NORTHAMPTON — Their names were Venus and Joab and Bathsheba, Cato and Cesar and Tom, and dozens of others, including those whose names are unknown.
They were part of at least 50 enslaved people who lived in Northampton during a 129-year period between the city’s founding until the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. And now, in an effort to shed light on their histories and identities, Historic Northampton is launching a new exhibit on Thursday called “Slavery and Freedom in Northampton, 1654 to 1783.”
“Our mission at Historic Northampton is to tell the story of everyone in Northampton,” said co-director Betty Sharpe. “Whether they were wealthy or not, named or named just with a first name, everyone is part of the history, and we wanted to be sure to tell this story.”
The exhibit, which comes from six years of research by the Northampton Slavery Research Project, includes silhouettes of enslaved people who lived in Northampton and information about their lives taken from historical documents, including the ways that some of them were able to gain their freedom, start families, and purchase property, as well as the ways that their enslavers oppressed them.
The exhibit, which will be on display until Dec. 11, 2026, also features a map of Northampton showing where these enslaved people worked, “situating their lives within our understanding of Northampton today,” according to a statement from Historic Northampton.
“The first and foremost fact that I hope people take away is that these people were here, they were part of our community, they were flesh and blood,” Sharpe said. “They walked the same places in Northampton that we walk today. For example, I was just headed down to the coffee shop, and I would have passed two or three homes with enslaved people in them. They were part of our community, and that’s been obscured over time.”
Michael Hanke of Design Division Inc. designed the exhibit; and local artist Nancy Haver created the art for the background murals. Northampton artist Merisa Skinner created a contemporary printmaking series featured in the show, “Glimmers of Past People,” which “interprets the local legacy of transatlantic slavery through the artistic reproduction of archival materials,” according to the statement.
On Thursday and Saturday of this week, the organization will also host a unique outdoor slideshow: silhouettes and documents from the exhibit will be projected onto the front of the historic Parsons family home at 58 Bridge St.
One of Northampton’s most well-known enslavers was town minister the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, best known for his fire-and-brimstone sermons like “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” He owned a boy named Titus, a girl named Rose, and a 14-year-old girl named Venus, whom he may have baptized as Leah in the interest of giving her a more Christian name. The Princeton & Slavery Project noted, “For New Englanders of their elite status, the [Edwards family’s] participation in the slave trade and slave ownership was unexceptional.”
Leah, incidentally, was a character (and narrator) in an opera about Edwards produced at Bombyx earlier this year. In the show’s final scene, Leah, played by Samirah Evans, asks, “What happened to her?”
“Friends, nobody knows,” she says. “Nobody knows but Jesus.”
The exhibit comes from six years of research of historical documents, including wills, court records, bills of sale, baptismal records, and more, but Sharpe noted that the research is still ongoing — if anything, its opening comes “in the middle of our research process.”
“We’re always trying to learn more,” she said, “and every day we are.”
Admission is by donation. During the summer, Historic Northampton is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. To learn more about the history of slavery in Northampton, visit historicnorthampton.org/slavery-research-project.html.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.
