Enslavement in the Puritan Village: The Untold History of Sudbury and Wayland, Massachusetts

Colonial Sudbury, Massachusetts (modern-day Wayland and Sudbury), was designated the quintessential “Puritan Village” by author Sumner Chilton Powell in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the town’s founding in 1638.

Yet this quiet rural village, like many others in New England, also had a darker history that is often overlooked. Sudbury’s early puritan inhabitants, including some of the most prominent citizens in town, held and sold enslaved Black people throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Never before published, these stories from preserved records highlight the lives of men, women, and children held in bondage, including a court case involving an enslaved boy repeatedly beaten and left scarred by his master less than thirty years after the town’s founding, as well as the bill of sale for Phebey, age two, to a woman in another town.

The accounts of life in colonial Sudbury and its residents’ interactions with nearby towns, including bills of sale, marriages, medical, and military records, expand the knowledge of enslavement and its pervasive impact, yet unquestioned acceptance, in Sudbury and similar pre-Revolutionary New England villages.

Join author Jane Sciacca for this virtual book talk as she shares the hidden side of suffering in a New England town that she uncovered through her research into local history materials.

Email any questions to programs@14beacon.org.

SPEAKER BIO

Jane Sciacca is a retired national park ranger with a degree in history education from Simmons University. Her work as an interpreter for the National Park Service in Concord, Boston and Cambridge led to her interest in researching enslavement and abolition in her own community of Wayland, where she has lived with her family for more than fifty years. As chair of the Wayland Historical Commission, she oversaw the 1981 publication of the first history of Wayland as a separate town, The Puritan Village Evolves.