Leavitt became editor of the Evangelist. An early opponent of slavery, he helped form the New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.

With such men as Elizur Wright and the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan - born in nearby Northampton in 1786 and 1788, respectively - Leavitt was also a leader in the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded the same year. The Dorseys and Leavitts in Western Massachusetts Leavitt had experienced antiabolitionist hostility firsthand on two occasions about the same time. In July 1834, a New York City mob destroyed black homes and churches and the home of Lewis Tappan; it is said that Leavitt's home was threatened as well. In October 1835, Leavitt and his brothers Roger Hooker and Hart Leavitt attended a state convention in Utica, New York, sponsored by the Utica Anti-Slavery Society, that was similarly marred by antiabolitionist violence. These events helped Leavitt convert his father Roger (1771-1840) and mother Chloe Maxwell Leavitt completely to abolitionism.

In 1837 Joshua Leavitt became editor of The Emancipator, an abolitionist newspaper based in New York, his brother Roger Hooker Leavitt (1805-85) became president of the Franklin County Anti-Slavery Society in 1836 and vice-president of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1838 and 1839, and his father - who by 1840 had moved from Heath just southeast to neighboring Charlemont, where his sons livedagreed in that year to run for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts on the ticket of the Liberty party, the new national antislavery party that his son Joshua had had a hand in forming.° 5 Library of Congress, Joshua Leavitt Family Papers, MMC-0893, Library of Congress, and Hugh Davis, Joshua Leavitt, Evangelical Abolitionist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), cited in Roger Hooker and Keziah Leavitt House Network to Freedom Application (hereafter cited as Leavitt NTF nomination).

Thanks to Bambi Miller, Tyler Memorial Library, Charlemont, MA, for sharing this application. On the New York City and Utica riots, see Leonard L. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 85-92, 113-22. ®Roger Leavitt is shown with eight persons in his household in Heath in the 1830 federal census but in Charlemont in the 1840 census, where he is enumerated in his own household just after his son Roger H. In 1840 he is shown as NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No.

1024-0018 Section number Page 5 About the same time that Dorsey was sent to Charlemont, other fugitives were assisted to that place. Historian and journalist Sylvester Judd (1789-1860), onetime editor and publisher of the Hampshire Gazette, wrote in his notebook, "June 1, 1838. Bought pair of second hand pantaloonsgave $2.25. Gave 50 cents to aid in transporting runaway slaves to Charlemont." James Crafts, born in Whately (north of Northampton on the Connecticut River) in 1817, recalled Charlemont as a stop on at least one fugitive's passage north.

In 1896 he told Underground Railroad memorialist Wilbur Siebert that Osee Monson of his town "was always credited with the honor of being the leader in assisting the poor black men to escape" and recalled a specific instance of Monson having "just returned from a trip to Charlemont where he had conveyed a black man who had been at his house." Two persons, though both young at the time, attested the Leavitt family's role in fugitive assistance. In 1895, Roger Leavitt's granddaughter told Siebert that Leavitt was "a whole souled Abolitionist, & did all he could to help the slaves to freedom" though she averred that she could provide no specific details of his assistance - not surprising in view of the fact that she was born about 1833 and her grandfather died in 1840.

In an undated letter to the Ashfield Historical Society, Caroline Blake, the daughter of George Abell of Goshen (diagonally between Northampton at the southeast and Charlemont at the northwest), wrote, "The fugitive slaves were cared for in our home and helped on their way. I was too young to remember all about what happened but it was always understood that a resting place was at Mr. [Hosea] Blake's and Mr. Leavit's. This was carried on with the greatest secrecy, because of the personal danger, not only to the slave but also to those who harbored them." Caroline Abell Blake was nineteen years old in 1850 and living then in her father's Goshen home? (continued) between sixty and seventy years old, which would tally with the date of birth stated in other sources; the only other person in the household is female, aged sixty to seventy, presumably his wife.

'Entry for 1 June 1838, Sylvester Judd Notebook, Number 1, June 1833-June 1841, page 201, Forbes Library, Northampton, MA. Judd was one of the original members of the Old Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society. Thanks to Steve Strimer of the Florence History Project for this information and citation. Mrs. Wm. (Mary Leavitt) Hillman, East Charlemont, Mass., 30 December 1895, to Wilbur H. Siebert, in The "Underground Railroad" in Massachusetts, vol. 1., "Material Collected by Professor Wilbur H. Siebert, Ohio State University, Columbus, n.d. Received by Harvard College Library 14 June 1939," Houghton Library, Harvard, unpaginated (hereafter cited as Siebert Notebooks). Hillman was the daughter of Hart Leavitt. The 1850 federal census establishes her age. James M. Crafts, Orange, MA, 24 July 1896, to Siebert, Siebert Notebooks; Caroline P. Blake, Amherst, June 4, no year, to "Mr.

Howes," collections Ashfield Historical Society; the 1880 census was used to determine her age. Thanks to Steve Strimer for a photocopy of the Blake letter. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number Page 6 Dorsey's presence in Charlemont is corroborated in other sources. Charlemont records list the birth in that town of Charles Robert Dorsey to Basil and Louisa Dorsey on 29 August 1838. They also list the names and dates of birth of two of the couple's children born in Maryland and then living there Eliza, born 3 November 1834, and John Richard, born 18 May 1836.

If the Hampshire Gazette's record of Dorsey's date of escape is correct, Dorsey left Maryland four days before his son John was born. Charlemont vital statistics also record the death of Louisa Dorsey scarcely two months after the birth of Charles, on 7 November 1838. Joshua Leavitt may have sent Dorsey to his father's Charlemont home, as Purvis recalled, but he probably worked, if not lived, on Roger Hart Leavitt's adjacent farm. About two weeks after Louisa Dorsey died, Joshua Leavitt wrote to his brother, "I feel for Mr.

Dorsey in his bereavement and trust that you will do all that Christian benevolence requires in his care." No record so far known indicates in which home the Dorsey family lived in Charlemont, and though they remained in Charlemont until 1844 the 1840 a census records no people of color in either the Roger or Roger Hart Leavitt households.® That he was in Charlemont in 1839 is indicated by the accounts of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, which list "B. Dorsey 50c" under contributions from Charlemont that year? Purvis's accounts do not offer specific details on the Dorsey family's route to Charlemont, but the Hampshire Gazette in 1867 stated that he came first to Northampton to the home of Haynes K. Starkweather on South Street; it seems probable that Joshua Leavitt had directed him there.

Leavitt had been admitted to the bar in Northampton and had married a woman from that town; no doubt he had numerous connections there, not the least of whom were the Tappans. Starkweather took the Dorseys straightaway to the home of Captain Samuel Parsons"whose heart," the Gazette wrote, "always beat in sympathy with the fugitive" - and after a "a day or two" there Parsons took the family by wagon from Northampton to the Charlemont home of Roger Hooker Leavitt. The newspaper stated that Basil Dorsey lived there with his three children "about five years," his wife having died there, and in January 1844 he moved to Florence.' (continued) &A man by the name of Basil Dorsey is not enumerated in Massachusetts in the 1840 federal census.

ºJoshua Leavitt Family Papers, MMC-0893, Library of Congress, cited in Leavitt NTF nomination; Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society Papers cited in ibid 10«Basil Dorsey," Hampshire Gazette. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 7 That David Ruggles may have collaborated with Leavitt in Dorsey's escape seems likely. The Gazette stated that Dorsey had met Ruggles in New York City, and that Ruggles and Leavitt knew each other is clear: Ruggles had been a subscription agent for the Emancipator since 1833 and a correspondent since 1834. Dorsey must have come along the Connecticut Valley to Northampton.

It is also known that Ruggles had used this route to move other fugitives northward at this time. In the fall of 1838 James Lindsay Smith of Northumberland County, Virginia, escaped with two friends by sailboat, then on foot to New Castle, Delaware, and then on to Philadelphia. Assistants there sent him "with a letter directed to David Ruggles" of the New York Vigilance Committee, and Ruggles in turn sent Smith off with "two letters, one to a Mr. Foster, in Hartford; and the other to Doctor Osgood, in Springfield." Smith took a steamboat to Hartford and another to Springfield, where he found his way to the home of Samuel Osgood, pastor of Springfield's First Congregational Church. By 1842 he moved to Norwich, Connecticut, David Ruggles's native place, where he lived the rest of his life.

Probably in 1839 or 1840, William Green, a fugitive from Maryland's Eastern Shore, was taken aboard a vessel by a willing captain to Philadelphia, sent on to New York where he stayed at a boardinghouse until constables came looking for him, and then was somehow helped to escape from that place to the home of Ruggles, who sent him on the same route to Osgood's Springfield home. When Green published a narrative of his life in 1853, he was still living in Springfield." Where the Dorsey family lived in Northampton between 1844 and 1849 is not yet known. That he purchased goods from the store of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI) between 1843 and 1847 is known from its account books, 12 and it is at least possible that he lived with one of the NAEI's founders, George W. Benson Jr.

