Darius Parkhurst, “deprived of Sight and hearing”

On 27 May 1774, the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman of Westboro wrote in his diary about a trip to Boston:

At Mr. Joseph Coollidge’s bought me a new pair of Gold Buttons, and paid him for them 8£ 6/. Undertook my Journey home. Called at Mr. [most likely the minister Amos] Adams’s at Roxbury where I saw Mr. [blank] of Woodstock [Connecticut], who was blind and deaf. The way to Converse with him, was by writing in his hand.

Parkman had forgotten the name of the deaf and blind man he met, and mistaken his home town. But the minister still remembered that encounter months later because on 12 August he wrote:

Mr. [the minister Aaron] Putnam of Pomfret and his Sister Bethiah dined here.

N.B. He gave me a further account of Mr. Darius Parkhurst of Pomfret (whom I saw at Mr. Adams’s at Roxbury last May) and his accomplishments though deprived of Sight and hearing about 11 AEts [i.e., age eleven]. Is now about 34. You must write in his hand, with your or his finger, to convey your meaning. Blessed be God for my sight and hearing! May I have grace to improve them!

Those details about the man match genealogical records of a Darius Parkhurst born in Pomfret on 7 June 1739 and dying there on 12 May 1792. His gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave.

Now it’s possible there was a cousin or other man of the same name and approximate age in Pomfret, but I haven’t come across one. So for the rest of this posting I’m going to assume that all the sources refer to one man. There are no mentions in newspapers, but he does appear in government records.

In September 1776 Darius Parkhurst of Pomfret married Joanna (sometimes called Anna) Sabin. Darius’s mother had also been a Sabin, but I can’t trace the family link to his wife.

The Parkhursts started having children, including a little Darius (1777–1778) memorialized on the same stone as his father. There were three more kids by 1785: Darius, Simeon, and Sarah.

In 1783, the town paid Darius Parkhurst for “keeping Seth Sabin.” That might have been Joanna’s father, then nearing seventy.

Joanne Pope Melish’s Disowning Slavery mentions another member of the household:

In 1790, when Jacob Dresser of Thompson, Connecticut, apprenticed “a Negro Girl Named Peggy” (apparently a child of his slave) to Darius Parkhurst of Pomfret, he wrote, “During the aforesd term Sd Dresser Doth fully impower Sd Parkhurst to Control, order & command said Peggy in all Respects, and to all Intents & Purposes a sthrough She were born his Servant.”

This reflected Connecticut’s slow move away from slavery. If Peggy had been born after 1784, she was legally free and would become a free adult at the age of twenty-one. Until that time, however, she was a child (of an enslaved woman, furthermore), and therefore not free but in need of both care and governance.

Remarkably, none of those local and legal records say anything about Darius Parkhurst himself being disabled. (Once again, assuming there was only one man in town by that name.) Legally Darius was the recipient of the town’s relief payments and the master of Peggy, but it seems likely that Joanna provided most of the care and oversight. In fact, the household might have received that money and that indentured child because people knew Darius couldn’t do ordinary farm work.

Still, Darius Parkhurst must have had some way to support himself since he did inherit land, marry, raise kids, travel as far as Roxbury, and so on. His minister told Parkman about “his accomplishments.” Yet he doesn’t seem to have been remembered in any local history. Without Parkman’s diary entries, we’d have no way of knowing that he’d lost his sight and hearing.

Laying Out Roxbury’s History in the Dillaway-Thomas House

On the corporate blog of Content•Design Collaborative LLC, which is in the business of “effective visitor experiences for public and private institutions,” there’s an interesting discussion of how the firm helped to redesign the Dillaway-Thomas House in Roxbury Heritage State Park for the Roxbury Historical Society and the city of Boston.

The park is a single acre between the First Church and the Timilty Middle School, and the house contains 2,200 square feet of exhibit space or, as the organization says, “a mere 600 square-feet per century” of town history.

The solution was to use each room for a different historical era:

Visitors enter the House from the accessible annex, the first thing you encounter is a cavernous ten-foot wide cooking hearth, so we deemed this space the Parsons Kitchen, and it covered the pre-revolutionary war era. This gallery was followed by the Revolutionary War gallery, or the Thomas Gallery, for General [John] Thomas who took residence there during the Siege of Boston. Next comes the Dillaway Room, named after Charles K. Dillaway, a scholar and early headmaster of Boston Latin. The next exhibit area is the Historic Hallway and the 20th Century Roxbury Room. Upstairs the House featured a gallery loosely dedicated to 21st Century Roxbury accompanied the multi-purpose changeable art gallery and community meeting space.

In the eighteenth century Roxbury was the large rural town right outside of Boston by land. It was enmeshed in Boston’s politics and social issues. In 1768, for example, town minister Amos Adams and his wife Elizabeth hosted a spinning meeting. There’s no evidence about slavery at that site, but in 1771 Roxbury’s population included 21 “servants for life.” The museum therefore includes displays about slavery in the town.

As for the Revolutionary War:

With all hell breaking loose in the spring of 1775, the leaders of the colonial rebels appointed veteran John Thomas as a leader of the militia tasked with keeping the British troops in Boston. Roxbury stood on one side of the only ground route called Boston Neck. Our exhibit features a letter from the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society where General Benjamin Lincoln informs Amos Adams that “It would be quite agreeable for General Thomas to remove into your house…”. Other experiences are a recreation of General Thomas’s field desk where you can hear a dramatic reading of one of his many letters to his wife and an interactive map placing the House in context of the siege of 1775-76.

(Lincoln wasn’t yet a general when he wrote that letter to Thomas; he was clerk of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. As for Thomas’s letters home, they’re terrific.)

One interesting requirement from the Roxbury Historical Society was that the maps inside the house “show the 1868 borders when Roxbury was annexed to Boston.” That area is larger than the Boston neighborhood now designated as Roxbury—it includes the Fenway, the Longwood Medical District, and Mission Hill. But it’s much smaller than the Roxbury of the eighteenth century, which also included Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury, and the modern Arnold Arboretum and Franklin Park—part of the big town’s farmland.