How Communities Are Uncovering Untold Black Histories
Historians and citizen archivists in New Hampshire are using old records to tell long-overlooked stories.
BY LINE SIDONIE TALLA MAFOTSING
MARCH 3, 2023
AS DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION AT the Historical Society of Cheshire County in New Hampshire, Jennifer Carroll couldn’t help but notice that people often came into the office to talk about secret rooms they have found in their houses. They usually assumed that their homes must have been part of the Underground Railroad, and helped shelter enslaved people who had escaped to freedom in the North. New England hosted many stops on this clandestine network, and New Hampshire was once a hotbed of abolitionist activity. For Carroll, though, it was never possible to verify the residents’ suspicions.
At a symposium Carroll attended about the Underground Railroad, held by the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, archaeologist Cheryl LaRoche called on the people of New Hampshire to stop focusing on secret architecture and pay more attention to the actual Black history of their towns. “It’s about the relationships and the networks, and not so much about the architecture of a space,” says Carroll. LaRoche helped her realize that the focus on the buildings was just placing the white homeowners at the center of the story—rather than the network of Black and Indigenous people in their communities, past and present.
Michelle Stahl, executive director of the Monadnock Center for History and Culture, based in neighboring Hillsborough County, had begun a similar line of inquiry about four years ago because people also asked her about the history of the Black and Indigenous people of the region. “Although we had snippets here and there, we couldn’t really tell a full and robust history,” Stahl says. “The information is there, we just need to pull it together.” As she began to scratch the surface, Stahl realized that there was more than she thought.
Carroll and Stahl had spoken for some time about doing a project about the region’s Black history at their respective institutions. Carroll had initially begun a project as a class at Keene State College for adults 55 years old and older. When the pandemic hit, she and Stahl partnered up to make it a collaborative online initiative encompassing both counties, which make up the states’s southern border. The resulting project, Recovering Black History in the Monadnock Region, uses census and other historical records to uncover the names and stories of the Black individuals and families who lived in the region between 1730 and 1930. The project is emblematic of efforts of a number of communities that are working toward uncovering and preserving previously untold Black history—in places such as Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee—against the backdrop of attempts to question Black history in schools through curriculum changes and book bans.
More:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/black-history-monadnock-new-hampshire
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