UXBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) - Members of the town’s Historical Commission received word last week that the Mrs. Nancy Adams Burial Site, marking the resting ground of a woman who escaped slavery three times and is linked to the region’s rich involvement with the Underground Railroad, was accepted by the National Park Service into the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.
The designation places the site on a permanent database for researchers and allows local historians to pursue grants and receive technical assistance as part of the mission to “honor, preserve and promote the history of resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, which continues to inspire people worldwide,” according to the Network to Freedom website.
More than 600 locations are part of the network.
The gravestone for Adams, “A respectable colored woman … born in Louisiana March 31, 1766 (and) Died in Uxbridge June 6, 1859,” was almost missed when state engineers were laying out improvements to Route 146 in the mid-1980s. The new highway design went through the abandoned Almshouse Cemetery in South Uxbridge.
The fallen gravestone, once covered by brush but much more elaborate than the crude granite markers surrounding it, was discovered when the site was being cleared, said Michael Potaski, a Historical Commission member. Archaeologists from Boston University were brought in to assess it.
Highway plans continued, however. So 32 bodies from the burial ground were removed and taken to BU for study.
In 1995, 31 sets of remains were re-interred in the New Almshouse Cemetery, 80 Almshouse Road, about a half-mile from the original site. One Native American was re-interred in the Indian Burial Ground in Thompson, Connecticut.
The Adams gravestone itself, broken into several pieces and damaged during cleaning, is stored on the third floor of the Uxbridge Free Public Library. A replica stands at the new cemetery.
Potaski noted in an interview at the site Monday that the engraving on the original and the replica is incorrect: Adams was born in Maryland, but Louisiana was one place she escaped from.
A letter dictated in 1838 by Adams, found two years ago at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library, along with mention of Adams in The Liberator, Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, and research conducted at BU and elsewhere, provide more insight into Adams and the network that helped as many as 20,000 enslaved people escape north through New England in the 1830s through the 1850s, according to the Historical Commission.
“It’s a fascinating history and it’s largely unknown,” said Selectman Susan Franz, who worked with Historical Commission members Potaski, Peter Emerick and Roy Henry to coordinate the application.
Local involvement with the Underground Railroad was not often discussed openly because people didn’t talk about slavery “and they were all breaking the law,” Franz said.
Uxbridge had about 2,000 residents during the 1830s to 1850s, she continued, and there were about 450 residents in the anti-slavery movement. “If you take the kids out, that’s about every other adult,” she said.
Potaski, one of the project researchers, serves as vice president of the Massachusetts History Alliance. He said he learned about Network to Freedom two years ago from a New Bedford historian who spoke at the group’s annual conference at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester.
Potaski knew there were around 30 sites linked to the Underground Railroad in Uxbridge and wanted to connect with the network. The town has mapped 11 sites.
Franz said the Uxbridge group’s first application, including the full list of sites, didn’t win approval. So a year later, in July, they submitted a proposal just for the Nancy Adams burial site, which is uniquely documented.
The town plans to seek recognition for two other major sites in the future: Friends’ Meetinghouse and Cemetery, 479 and 500 Quaker Highway, and the area around the Town Common where the mill-owning Capron family held property and served as active station-keepers, sheltering and providing resources for freedom seekers.
Franz said the building where J.F. Cove Insurance Agency and Uxbridge School Department operate, 9 N. Main St., across from the Common, has a hidden room above the pantry, accessible only by a ladder.
“Uxbridge was the heartbeat of the Underground Railroad in this part of the country,” Franz said in a presentation last March, recorded by Uxbridge Community Television.
The town has records of four people, including Adams, but there were likely hundreds or thousands more who came through between the late 1700s and the Civil War, she said.
Why Uxbridge?
“Some of it is history; some of it is religion; a lot of it is just geography,” Franz said.
The intersection where CVS stands in North Uxbridge is the crossroads of two historic thoroughfares: The Great Road, now Route 122, which connects Worcester and Providence; and Boston Post Road, now Hartford Avenue, connecting Boston to Hartford.
The Quaker community, including families such as the Buffums, Farnums and Caprons, was active in promoting equal rights and working to abolish slavery.
Abby Kelley Foster grew up in Uxbridge, living there until she went away to boarding school at Moses Brown in Providence at age 11. She was one of the many women, including Rebecca Buffum, who spoke out and helped to raise money for the anti-slavery cause.
What’s known about Adams is that she lived openly in the Uxbridge community for many years, appearing in the 1850 U.S. census, identified as a slave.
The letter she dictated to abolitionist sisters Sarah and Angeline Grimke on March 30, 1838, details much of what’s known of her past.
The town’s Network to Freedom application summary highlights her marriage at around age 17 and her first escape from enslavement around age 22, into the nearby woods on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, with her husband and two children.
After five months living “with no food but acorns and no shelter but a large tree which had been blown up by the roots,” the family was located and persuaded to return to a new slaveholder, Jesse Waters.
Mrs. Adams was “sold south” with her children and traveled, first overland and then by water, to Port Gibson, Mississippi. A daughter died on the journey.
She worked decades in Louisiana’s cotton fields. Her 19-year-old son received 400 lashes and was “salted and peppered,” an excruciatingly painful practice meant to dissuade people from attempting to flee by rubbing salt and hot pepper into their open wounds.
In “feeble health,” the letter continued, she hired herself out to work for another family, with her slaveholder receiving the money. She managed her second escape on a trip to Norwich, Connecticut, hiding in an ice house for two days until the man left. She remained in Norwich for 12 years.
Her third escape came as she learned her former slaveholder sought her. She found safety in Uxbridge.
The Rev. Samuel J. May, a Unitarian minister in Brooklyn, Connecticut, who was a “station master” known to have helped move countless freedom seekers to Uxbridge, coordinated with Effingham L. Capron of Uxbridge and their wives.
From there many continued to Worcester, sometimes along the Blackstone Canal or with a friendly Providence & Worcester Railroad conductor - also with Uxbridge roots - or on to Canada.
“My eyes have seen what my tongue dares not speak,” Adams wrote.
Recent studies at BU of Adams’ remains reveal “a woman who suffered from a tragic and difficult life and with severe disabilities,” according to the application.
But evidence exists that she donated 25 cents to the local anti-slavery society. And she sent cakes, for which she was known, to William Lloyd Garrison, who came to Uxbridge to speak.
Franz said a proposal has been submitted for an exhibition on Mrs. Nancy Adams’ Burial Site to be held at River Bend Farm Visitor Center at Blackstone River and Canal Heritage State Park early next year.
The burial site is also one of three sites in town recognized in the African American Trail Project, under the direction of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University.
Online: https://bit.ly/34VMenQ
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Information from: Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, Mass.), http://www.telegram.com
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