The Expanding “Eleven Names Project”

Wayne Tucker began the Eleven Names Project, as he wrote on his website, to look into people documented as enslaved to the Dudleys of Roxbury, including a Massachusetts governor and a chief justice, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By 1826, Tucker found, a crossroads in Roxbury was being called “Dudley Square” after the prominent family that once lived there. The Boston city government officially adopted that name around the turn of the next century, during the Colonial Revival.

In 1910 there was a proposal to name the square after Edward Everett Hale because no official “Dudley” signs had ever gone up. As if New Englanders need road signs! The Boston city council decreed that locals knew that place was Dudley Square and, more or less, that anyone who didn’t already know that didn’t really belong there.

Over the next century the surrounding neighborhood changed to become largely African-American. In December 2019, following a vote in nearby precincts, the city changed the area’s official name to Nubian Square. The Dudley family’s ties to slavery, both making it legal in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and practicing it, were factors in that decision.

Recently Tucker has expanded his research into tracking another set of enslaved people through the archives, those enslaved to two prominent men in Abington:

• The Rev. Samuel Brown (1687-1749), the town’s first minister and a traditional “Old Light.”
• Josiah Torrey (1720-1783), a wealthy farmer who married Brown’s widow and then married the widow of Brown’s successor.

Because Torrey’s death and will coincide with the Massachusetts high court’s decision to render slavery unenforceable in the state, the fates of this group of people also show how the local institution broke down.

Thus, Tucker writes about one mother and son:

Besse Goold was born into slavery on Reverend Brown’s farm in 1734 to the abovesaid Cesar and Flora; from whence the Goold surname came, it is unknown. Besse would in turn bear a child in 1759 named Brister Goold while living in bondage at the Torrey farm.

A search of probate file archives yields Josiah Torrey’s original 1783 will, said to be in his handwriting. Directly under a £3 donation to the Congregational church, he returns Besse her stolen freedom. Below that, we see Torrey returns the freedom of Brister upon his 25th birthday, which fell a year later in December of 1784. Surprisingly, Torrey further bequeaths Brister 15 acres of land.

Abington’s vital records show that Brister died in 1823, aged 63, where he is categorized as “a person of color”; luckily, his will survives in the archive, too. We see that he still owned property left to him by Torrey and that his widow Phebe is executrix of his estate.

The stories that Tucker has pieced together about Brister Goold, his wife Phebe Wamsley, and their children include preserved Native traditions, service in the Revolutionary War, and of course (given the nature of these sources) small-town bureaucracy.

That’s a reward of digging into the lives of ordinary people in New England communities: following all the connections eventually unearths a range of stories connected to nearly every part of society and nearly every endeavor.