Benson was the brother-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison and son of one of the founders of the 1789 Providence (Rhode Island) Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.' In 1841 he had moved to the Lonetown section of "James Lindsay Smith, Autobiography of James L. Smith, Including, Also, Reminiscences of Slave Life, Recollections of the War, Education of Freedmen, Causes of the Exodus, etc. (Norwich, Conn.: Press of the Bulletin Company, 1881); Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green (Formerly a Slave), Written by Himself (Springfield: L. M. Guernsey, I'NAEI Laborer's Book, 1843-47. The association store accounts begin on page 110 of this volume. Thanks to Steve Strimer for this information.

13The name under which the society applied for a charter was the "Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, for the Relief of Persons unlawfully held in Bondage, and for improving the condition of the African race." NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number Page 8 Northampton from Brooklyn, Connecticut, and with associates had purchased the assets of the Northampton Silk Company, which New York capitalist Samuel Whitmarsh had begun in Northampton in 1829; Whitmarsh had moved the company to Broughton's Meadow in outlying Lonetown in 1834.

A year before Benson's move, abolitionists Lydia Maria Child and her husband David had moved to the Broughton's Meadow area so that David could continue to experiment with the cultivation of sugar beets, a deliberate attempt to develop an alternative to sugar grown and processed by slave labor. By 1852, the Lonetown district was renamed Florence in honor of the Italian silk-producing city.'* The NAEI, which Benson and others incorporated in 1841, saw silk in the same light, as an alternative to cotton cultivated by the slave-labor system, in which northern textile mills were deeply complicit. Radical abolitionists of the day patronized free labor stores, ate confections made with "free sugar," and wore linen stockings.

The Northampton Association and Fugitives in Florence Founded about the same time as such other Massachusetts utopian communities as Hopedale, Fruitlands, and Brook Farm, the Northampton Association was dedicated to nonresistance, manufacture, nondenominationalism, temperance, education, and equal rights "without distinction of sex, color, or condition, sect or religion."'S In 1842, the year of its founding, Lydia Maria Child left her husband David in Florence to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York, and there she learned of the difficult situation of David Ruggles. Abandoned by several leading black abolitionists in New York City after a libel and monetary dispute in 1839, Ruggles was nearly blind and physically broken by other ailments. On 15 November 1842 David Lee Child went before the NAEI to ask that Ruggles be admitted as a member.

The association resolved that Benson should invite him "to come amongst us and remain with us" until the members had a chance to come to know him "and his circumstances." Ruggles was soon afterward admitted. About 1845, with the assistance of Northampton's Payson Williston and his son J. Payson Williston, Ruggles purchased the "oil-mill house" where David Lee Child had processed sugar beets and converted it to a water (continued) Folder 1, Series B, Austin Collection of Moses Brown Papers, Archives of New England Yearly Meeting of Society of Friends, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence. "Charles A. Sheffield, The History of Florence, Massachusetts, 1657-1894, Including a Complete Description of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (Florence, MA: n.p., 1895), 14, 23.

"Christopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 15-29. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number Page 9 cure, believed to be the first hydropathic hospital in the United States. Florence was equally well if not better known for its water cure, which endured until the late 1860s, long after the NAEI dissolved in 1846. Benson also had a direct connection with once-enslaved New Yorker Sojourner Truth (Isabella Van Wagenen), a resident of Florence from 1843 through about 1857.

In the former year Truth visited the association and, though not impressed at first glance, was persuaded to stay overnight. She came to feel that in the Northampton Association, her amanuensis wrote, "all was characterized by an equality of feeling, a liberty of thought and speech, and a largeness of soul, she could not have before met with, to the same extent, in any of her wanderings." Truth worried, as she had perennially, about supporting herself, especially now that "labor, exposure and hardship had made sad inroads upon her iron constitution, by inducing chronic disease and premature old age." Yet, her narrative notes, she was somewhat less anxious in Florence, for she "remained under the shadow of one,* who never wearies in doing good, giving to the needy, and supplying the wants of the destitute." This "one," the asterisk explains, was George W. Benson.

17 She too became an NAEI member, and at some point between 1846 and 1850, when she was able to purchase her own home in Florence with the assistance of NAEI founder Samuel L. Hill, Truth lived in Benson's home. In early May of the same year that Truth settled in Florence, the fugitive Stephen C. Rush was accepted as a one-week visitor to the association. Five days later he was "unanimously invited to consider the Community his home for the present." William Lloyd Garrison, who with his family was spending that summer in Florence in a small cottage near the association, identified Rush as a fugitive in his Liberator after that year's West Indian Emancipation celebration.

"He said that he was induced to run away by hearing of Latimer's case; and that as Massachusetts had given succor and protection to George Latimer, he thought he would try his luck in the same manner," Garrison wrote, "He was also induced the more readily to escape, by hearing his master and other slaveholders cursing the abolitionists, of whom he formed a high opinion from that circumstance." By early November 1843, after undergoing what seems to have been six months of probation, Rush (continued) I'Hill, "Florence." "Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850; reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 72-73. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No.

1024-0018 Section number Page 10 was admitted a member of the Northampton Association. Active, with Ruggles, in local antislavery meetings in 1844, Rush left the NAEI and Florence in April 1846; nothing more is yet known of him. The Benson family had been involved in issues of racial equality since the early 1830s. From his retirement home in Brooklyn, Connecticut, Benson's father, though in his early eighties, was reelected president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1834. The year before, he had played a central role in the defense of Prudence Crandall in nearby Canterbury when townspeople violently attempted to close the school she had opened for young women of color. At that point, the Reverend Samuel J. May, also of Brooklyn and well documented for his fugitive assistance in Connecticut and upstate New York, began his Underground Railroad work.

According to Connecticut Underground Railroad historian Horatio Strother, the Crandall affair also impelled the Benson family to begin to raise money to support fugitive escapes. By 1845 the silk manufacturing venture was on shaky ground, and, with other investors, Benson acquired the factory as well as ninety acres of land and half of the company's debt. He incorporated a new venture, Bensonville Manufacturing Company, and with the help of the brothers Samuel and J. Payson Williston, the latter a well-known abolitionist and reputed fugitive assistant, converted the operation to cotton manufacturing. Benson stayed with the company only until 1848, but it is possible that Basil Dorsey worked for Benson by 1845. The Hampshire Gazette stated that after the Dorsey family's move to Northampton, Basil Dorsey "worked for Mr.

Benson, a brother-in-law of (continued) "Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 322-24; Liberator, 2 August 1843. 1On May, the Bensons, and fugitives in Brooklyn, see Horatio Strother, The Underground Railroad in Connecticut (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 134: "The Brooklyn agents who raised the funds for this refugee included George Benson, a man named Whitcomb, and others. They were working in the tradition established by the Reverend Samuel J. May, who as early as 1834 was receiving fugitives at this town and sending them across the state line to Uxbridge or Worcester." Strother's reference, somewhat puzzling given the dates in the quote, are "First Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the New England Anti-Slavery Society" (Boston, 1833), 13-14; and W.

Sherman Savage, , "The Controversy over the Distribution of Abolition Literature, 1830-1860" (Washington, 1938), 9. Thanks to Steve Strimer for this information. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 11 William Lloyd Garrison." The newspaper noted that Dorsey worked "as a teamster, first as an employee of the cotton-mill company, and latterly as a general jobber.

He has always done the teaming for the cotton mill."20 In the fall of 1846 Bensonville Manufacturing Company plotted house lots on the hill northeast of its factory on the Mill River in Florence, and on 12 November 1849 the company, through Samuel Williston, its president, sold Basil Dorsey lot 12 in Bensonville for thirty-five dollars.?' The house was standing by the time the federal census was taken in August 1850. At that time Dorsey and his family his second wife Cynthia and their three childrenshared their household with fifty-year- old Jacob Benson, his thirty-two-year old wife Elizaboth, like Dorsey, born in Maryland - and their one-year-old daughter, born in Massachusetts.' Presumably because the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had stimulated a rash of captures and arrests of known and presumed fugitives, Dorsey's friends then raised funds to purchase his freedom.

The Hampshire Gazette noted the action was "against the wishes of many of his friends, who didn't like to buy with money that freedom which God had endowed all men with; but as he sometimes visited Boston, Providence, and other cities, in his teaming business, it was feared he might, when away from home be made a subject for the fugitive slave law, and be hurried back to slavery. So it was deemed best to pay the price demanded and thus make his freedom secure." The Gazette stated that the purchase occurred in 1850 for two hundred dollars, Dorsey himself contributing fifty dollars. But Swarthmore College dean Elizabeth Powell Bond, who spoke at (continued) 2°Clark, Communitarian Moment, 159; "Basil Dorsey," Hampshire Gazette. Arthur G. Hill, son of NAEI founder Samuel L.

Hill, wrote of Dorsey, "He brought the cotton bales from the Northampton railroad station and took thither the finished cloth for shipment to the outer world. He had a powerful pair of lungs and on the road from Northampton with a load of bales, he would commence yelling at the eastern slope of Nonotuck St. when the people at the mill would open doors and prepare to receive his load." A. G. Hill, "Florence the Mecca [sic] Sanctuary of the Colored Race," Arthur G. Hill Papers, Forbes Library, Northampton. Hill had crossed out "mecca," evidently feeling "sanctuary" the more appropriate descriptor. 2'Hampshire County Deeds 115:360 and 130:464-65. "It is tempting to speculate, as Strimer of the Florence History Project suggests, that the Bensons too were fugitives assisted by George Benson, and that they adopted his surname in recognition of that fact.

NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 12 Dorsey's funeral, stated in the 1890s that she found among her papers "the printed bill of sale" between Thomas Sollars and the Philadelphia attorney George Griscom for Dorsey, in the amount of 150 dollars, signed on 14 May 1851.2 Griscom must then have manumitted Dorsey through the Maryland courts. The family was living in the Bensonville house when, on 1 March 1852, Dorsey sold the land and the buildings on it to Selah B. Trask for eight hundred dollars.?

On the same day he bought from Trask other Florence property, on South Street (now Florence Road) between the house David Ruggles had lived in until his death in 1849 and the home of Henry Anthony, a man of color who had lived in Florence since as early as 1840.?S Trask himself lived in Dorsey's former Bensonville house for scarcely two years before selling it, on 1 April 1854, to Mary Jones, wife of Thomas H. Jones. Trask also held a mortgage bond on the property through 1 April 1858. The Jones Family in Florence A stevedore working in the port of Wilmington, North Carolina, Thomas H. Jones (1806-90) arranged for the escape of his free wife and her enslaved children and then his own escape in 1849, thirteen years after Basil Dorsey escaped from Maryland.

Jones, born to enslaved parents and raised on a plantation near Wilmington, was about nine years old when he was sold to a storekeeper in (continued) 2See Edward H. Magill, "The Underground Railroad," Friends Intelligencer 55 (1898): 181. Bond stated here that she "found among her papers the printed report of her discourse on the occasion," meaning Dorsey's funeral, "and in it I found the printed bill of sale." Christoper Densmore, curator of Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, did not find this report in Bond's papers, though he stated that a more thorough review of the collection may uncover it. See Densmore e-mail to Strimer. Thanks to Steve Strimer for a photocopy of the Magill article. 2*Hampshire County Deeds 142:488-89. 2Henry Anthony was a well-known fiddler in Florence.

He and his family may have been the "fugitives from injustice" living in the "shantee" on the farm Lydia Maria Child's father bought her in June 1840. Child described the Thanksgiving fiddle playing of "their colored man" and mentioned his wife and child in a letter to Anna Loring on 20 December 1840. In the spring of 1841 the Childs moved into this shanty, and Anthony's deed for property adjacent to Dorsey's is recorded soon afterward. Hill, "Florence," also mentions Anthony's fiddle playing. The 1850 census lists a Maryland birthplace for Anthony. Massachusetts native Hannah Randall, age forty-seven, lived in the Ruggles house, which had been moved from its original location. Randall worked at Ruggles's water cure, still in operation. 2Hampshire County Deeds 154:22-23.

NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 13 Wilmington. He then worked as a clerk and in domestic service. Jones married and had three children, but his family was taken from him when his wife's mistress moved to Alabama. Bereft and then himself again sold after 1829, Jones took a second wife, Mary R. Moore, who had three children of her own. He managed to raise the money to purchase and then free his new wife, but in 1849 he learned that plans were afoot to sell the children. Working with a white lawyer, Jones tried to push the North Carolina legislature to pass a special act to emancipate them.

When his efforts failed, in mid- to late June 1849 he somehow arranged for Mary and her children - all but her son Edward - to be sent by coastwise vessel to the Brooklyn, New York, home of Robert H. Cousins, an African American porter living on Jay Street. Born in Virginia, Cousins's wife Sarah had been born in North Carolina, and in his home in 1850 was the 74-year-old Elizabeth Jones, also born in North Carolina. Then, in August of the same year, Jones paid the steward of the turpentine brig Bell eight dollars to stow him away. At sea the brig's captain discovered him, but rough weather prevented returning Jones until the vessel was near New York. When the captain went ashore to arrange Jones's rendition and the mate aboard was otherwise occupied, Jones fabricated a rude raft and escaped from the Bell.

Though the mate set out after him, a friendly vessel rescued Jones and brought him to Cousins. "The Sabbath after my arrival in Brooklyn, I preached in the morning in the Bethel: I then came on to Hartford," Jones wrote in his narrative, issued in numerous editions under several slightly different titles. "A gentleman kindly paid my passage to that place, and sent me an (continued) 2Thanks to Jim Driscoll of the Queens (NY) Historical Society for the information that Cousins was black. Driscoll's search of the Hearnes' Brooklyn City Directory for 1853-54 found that Cousins then had a clothing store and barber shop at 9 Linden Row and was living at 9 Jay Street, the same address at which he was listed in the 1850-51 city directory.

Driscoll notes that this section of Brooklyn was an African American neighborhood and the home of the Bridge Street African American church, to which Cousins was connected, as well as the Concord Street Baptist Church, also African American. The 1850 census shows five others within several households of Cousins with North Carolina birthplaces. In a 11 July 1849 letter to his wife reprinted in his several narratives, Thomas H. Jones wrote, "Tell brother Robert H. Cousins that he must pray for me; for I long to meet him one time more in this world." Jones had a sister named Sarah, but his narratives state that she was the last sibling to be sold away from his family and that he did not know where she was. His narratives do not state the name of his mother but imply that she died before he left North Carolina.

In the record of his third marriage, in 1867 in New Bedford, MA, Jones stated that his parents were Tony and Grace Kirkwood, though at the time of his fourth marriage in 1882 he stated his parents names as Henry and Grace with no surname. Thanks to Carl J. Cruz of New Bedford for this marriage data. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 14 introduction to a true-hearted friend. I stayed in Hartford twenty-four hours; but finding I was pursued, and being informed that I should be safer in Massachusetts than in Connecticut, I came on to Springfield, and from thence to Boston, where I arrived, penniless and friendless, the 7th of October.

By preaching and receiving contributions at several Boston churches, Jones was able to bring his family there, and by 1850 he and his family moved to Salem. He had preached at least once at the Free Evangelical Church in Danvers, adjacent to Salem, and the town was home to the family of John, Charles Lenox, and Sarah Remond, well-known African American abolitionists. The 1850 Salem census enumeration shows Thomas Jones, age forty-four, with his wife Mary, seven-year-old daughter Mary C., five-year-old son John, and three-year-old son Alexander. The 1851 Salem city directory lists the Rev.

Thomas Jones at 10 High Street Court - the African American section of town popularly known as "Roast Meat Hill." In the census Thomas and Mary Jones claimed Massachusetts as the place of birth for the entire family, though they were all born in North Carolina; the subterfuge, certainly not uncommon among documented fugitives, must have stemmed from Jones's continued anxiety over the possibility of pursuit.?9 The threat Jones perceived remained high and was no doubt elevated after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850. In May 1851 he left his family in Salem and escaped to the Canadian Maritimes, where he presented a series of antislavery lectures in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and drummed up subscriptions for Garrison's Liberator.

"Quite free from terror, I now feel that my bones are a property bequeathed to me for my own use," he wrote to his friend and supporter, the abolitionist Daniel Foster, shortly after his arrival in Canada, "and not for the servitude or gratification of the white men, in that gloomy and sultry region, where the hue of the (continued) 28Thomas H. Jones,The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years. Written by a Friend, as Given to Him by Brother Jones (Worcester, MA: Henry J. Howland, 1857), 47. "Jones often gave census enumerators different information about his place of birth. In 1860 he (or his wife) told Worcester enumerators he didn't know where he was born. In 1880, then a widower living in New Bedford, he stated he was born in Virginia. In records of his third and fourth marriages he stated his birthplace as North Carolina.

Jones did not state a place of birth in any of the three narratives surveyed in this research. Peter Ripley et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 2, Canada, 1830-1865 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 134 n.4, states that Jones was born to slave parents outside Wilmington, NC. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 15 skin has left my race in thraldom and misery for ages." In 1852 he and his wife learned that her son Edward's freedom could be purchased for 850 dollars, at which point Mary began a fund-raising campaign in and around Boston, and Jones turned the full energy of his lecturing effort to that cause.

His wife and one of her children joined him in Nova Scotia for a time, but by the time Jones returned to the United States in 1854 Mary Jones had already entered into a contract with Trask for the purchase of Basil Dorsey's former property. 30 Unlike Basil Dorsey, who was a relatively permanent and long-lived fixture in Florence, Jones's presence in Florence as elsewhere to that point was intermittent. "Rev. Thomas H. Jones made this his headquarters during the intervals between his preaching and lecturing tours," Arthur G. Hill recalled. "He lived on Nonotuck Street, second house from Cross Hill.

He had in his lectures, handcuffs, yokes, chains, whips and gags as exhibits of the cruelty of the slaveholder."3 Like Dorsey, Jones shared the Nonotuck Street dwelling with another family, identified in the state census as Thomas Washington, an African American farmer born in Maryland, and Laura Washington, born in Connecticut. Jones and his family left Florence in 1859 and settled in Worcester. In 1865 Mary Jones and her sons John and Alexander may have been in Boston's fifth ward. But by 1867, Mary evidently having died, Thomas Jones and possibly some of the children moved to New Bedford, where directories list him as a lecturer and minister until his death in 1890.32 3°C. Peter Ripley et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 2, Canada, 1830-1865 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 133-35.

Jones's letter to Foster was published in the Liberator, 30 May 1851.The date of Mary Jones's bond with Trask is 1 November 1853; Hampshire County Deeds 154:22-23. 3'Hill, "Florence." 32 In 1861 Thomas H. Jones is listed in the Worcester directory as living at 13 Austin Street; in 1862 the directory showed him at 18 Chandler Street. A block apart, the streets run parallel to Park Avenue in the city's seventh ward. In the 1865 Boston census, a Mary Jones with sons of the correct names and ages is shown running a boardinghouse; see fifth ward, household 236, family 374, Massachusetts state census. On 7 September 1867, Thomas H. Jones married Mrs. Anna Campbell in New Bedford; it is listed as a second marriage for both, though it was technically Jones's third. Jones was listed as sixty years old, from North Carolina, and the son of Tony and Grace Kirkwood.

Campbell was thirty-three, from Virginia, and the daughter of Matton (?) and Nancy; no surname was shown in the record. George B. Richmond of the city's YMCA stated in a letter dated 20 November 1869 that he had known Jones for the "past two years"; see Thomas H. Jones, The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years. Written by a Friend, As Related to Him by Brother Jones (New Bedford: E. Anthony & Sons, 1885). On 20 December 1882 Jones married again to Lavina Russell Leslie of Boston, born in Bridgetown Nova Scotia. It was her second marriage. Jones's will names her as his widow and his other heirs as a son William H. Moore of Wilmington, NC, a son Alexander A.

NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 16 Role of Florence in the Underground Railroad Northampton, of which Florence is a part, was a demographic anomaly in the general African American experience in Massachusetts. In general, people of color, before and after the Civil War, gravitated to the commonwealth's largest port cities, not to its inland cities or its smaller towns. In 1855, 3,768 people of color were listed as living in Boston and New Bedford combined and made up, respectively, 3.7 and 8.1 percent of each city's total population. Thirty-eight percent of the state's black population lived in these two cities in 1855.

Away from the coast, only 282 people of color lived in Lowell and Worcester, whose economies were largely based on manufacturing; industrial jobs were virtually unavailable to blacks throughout the 19" and well into the 20th century. The population of Lowell, with 37,554 people one of the largest cities in the state, was only 0.2 % black; Worcester, at 22,286, was 0.9% of color. Nearly 3.0 % (399 persons) of the 1855 population of Springfield (13,788 in 1855) was black. Northampton at that time was home to 5,819 people, of whom 124, or 2.1 %, were people of color.33 Westfield and Greenfield, towns of roughly similar population size in the Connecticut River Valley, together counted only thirty-six persons of color among their residents in 1855.

Springfield's relative attraction may be explained by its size and corresponding economic prominence in the Connecticut River corridor coupled with the existence of a both an active group of white fugitive assistants, organized as the Emigrant Aid Society, and the militant United States League of Gileadites, which the famed John Brown organized in 1852 among African Americans to help fugitives avoid recapture. Northampton, however, was small and not commercially significant in relative terms, nor was it formally organized for fugitive assistance. Northampton's A. G. Hill believed Florence was a "sanctuary" to people of color because of its liberal sentiments: (continued) Jones of Dixon, IL, and a daughter Mary Catherine Bond of Newport, RI.

There is no mention of John, who may have predeceased him, and it may be that William Moore was "Edward," the son whom the Joneses tried to purchase from slavery; it is not known whether their efforts succeeded or failed. Jones's will is Probate #6717, Bristol County Register of Probate, New Bedford, MA. Lavina Jones died at age 85 at her niece's hosue in Onset, MA, in late August 1924. Thanks again to Carl Cruz for the information on Jones's last two wives. 33 Francis DeWitt, comp., Abstract of the Census of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Taken with References to Facts Existing on the First Day of June 1855, with Remarks on the Same (Boston: William White, 1857).

NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 17 The North and the South of the United States battled long over the right to hold the colored people in slavery. Many people, politicians, statesmen and clergymen alike weakly knuckled to the arrogance of the South, while the colored fugitives from barbaric treatment found little comfort or safety in Northern towns or cities....

When the Bensonville associates reached their field of cooperative labors, each of them feeling that the brotherhood of man included all of whatever color or shape of head, early made it known that here at any rate was a house of refuge for the ill-treated wanderer whether from Southern slavery or Northern barbarity. Many residents of color therefore soon made this their home and were fraternally greeted and guarded. 4 Hill was speaking only of Florence; Northampton itself was not esteemed among abolitionists.

When Lydia Maria Child moved there in 1838, she called the "state of abolition" in the town "lifeless enough." In a letter later the same year to the abolitionist lecturer and fugitive assistant Abigail Kelley she wrote, "This town is a great resort for Southerners in the summer season; and never in my life have I witnessed so much of the lofty slave-holding spirit." Five years later, in 1843, the Hampshire Gazette noted that David Ruggles, a "black man," had chaired a Northampton antislavery meeting. The Gazette declared it "not in very good taste or, at any rate, was not so regarded in this community, and we do not think it good policy to offend the taste of any community, in any way, when there is no necessity for it." The newspaper went on to report that "a colored man, who has recently escaped from slavery" also addressed the meeting.

"Such speeches if speeches they may be called - can do no good. It was mere jargon, uttered in a tone and manner that was truly distressing. Such persons should be taught to confine themselves to the simple tale of their history, and not attempt to exhort.35 (continued) 3'Hill, "Florence." 35 Child, Northampton, to Caroline Weston, 27 July 1838; Child, Northampton, to Abigail Kelley, 1 October 1838, in Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880, eds. Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 79-80, 89-91; Hampshire Gazette, 8 August 1843. This fugitive may have been Stephen C. Rush, who came to Florence that year.

NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 18 Yet in 1843, the same year that the local newspaper looked askance at African American participation in local antislavery meetings, the racial climate in Florence received an opposite evaluation from a visiting schoolteacher. Sophia Foord, who came to Florence from Dedham, Massachusetts, to teach in the NAEI's Educational Department, wrote in May 1843 to her friend Robert Adams, who shortly became a key fugitive assistant in Fall River, 'This is becoming, or has already become quite a depot for fugitives - one left here on Thursday & another arrived the day following who will probably tarry a short time.

He is quite intelligent, speaks of having been kindly treated by a Mr. Adams of Providence some day last week, who it is presumed is your father. - He says the slaves escape so frequently that their masters say the Abolitionists must have a rail road under ground; that many more would run away were it not for the belief they are taught to cherish, that abolitionists at the North would treat them [rest of sentence missing]."3 The arrival Foord described was probably Stephen C. Rush. Arthur G. Hill, born in 1841 in an extant Federal-style house in Broughton's Meadow, recalled, "A good many passengers stopped "five minutes for refreshments' at my father's, and conductors were often changed here. On a few trips I was either conductor or assistant conductor.

Quite a number of the through passengers temporarily took up their abode in Florence, the balmy anti-slavery climate here proving very attractive to them." Hill also recalled that Josiah Henson, who like Harriet Tubman returned to the South to assist others in their escapes from slavery, also stopped at Samuel L. Hill's Florence home. Hill had also helped Sojourner Truth buy her Florence home and put his son Arthur to the task of copying Truth's narrative of her life, taken down by "a kind lady in another town," and printing it in pamphlet form. Hill also remained in the silk business when Benson had turned to cotton. He developed "machine twist," a silk thread smooth and strong enough that home sewing machines could use it successfully, and upon its basis the silk industry became Northampton's largest employer through 1874. Samuel L.

Hill moved to a new home in Florence (extant on 31 Maple Street) probably by late 1845, and Austin and Fidelia Ross bought the Hill property when the Northampton Association (continued) 36Sophia Foord, Northampton, to Robert Adams, 8 May 1843, private collection. Thanks to Steve Strimer for this information and citation. 37 A. G. Hill to Joseph Marsh, 31 January 1893, reproduced in Sheffield, History of Florence, 166. Hill appears not to have owned what is now known as the Ross Homestead outright. The Northampton Associated owned title to the property when Austin and Fidelia Ross bought it. Steve Strimer, e-mail to author, 4 February 2004. NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No.

1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 19 collapsed in 1846. From the same area of northeastern Connecticut as Hill, Benson, and Ruggles, Ross had been dismissed from the Presbyterian church in Chaplin, Connecticut because of the strength of his antislavery sentiment, and he had come to Florence in 1845 to farm and to teach in the NAEI school. Nineteenth-century local historian Charles Shefffield stated that the fugitive "Wilson" lived on the Ross farm for a year and a half. This James Wilson worked as a night watchman after 1850 at what was then known as the Greenville (formerly Bensonville) Manufacturing Company, where Basil Dorsey continued to work as a teamster. 38 A. G. Hill remembered him: Before the decision of Justice Taney and its results, Wilson a fugitive arrived here.

He decided to remain here, became a laborer, lived on Nonotuck St., got together a little money tramped back to Virginia to try to rescue his son from slavery. After a few months he appeared with his son. Leaving him he went back to get his daughter. He was captured and kept in slavery again for several months. He again escaped and arrived here with his daughter when the three started for Canada to happily breathe the air of freedom. The Williston family were probably not the only ones to hire fugitives in Florence. According to Sheffield, apparently based in part on the reminiscence of A. G. Hill, A. P. Critchlow employed fugitives in his factory, which produced cases for daguerreotypes. One, whose name was given only as "French," worked there until his claimant or an agent named King came to the water cure seeking him.

Critchlow stayed with French at the factory for a few nights until the pursuant left Florence to look for French elsewhere. Hill noted that the 1857 Dred Scott Case - in which U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney declared that African Americans "had no rights which the white man is bound to respect" - (continued) 38 "The Leading Citizens of Hampshire County, Massachusetts," Biographical Review (Boston: Biographical Review Publishing Company, 1896), 364. Strimer of the Florence History Project states that Wilson was a member of the NAEI. 3'Hill, "Florence." 40 Arthur G. Hill, Florence, Mass., 31January 1893, to Mr. Marsh, Siebert Notebooks; Sheffield, History of Florence, 167.

Sheffield, 220, also stated that Critchlow "connected with the local station of the underground railroad." NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 20 "frightened the fugitives who had been drawn here by the anti-slavery sentiment of the palce, so that they soon after migrated to Canada in which country the Dred Scott decision had no power. This place then became a station on the so-caller under-ground railroad for transporting the fugitives to Canada," Hill wrote. There may have been a decline in the overall black population of Northampton between 1855 and 1860, but there was a slight increase between1855 and 1865, from 108 to 125 persons.

In addition, the proportion claiming to have been born in a slave state rose as well, from 5.6% of all persons of color in the town to 11.1%. In truth, their numbers are small. Only seven persons of color stated that they were born in southern states in 1855 - the cook Robert Wright from Virginia; the barber George W. Brown, living in the same household; Henry Anthony, of Maryland; Basil Dorsey, who lived about a quarter-mile down the road from Anthony; Thomas H. and Mary Jones, who lived in Dorsey's former home with their two children, the latter of whom did not claim southern birthplaces; and the Maryland-born farmer Thomas Washington, who lived with his wife in Jones's household. Sojourner Truth was nearby.

The Dorsey - Jones House represents what, at least at this stage of Underground Railroad research, an uncommon artifact - a dwelling built for one fugitive and occupied by two in a small Massachusetts community dedicated to and shaped by a commitment to racial equality and distinguished by its location on a documented path of fugitive movement. Moreover, a number of properties associated with Florence's fugitives and Underground Railroad activists survive, while others may be extant and are being researched. The home and farm of Austin and Fidelia Ross, in which they lived from 1845 into the 1890s and where Samuel L. and Arthur G. Hill also lived, is extant at 123 Meadow Street. The house to which the Hill family moved in 1845, which A.G. Hill occupied until 1926, survives at 31 Maple Street.

The house to which Basil Dorsey and his family moved in 1852, and where they remained for the next twenty years stands on 4 Florence Road; further, at 47 Florence Road, is the home David Ruggles occupied from 1846 to 1849 and where (though the building was moved from its original site) the African American water cure employee Hannah Randall and her family lived from 1856 to 1882. The house Sojourner Truth lived in from 1850 to 1857 is actually enclosed in a two-story home on Park Street; its stone foundation, timber frame and floor joists remain in their original locations. Henry Anthony, quite possibly one of the "fugitives from injustice" living in the now-destroyed "shantee" to which the Childs moved when they first settled in Florence in 1841, lived in a house that still stands at 48 Spring Street.

(continued) NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number Page 21 Research needs to establish whether other properties in Florence have sound associations with the Underground Railroad. The home of George W. Hodestia and his wife Laura, at 9 Florence Road, for example, is extant; his gravestone states that he was "born a slave in Maryland," but shether he was a fugitive is not yet known. A dwelling at 615 Riverside Drive may have been where George W. Benson lived from 1841 to 1850 and also where Sojourner Truth stayed before she bought her Florence Home.

The homes of abolitionists Seth Hurd, Elisha Hammond (who painted the well- known portraits of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, the former in Florence, in 1844), and Hall Judd - all of whom have been legendarily connected to the Underground Railroad - survive, but specific instances of fugitive assistance have so far not been uncovered for these individuals. Later history of Dorsey-Jones House (1859-present) After Thomas H. and Mary Jones had moved to Worcester, they sold the property to Lee Claflin of Hopkinton, Middlesex County for 500 dollars in 1859.4 Claflin's identity is unknown as well as his real estate interests in Florence. Four years later Claflin sold the house and lot to A. Lyman Williston for 1100 dollars.

.42 Williston was the overseer of the Greenville Manufacturing Company, successor to the Benson concern, and he was re-consolidating the old Bensonville subdivision into a single large parcel to provide the setting for a new villa he was constructing on Pine Street at the top of the hill. It was his grandfather and father, Payson and J. Payson Williston, respectively, who helped David Ruggles purchase the oil mill house for his water cure enterprise in 1845. A map of Florence published in 1873 depicts the large Williston house and barn along Pine Street and the Dorsey - Jones House on Nonotuck Street amid a row of cottages labeled as owned by the Greenville Manufacturing Company.43 A lithographic birds-eye view of Florence published in 1879 pictures the large Gothic-revival villa and barn along with a dwelling that appears to be the Dorsey - Jones House with a small barn of its own.

44 The depiction also indicates that most of the dwellings identified along Nonotuck Street on the 1873map had been cleared from the scene. Although it was evidently protected from this fate, it is apparent from the existing conditions in the house that no particular alterations weremade to it at this time. (continued) 4' Hampshire County Deeds, 188:77 (18 August 1859). 42 Hampshire County Deeds, 213:189 (1 June 1863). 43 F. W. Beers, Atlas of Hampshire County, Mass. (1873). 44 Galt and Hoy, Map of Florence, Mass. (1878). NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number Page 22 By 1881 Williston had moved to Round Hill, and he sold the property to Mary S.

Mann in 1884.45 She was the daughter of Samuel L. Hill, who with George W. Benson was a founder of the Northampton Association of Industry and Education. By the time the next map of Florence was published in 1895, Williston's mansion had been damaged by fire and relocated to the north side of Pine Street where it was renovated into a new residence and sold. The large barn was demolished. The remaining dwellings on Nonotuck Street were not affected. Mary S. Mann died with the larger property containing the Dorsey - Jones House still in her possession around 1904. In that year, her son Samuel H. Mann conveyed his half interest in the property to his brother Charles A. Mann, who in 1919 sold it to the Nonotuck Silk Company, more or less restoring it to the factory. At some point during the next five years, the business was renamed the Corticelli Silk Company.

Northampton directories indicate that the Dorsey - Jones House (191 Nonotuck Street) was rented to a variety of tradesmen and factory workers during this period. No one name remained associated with the house for long. There does not appear to be any significant changes made to the house for or by these tenants before 1925 when the Corticelli Silk Co. platted a new subdivision of the Mann estate.* The old lots laid out for Bensonville in 1846 were voided and new, larger lots created. The Dorsey - Jones House was contained in Lot No. 33 of the new plan. The small barn pictured on earlier maps had been removed. This lot was sold to John P.

Burke, an employee of the Pro- Phy-Lac-Tic Brush Company, and his wife Evelyn Burke in 1925.48 It is suspected that hot-water heat and electricity was installed in the house, a bathroom created in the pantry in the east end of the kitchen wing, and the dining room refurbished either by the Corticelli Silk Co. to improve the house for the sale or by the Burkes themselves. In 1930 the Burkes sold the house to Emma M. Cantin.* She was employed as a clerk at the Corticelli Silk Company. According to the city directories for the period, Cantin continued to live with her parents (her father was also employed by the company) and rented the house to at least three tenants; of longest duration was Francis R. Wilkinson, a brushmaker at Pro-Phy-Lac-Tic. (continued) 45 Northampton Directory, 1881; Hampshire County Deeds, 387:437 (15 May 1884).

4° Hampshire County Deeds, 579:253 (15 February 1904); 752:361 (17 November 1919). 47 Hampshire County Plan Book 5, page 10. 48 Hampshire County Deeds, 818:35 (18 August 1925); Northampton Directory. 49 Hampshire County Deeds, 863:35 (5 May 1930). NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 23 Havelock J. Purseglove, Jr. and his wife, Anne, bought the property from Cantin in 1942.5° In 1944 when Purseglove returned home from the Second World War, they quickly replaced the old six- over-six vertical sliding sashes of windows in the principal rooms of the house with one-over-one sashes.

They laid oak flooring in the front parlor and entranceway and removed the old balustrade and replaced risers and treads on the stairs. Havelock J. Purseglove, Jr. died unexpectedly from a war-related illness shortly after these improvements were completed in 1945. A decade later, his widow made substantial changes to the kitchen wing. The kitchen was expanded into the old wood shed by enlarging the opening in the interior partition between them and by enclosing a portion of the porch, demolishing a portion of the front exterior wall, to create a pantry. At the same time the rear wall of the old pantry space behind the wood shed was pushed out to enlarge the bathroom that had already been added there. New windows were installed, and porches were constructed in the front and rear of the wing. Then the entire house was sided with wide aluminum clapboards to conceal the alterations.

This was reputedly the first instance of aluminum siding in Florence. The small porch that had sheltered the main entrance of the house since its construction was removed when the siding was installed, and a concrete deck extending across the entire width of the upright section was built.!! Anna J. Purseglove purchased Lot No. 34 to the east of her property in 1954, and she partitioned it and sold the eastern half to her neighbor in 1969.2 She sold the house and lots to Russell G. Andrus of Northampton in the same year." Andrus was responsible for installing the sheet paneling in the entrance passage and the new surfaces on the walls, floor and ceiling of the rear chamber on the ground floor.

In this latter action, demolished the partition creating the closet on the north wall of that room and blocked the doorway from the rear chamber into the parlor, creating a bookcase on the parlor side to disguise it. The present owner, Richard Costello of Hadley purchased the property from Andrus in 2001.54 (continued) 50 Hampshire County Deeds, 970:7 (24 September 1942). 51 Personal communication with Havelock J. Purseglove, III, 13 January 2004. 52 Hampshire County Deeds, 1161:315 (23 February 1954); 1558:651 (29 August 1969) and Plan Book 17, page 64. 53 Hampshire County Deeds, 1558:67 (29 August 1969) 54 Hampshire County Deeds, 6325:48 (15 August 2001).

NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number Page 24 He has gutted the kitchen wing in anticipation of renovating the house for tenants. He has learned of the historic significance of the property and is now consulting with preservationists to plan the further rehabilitation of the building. Integrity The alterations to the wing section of the house, the removal of the decorative porch over the main entrance, and the containment of original wood clapboard siding, corner boards, and friezes under aluminum siding have deprived this house of the luster of its original exterior finishes.

Yet the distinctive form of the Upright-and Wing dwelling type is still clearly discernable, and its image outwardly conveys the modest but respectable economic and social status the two fugitives and their integration into the community. Restrained Greek Revival-style embellishments are also adequately visible to associate this house with the period of significance and the level of workmanship invested in affordable houses of the era. The interior plan and extant finishes provide distinguishing features that reinforce the associative integrity of the house to the notable individuals and the period of significance. The interior plan and finishes are sufficiently intact to indicate the living patterns and quality of life chosen by Basil Dorsey when he contracted to build the house.

The progressive aspects of the plan were intended to improve the living conditions of the laboring class evincing the modern dimension of the antislavery movement and the outlook of at least one fugitive. The feeling of Dorsey's presence in the house is palpable even with the damage done to the kitchen wing. Archaeological Significance Historic archaeological resources described above may contribute important information associated with African-American history and the Underground Railroad in Massachusetts. Important information may also exist related to the social, cultural, and economic lives of Basil Dorsey and Thomas H. Jones, both Fugitive slaves and later occupants of the house.

Comparative study of architectural features of the house combined with archaeological evidence of construction features, (continued) NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Section number 8 Page 25 renovations to the house, and evidence of stables and/or outbuildings may identify spatial and structural characteristics similar to those in other areas of Massachusetts or the American South. The evidence indicated above might be used to characterize fugitive built and occupied dwellings in the Massachusetts and possibly northeastern region. The absence of stables and/or outbuildings on maps before and after 1895 may result from the lack of these representations on those maps.

The stables and/or outbuildings illustrated on the 1895 map of Florence may also indicate the structures are unrelated to fugitive occupancy of the house and period of significance. Detailed analysis of the contents of occupational related features may also contribute important social, cultural, and economic information related to the Dorsey-Jones occupancy of the house and fugitive occupancy of residential buildings in general. Cultural artifacts and macro-fossil evidence may exist that indicate associations with West African culture or the American South. In addition to material artifacts, evidence of dietary habits and pathologies may also exist. The information described above may help identify characteristics of fugitive occupied dwellings independent of documentary sources.

(end) NPS Form 10-900-a 1024-0018 (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA Section number 9 Page - 1 9. Major Bibliographical References "Basil Dorsey." Hampshire Gazette 81, 36, 2 April 1867. Beers, F. W. Atlas of Hampshire County, Mass. 1873. Clark, Christopher. The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge Of The Northampton Association. Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press, 1995. Fields, Barbara Jeanne. Slavery And Freedom On The Middle Ground: Maryland During The Nineteenth Century. New Haven, Ct, And London: Yale University Press, 1985. Galt and Hoy. Map of Florence, Mass. 1878. Hampshire County Deed and Plan Books. Hampshire Registry. Northampton, Ma. Hampshire Gazette (Microfilm).

Forbes Library, Northampton, Ma. Hill, A. G. "Florence The Meeca Sanctuary Of The Colored Race." Arthur G. Hill Papers, Forbes Library, Northampton, Ma. Jones, Thomas H. The Experience Of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was A Slave For Forty-Three Years. Written By A Friend, As Given To Him By Brother Jones. Worcester, Ma: Henry J. Howland, 1857. Joshua Leavitt Family Papers, Library Of Congress. Magill, Edward H. "The Underground Railroad." Friends Intelligencer 55 (1898): 124-25, 142-44, 159-61, 245, 276-77.

Expanded And Republished As "When Men Were Sold: Reminiscences Of (continued) NPS Form 10-900-a 1024-0018 (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA Section number Page 2 The Underground Railroad In Bucks County And Its Managers," A Collection Of Papers Read Before The Bucks County Historical Society 2 (1909): 493-520. Mayer, Henry. All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison And The Abolition Of Slavery. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Meltzer, Milton, and Patricia G. Holland, Eds. Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880. Amherst: University Of Massachusetts Press, 1982. Narrative Of Events In The Life Of William Green (Formerly A Slave), Written By Himself. Springfield: L. M. Guernsey, 1853.

Northampton Association Of Education And Industry Records, 1836-1853. American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Ma. Northampton Directory, 1881-1945. Forbes Library. Northampton, Ma. Sheffeld, Charles A. The History Of Florence, Massachusetts, 1657-1894, Including A Complete Description Of The Northampton Association Of Education And Industry. Florence, Ma: N.P., 1895. Siebert, Wilbur, Comp. The "Underground Railroad" In Massachusetts, Vol. 1. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Ma. Smedley, R. C. History Of The Underground Railroad In Chester And The Neighboring Counties Of Pennsylvania. Lancaster, Pa: Office Of The Journal, 1883. Smith, James Lindsay. Autobiography Of James L. Smith, Including, Also, Reminiscences Of Slave Life, Recollections Of The War, Education Of Freedmen, Causes Of The Exodus, Etc. Norwich, Conn.: Press Of The Bulletin Company, 1881.

(continued) NPS Form 10-900-a 1024-0018 (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No. DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co., MA Section number 9 Page 3 Strother, Horatio. The Underground Railroad In Connecticut. Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1962. Truth, Sojourner. Narrative Of Sojourner Truth.1850. Reprint. Mineola, Ny: Dover Publications, 1997. (end) DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Name of Property 10. Geographical Data Acreage of Property - less than one UTM References See continuation sheet. (Place additional UTM references on a continuation sheet) 1. 18 Zone 691840 Easting 4688950 Northing 2. Zone Easting Northing HAMPSHIRE CO., MASSACHUSETTS County, State 3. Zone 4.

Zone Easting Easting - See continuation sheet Northing Northing Verbal Boundary Description (Describe the boundaries of the property on a continuation sheet.) Boundary Justification (Explain why the boundaries were selected on a continuation sheet.) 11. Form Prepared By name/title Kathryn Grover & Neil Larson, preservation consultants, with Betsy Friedberg, NR Director, MHC organization Massachusetts Historical Commission date_April 2005 street & number220 Morrissey Blvd. telephone 617-727-8470 city or town Boston _ stateMA _zip code_02125 Additional Documentation Submit the following items with the completed form: Continuation Sheets Maps A USGS map (7.5 or 15 minute series) indicating the property's location. A sketch map for historic districts and properties having large acreage or numerous resources. Photographs Representative black and white photographs of the property.

Additional items (Check with the SHPO or FPO for any additional items) Property Owner (Completethis item at the request of the SHPO or FPO.) nameRichard Costello street & number 9 Lawrence Plain Road telephone 413-586-6472 city or town Hadley _state_ MA _ zip code 01035 Paperwork Reduction Act Statement: This information is being collected for applications to the National Register of Historic Places to nominate properties for listing or determine eligibility for listing, to list properties, and to amend existing listings. Response to this request is required to obtain a benefit in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act, as amended (16 U.S.C. 470 et seq.).

Estimated Burden Statement: Public reporting burden for this form is estimated to average 18.1 hours per response including the time for reviewing instructions, gathering and maintaining data, and completing and reviewing the form. Direct comments regarding this burden estimate or any aspect of this form to the Chief, Administrative Services Division, National Park Service, P.0. Box 37127, Washington, DC 20013-7127; and the Office of Management and Budget, Paperwork Reductions Project (1024-0018), Washington, DC 20503. NPS Form 10-900-a 1024-0018 (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet OMB Approval No. DORSEY - JONES HOUSE Underground Railroad in MA MPS Northampton, Hampshire Co.

MA Section number 10 Page 1 Verbal Boundary Description The nominated parcel is located in the Florence section of the City of Northampton on the north side of Nonotuck Street, three lots east of Maple Street with boundaries as indicated on the accompanying tax map. Boundary Justification The nominated parcel represents the current legal lot containing the historic house that is the subject of this nomination. The historic lot containing the house, created in 1846, was reconfigured in 1925 when new lots were surveyed for the existing subdivision. This lot was enlarged to its present size by two actions in 1954 and 1969. See the text of this nomination for more detail. (end) Photographs Photographer: Neil Larson, 2004 Negatives at: Massachusetts Historical Commission 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12 13. 14. 15. 16.

Exterior, view from SW Exterior, view from SE Exterior, view from NE Exterior, view W towards mill (house on right) Interior, ground floor, entry and stair passage Interior, ground floor, parlor view from stair passage Interior, ground floor, parlor, view towards stair passage Interior, ground floor, dining room, view towards rear chamber, stair passage on left Interior, ground floor, dining room, view towards kitchen Interior, second floor, stair passage Interior, second floor, front bed chamber, view from stair passage Interior, second floor, front bed chamber, view towards door to stair passage Interior, second floor, front bed chamber, detail of door latch Interior, second floor, NW bed chamber, view from closet Interior, kitchen wing, view towards dining room Interior, kitchen wing, view towards east end Figures, maps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Photograph of house, ca.

1952 Photograph of house, detail, ca. 1952 Florence map, 1860 Florence map, 1873 Bird's eye view of Florence, 1879 Florence map detail, 1895 Florence plan of lots, 1925 (end) DINING ROOM CHAMBER PARLOR GROUMD FLOOR BED CHAMBER. BCD CHAMBER BED CHAMBER SECOND FLOOR KITCHEN PANTRY WOOD SHED DN DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form Illustrations FIG. 3. Sketch floor plans (drawn by Neil Larson) N No scale DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form Illustrations FIG. 1. Photograph of house c. 1952 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form Illustrations FIG. 2. Photograph of house, detail, c. 1952 hranety Brnei ) D.Coughlin Nohovan T:Murpry HIGH SCHOO L Jas Nechan Vas. Shannon J.Ryan deWE.ST.

J.Ryan Las tatdien mGraie NONGTUCT SELIE MILL P.VºDorala ianatuco Suk eostine sinca Danie Brie R.Cole F.Connelt PBarlley FiBrition q.Murphu CatrsJ.Smith 8.MTss2 Daniels 10%JoBrien nN.Bartley E. Folcy 'SCANLAN HEAVE, * Roed PWalL° J scanlan VrsBurkett Tn (olie toaia Tas Cmners I. Walluce Wallace Thea J. Scanlan :W. Suellivanr Cag 6 RO'Brian wmOBrien D.DODonnelt D. Corbett NONOT SreaGreen R.Bco GR DOrs NONDTUER |D.MODonnelL PRS DOLES aaeaoiDanincll EDDavomnel 1538 FDarorar Jasiraten Y JCGeary RI wE Shunnor (13 - I Corbett 1.t:Weehan MIsM. S Mann Williston MusZetWhide 1. 1. Williston ABurke T De> HC A Mrs J.Shannon J. M/ann & 21-7ncr J.flayes I.Maher Vandy Fih cy B EACON=6? Mrs-F-honk Nrs1BODornell M. Haley ?Hcaly PLATE 1 1895 Mr S.S.

Hemz R.Graves MM Comey MresBurr DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form Iilustrations Map of Florence, detail, 1895 EXPLANATIONS. Easll Brick orStone buikdings J Prame huldings -Jstables, Jheds 8e #d breertioasen Pme tyetant ..Jener. (5)shaw's thetntignous Plate PART OF FLORENGE. Scale, 200 feet to an inch 12 110 STREET. SMAPLE 4.7235277 99.10 72.02. STREET 57.5 55.83 '"55 35 MANN 55.75 35 TERRACE 55%0 128.10 ic5 NONOTUCK BEACON 81.05 65.00 58.72 10.12 70.62 ® HALPIN 142.60 38°, STREET * RESERVGO OCONNELL 011 KEY - INDICATES IRON PIM 1925 :"STREET HERLIHY SHEA DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form Illustrations Plan of Lots, Mann Terrace, 1925 PLAN OF LOTS MANN TERRACE CORTICELLI SILK CO.

FLORENEEMASS FiFRi 21925 ezvisto -131 14.7 150 151 154 :A-152 :130 23A-277 127 162 100 50 81.5 234-276 0...

244 106.5 179 CURRENT 80.5 23A-153 120 135 157.9 23A-101 130 80.1 MAPLE ST 57 23A-256 98.65 66 23A-255 71.13 62.47 123.25 23A-254 90.35 132.73 160 67 75 89.56 60 23A-154 105.4 57.5 99.1 23A-252 59 5 101.46 23A-253 97.02 70 23A-155 66.8 65 80 95.9 23A-251 85 93.16 3587 97 51.16 60 73 60 115 167.6 23A-158 23A-159 68 140.42 23A-160 57.42 107.9 23A-156 155.33 72.42 50 133.1 55 74 23A-249 74 167.46 23A-250 118.26 74.9 40 23A-157 40 23A-309 95 55 MANN TERR 67 70 70 100 114.55 23A-247 23A-245 23A-243 102.65 76 70 66.06 81.56 70.32 121.33 113 23A-246 23A-244 128.1 81 70 130 87.4 238.202 159.49 23A-161 23A-162 78.66 60.24 65 65 138.19 23A-241 23A-240 126.37 75.32 66.06 50.7 .137.43 216.98 23A-242 141.16 -DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form BOUNDARY MAP City of Northampton Tax Map - Parcel No.

23A-250 / 150 74.2 UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES EVALUATION/RETURN SHEET REQUESTED ACTION: NOMINATION PROPERTY Dorsey--Jones House NAME: MULTIPLE Underground Railroad in Massachusetts MPS NAME : STATE & COUNTY: MASSACHUSETTS, Hampshire DATE RECEIVED: 7/20/05 DATE OF 16TH DAY: 8/25/05 DATE OF WEEKLY LIST: DATE OF PENDING LIST: 8/10/05 DATE OF 45TH DAY: 9/02/05 REFERENCE NUMBER: 05000931 REASONS FOR REVIEW: APPEAL: N OTHER: N PDIL: REQUEST: Y SAMPLE: DATA PROBLEM: N LANDSCAPE: N LESS THAN 50 YEARS: N PERIOD: N PROGRAM UNAPPROVED: N SLR DRAFT: N NATIONAL: COMMENT WAIVER: N ACCEPT RETURN REJECT 9/2/2005 DATE ABSTRACT/SUMMARY COMMENTS: N N N Nistornically signifiant home of two notable fuqtives who excaped from slavery RECOM.

/ CRETERIA Accept As B REVIEWER atuck Andrus DISCIPLINE Histarian TELEPHONE DATE 9/2/2005 DOCUMENTATION see attached comments Y/N see attached SLR Y/N If a nomination is returned to the nominating authority, the nomination is no longer under consideration by the NPS. DORSEY-JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St. Florence, Hampshire Co. MA Photo by Neil Larson, 2004 Neg. at. Massachusetts Histnical Comm. PHoToI : Extenor, vlew fram SN DORSEY-JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St. Florence, Hampshire Co. MA Photoby Neil Larson, 2004 Ney. at Massachuselts Hestoncal Comm. PHOTO 2: Exterion, view fram SE DORSEY-JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck st. Florence, Hampshire Co. MA Photo by Neil Larson, 2004 Neg. at Massachusetts Histoncal Comm. PHoTO 3: Exterio, view from NE DORSEY-JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St. Florence, Hampslire Co. MA Phato by Neil Larson, 2004 Neg. at Massachusetts Histonical Comm.

PHOTo 4: Extonor, iewu west towards mill fram house (on ight) DORSEY-JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuch St. Florence, Hampslire Co. MA Photo by Neil Larson, 2004 Neg. at Massachusetts His toncal Comm. pHoTO 5: Interior, ground floor, eutry and stair passage DORSET- JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St. Florence, Hampshire Co. MA Photo by Neil Larson, 2004 Neg. at Massachusetts Histoncal Comm. PHoTO 6: Interior, ground flor, parhr view frau stair passage DORSEY-JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St., Florence, Hampshie Co. Massachusetts Photo ky Neil Larson, 2004 Neg. at Massachusetts Histoncal Comm. PHoto 7: Interior, ground flom, partor, view towards stair passage DORSEY- JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St. Florence, Hampshive 6o. MA Photo by Neil Larson, - Lood Neg. at Massachusetts Histoncal Comm. PHoTo 8: Interior, ground floor, diningroom vlew towards rear chambes, stair pussage ou left.

DORSET- JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St. Floreuce, Hampshire Co. MA Ploto by Neil Larson, 2004 Ney. at Massachusitts Histoncil Corum, PHoTo 9: Interior, ground frow, dining room, vlew towands kitchen DORSEY JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St. Plovence, Hampshire Go. MA Phato by Neil Larsen, 2004 Neg. at Massachusetts Histoncal Comm. PHOTO 10: Interion, second floor, stuir passage DORSEY-JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St. Plorence, Hampshire Co, MA Ploto by Neil Larsen, 2004 Ney. at Massachusetts Histoncal Comm. PHoTO II : Iuteno, second flow, frnt bed chamher, view from stair passase DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St. Foreuce, Hampshire Co. N7 Photo by Neil Larson, LOOC Neg. at Massachusetts Histoncal Comm. PHoto 12: Iuterim, second fror, frout bed Chamber, view towands doar to stair passage DORSEY- JONES HOaSE 191 Nonotuck St. Florence, Hampshire Co. MA Phato by Neil Larsun, 2004 Neg.

at Massachuseth Histoncal Corum. PHoTo 13: Iuteno, second feoor, front bed chamher, detail of door latch DORSET- JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck St. Florence, Aampshire Co. MA Phato by NeilLarsen, 2004 Neg. at Massachusetts Histoncal Comm. PHoTo 14: Interion, second floor, Nw bed chamber, view from closet DORSET -JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotack St. Floreuce, Hampshire 6., MA Phsto by Neil Larson, 2004 Neg. at Massachuselts His toncal Corum. PHoto 15: Iuterur, Kutchen wing, view towards dinnig voom DORSEY-SONES HOUSE 191 Nonofach St. Flovence, Hampshire 6., MA thoto by Neil Larsm, 2004- Neg. at Massachusetts Hestoncal Grunussin 16: Interior, kutchen wing, vrew towards east end 14 Florence Business Notices Carpenters, Contractors and racton, Piae 81 aior aad aler, Mata Ifre ef Vlorenoe Band 3lir #k Manafr. Weat Elm B8 nsenre analinrdwnre vars, Fo. pepaetre in Iant.

scellnneons Bberfeli Mely Latnete Yoteon Deain oie, Dera Meal renoe Bewiut Ma A.Ross Res.g S. A. Bottum TrsIl Randall Ecmar s.Phep 1. Reerc gNes/Vecee ©R.Sechey Nor. d ) Washington W.J. Harner J.Warner d.Warner II. J. Warner Nrs /ortere C.L.Warien I/erl) mmis2 MYBTiC J.Bert S.Ilunt S.J.Borworth Res. Ab (c. Cg. FREE CONG: SOCIETY Vre Fink neifS - 1.Ross A.Ross GR" Miczcy (epie SENENE 19% ore & Caatte Zay riton Willer Whittlesey C.L. Graves J. Allen 6. Steziienso 1. Sheflerà S.1.Bottum Little. D.G. Litlefictd 100 L.A.Chase a.sakceg Greenville Nant: Co NOM9 ,. Hic »viu. J. Landy BBoanding lo. Greenville Manf. Co. n G.1. A. Sawyer 1873 NORTH PART OF FLORENCE TOWNoF NORTHAMPTON -Seale 400 Feet to the inch WX.

Afoore DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form Illustrations Map of Florence, 1873 Nes Haley 75 ioant R.C CE M T.Henshew A.Sawyer Nanuf" N.Sullivan =: ~ la 1- dustm Ross Gineroy ADorsel olomnell shona 1860 FLORENCE (NORTHAMPTON) 510 20 40 80 1o0ruds MrsBoswortlD WTait.on School KHartlelt hainng Ross il Corry Cemelery T-Oraves Scale 50rodstoun inch Lattorcromibio ilDady BClarko-e a-s.BoyoN DGLitlerida f.Main. -Col.T'Pomeroy Muchme Mehne Shsp -SAistin &Ginititen: /l. Stetbins TSParsons- Miss Bowers< "y'Swirt" AAssiny -DIves PP.Pond. 7 Graves J.BWhitehouse, 1 v Mrs Judd MrsHlWell.s-= 1Eldridge SIHill Kesidence otIavebaucns lood Vz.Hsuisgond 's.i.Till.

mintikins ,DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form Illustrations -L S.Parsorrs "Paris Map of Florence, 1860 II Smith limmock JItones ygilouse Shone School Greenvule! Maufa Co Bsshore" Dictory Stabtt *Bonriling House sy ColtaJ.Mill - Wood Shed. *lireenile ManfgC T Caluil Hracysteten Asidet -J, Haley ?Sidell J.Haley- - S Hill.Jr Hlidey. MoRened NuSerya/smuni L4. Jucarle" sHandal".MesH rotey .l'Rrillon. / Penn. wRice Mrs Bail! - at. Powert W.Sculzon Business Directory. 1Slarsons&Co.Dry Goods, Groccries &.e. ittlerictit Tarsons&:Co Manufacurerst lidmos Fldridge, "Curpenter & Builder: il, Smith, Carpenter å Joiner OMie over Is Parsons & Cós Store PI.Pond, Bpot & Shoe Maher Hunutnche Silk CoMantrs of Sewing sile D'Nachol, Merchant I'ailor Wanuftuturies a Florenco & Leeda. -Graves Brolk?,Luvery & F'eedung Stable Wells 8:Co.

Machinc Shap. ).Dr. Cha" Munde, Tropuictor of Water. IBWhwlehou Foremau at Littlefiela Pursoris 1 Cure Holel Ad Swit, #breman Nonotucle Sitk Co Scm' Hill Ju Nursery. 13 LandyBp D.Coughlin T.Nurphy JRyan J. Rvan -WEST J. Witmo *= - p ve Donala R.Cole ".Reed Prrall M. Sullivan Jar Mechan Tas. Shannon MErain F Connelt ,Bnitone Inthrigcrata Latrst Smith 78Ase2 Daniels nM.Bartley SOANLAN HEMUAVE. 1.Bartley J. Scanlan J. Scanlan WONGTOCT SEL MILL 1E NONOTUÓN Taylo, DGrilin anoDonnell OP.Datey oHertiny JaoDainell nasomietl Ine teen rallac aVallace JasMaten Shea i raglor wmOBrien D.DO Donnelt NONOTUCK Mrs.Str. S. Mann 1. T. Nechai iss y Hich JGGeary W.EShannor JShanron T S. Mann Vandy J.Hayer sMarp BEACON 63 Ns-Fihook Mri BAsE M.Haley P. Healy PLAID 1 1895 Mrs S.S.

Hemingway R.Graves iamty MresBurr B.FR DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form Illustrations Map of Florence, detail, 1895 EXPLANATIONS. F2l Brick or Stone building s.. Jerame outtdings &lStables, Sheds &c Green Houses Füe Kydrant sin.)Mater ipos-Sowers 5 Shows the Contignons Plate PART OF FLORENGE. Scale, 200 feet to an inch 12 10 STREET APLE 4733270 25 93 BEACON 81.03 STREET 57.5 55.83 57.42 MANN 55.75! ® 351 TERRACE ® 5a.72 PROPOsKO 70.12 ® 60.3 80.02 55 70 NONOTUCK 141.16 HALPIN STREET KEY niares lRon Pir OCONNELL 1925 "STREET -Id1P HERLIHY ® DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form Illustrations Plan of Lots, Mann Terrace, 1925 53 PLAN OF LOTS MANN TERRACE CORTICELLI SILK FLORENCEMASS cO. ScalElago PPPL 77925 REVISED MAY 26,19.

-131 14.7 150 1151 154 :A-152 130 23A-277 127 162 100 50 81.5 234-276 13273 264 106.5 179 CURRENT 80.5 23A-153 120 135 157.9 23A-101 130 80.1 MAPLE ST 23A-256 98.65 66 23A-255 71.13 62.47 123.25 23A-254 90.35 :132.73 168.67 89.56 60 75 23A-154 105.4 57.5 99.1 23A-252 59 70 23A-155 66.8 80 23A-251 85 101.46 23A-253 97.02 65 95.9 93.16 358.7 51.16 60 73 60 115 23A-158 23A-159 68 140.42 57.42 107.9 23A-156 50 155.33 72.42 133.1 55 74 23A-249 74 167.46 23A-250 11826 74.9 40 23A-157 40 23A-309 55 -50 70 70 100 23A-247 23A-245 102.65 76 70 81.56 121.33 113 23A-246 23A-244 81 70 87.4 97 167.6 23A-160 95 MANN TERR 67 114.55 23A-243 66.06 70.32 128.1 130 734-797 159.49 15C 23A-161 23A-162 78.66 60.24 65 65 138.19 23A-241 23A-240 126.37 75.32 66.06 50.7 137.43 216.98 23A-242 141.16 -DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form BOUNDARY MAP City of Northampton Tax Map Parcel No.

23A-250 / 74.2 DORSEY - JONES HOUSE 191 Nonotuck Street Florence, Hampshire Co., MA National Register Nomination Form Illustrations Bird's Eye View of Florence, detail, 1879 The Commonwealth of Massachusetts William Francis Galvin, Secretary of the Commonwealth Massachusetts Historical Commission July 14, 2005 Mr. John Roberts, Acting Chief National Register of Historic Places Department of the Interior National Park Service 1201 Eye Street, NW 8" floor Washington, DC 20005 RECEIVED 2280 JUL 2 0 2005 NAT. REGIS PARK SERVICE HOTORIC PLACES Dear Mr. Roberts: Enclosed please find the following nomination form: - Dorsey - Jones House, 191 Nonotuck Street, Northampton [Florence], (Hampshire), MA. [Underground Railroad in Massachusetts, 1783-1865 MPS] The nomination has been voted eligible by the State Review Board and has been signed by the State Historic Preservation Officer.

The owners of the property were notified of pending State Review Board consideration 30 to 45 days before the meeting and were afforded the opportunity to comment. Sincerely, Betry Friedkey Betsy Friedberg National Register Director Massachusetts Historical Commission enclosure CC: Richard Costello, owner Christopher Kennedy, Northampton Historical Commission Mary Clare Higgins, Mayor, City of Northampton Wayne Feiden, Planning Director Neil Larson, Kathryn Grover, consultants Tara Morrison, Paul Weinbaum, NPS 220 Morrissey Boulevard, Boston, Massachusetts 02125 (617) 727-8470 - Fax: (617) 727-5128 www.state.ma.us/sec/mhc