About

About

In the wake of the Spring 2020 murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and ensuing wave of protests across the U.S., history organizations nationwide, as they published statements condemning racism, also asked what more they could be doing to help their communities better understand long histories of racial injustice. 

Local history organizations are asking similar questions.

In western Massachusetts, some historical organizations have been focused on unearthing the Black history of their communities for years; others have turned to this more recently. All face a high degree of difficulty in researching histories of enslavement and freedom across the small towns of rural western Massachusetts. How can avocational researchers help uncover stories of enslavement and freedom? What sources reveal this difficult history? How can we locate and connect stories that cross the boundaries of individual towns and the records they generate? And how can we think beyond the identification of enslaved residents, and enslavers, to tell broader stories about how a community’s economy and culture was inextricably entwined with the commerce of slavery?

Documenting Black Lives in the Early Connecticut River Valley seeks to address this pressing need.

This project is presented by the Pioneer Valley History Network, a consortium of nearly fifty community historical societies and small museums in the three counties of the Connecticut River Valley that is a resource for local history organizations in western Massachusetts and the public they serve; the UMass Amherst Public History Program, one of the nation’s leading academic programs in public history; and the UMass Amherst Libraries, the largest publicly-funded library in New England and home to the papers of esteemed African American scholar, writer and activist and Great Barrington native W.E.B. Du Bois.

Project aims

1) Assist local historical societies, archives, museums, and other past-keeping organizations, as well as interested individuals in interpreting and presenting histories of Black life in the Connecticut River Valley. 2) Facilitate new research on this vital subject in order to support a wide range of potential inquiries, from individual families’ genealogical work to academic scholarship to documentation related to reparations efforts. 3) Facilitate connections across local boundaries to create an understanding that is greater than the sum of its parts. 4) Develop mechanisms to aid future researchers, curators, interpreters, and educators in locating and sharing relevant resources.

The scope

This initiative was born of a widely-shared belief that we need to better understand histories of enslavement in the Massachusetts counties of the Connecticut River Valley. Recovering the stories of enslaved people is the project’s first priority. But the Valley was also home to hundreds of people who came here having fled slave states before the end of slavery at the national level, and their stories fall within the compass of this work as well. As the project at its broadest purpose aims to understand the Valley’s relationship to the Atlantic slave economy broadly defined, surfacing narratives that help illuminate the consequences of enslavement for Black families, directly and indirectly, in the decades before the Civil War is also a critical component of this endeavor. Finally, the project seeks to support the aims and interests of the local organizations it serves, and will follow their leads, responding to their unique resources and priorities.

Beginnings

Over the summer of 2021, local history organizations based in Greenfield, Amherst, Belchertown, Northampton, Springfield, and Longmeadow, in formal association with this initiative, undertook deep dives into their archival collections, helping gather known material and uncover new insight into these Valley stories. This work culminated in a capstone event and the publication of numerous open access resources, including a webpage gathering together a wide range of video and bibliographical resources; a dataset with thousands of entries, each reflecting an archival reference related to the project goals; a research guide supporting ongoing community and campus research in this area; an online handbook containing both reflective and practice essays; and a series of online biographical sketches that showcase some of the project findings and illustrate some of the histories recovered during the course of the project.

 Broadening and Deepening the Research

In the following years, the research has broadened and deepened. Volunteer efforts continue and have yielded new materials from Springfield, Hatfield, South Hadley. Project partners and steering committee members have shared the project in numerous venues, including the New England Museum Association, Amherst College, and Mount Holyoke College, and through a summer workshop series with history organizations in Greenfield, Northampton and Westfield. Meanwhile, UMass history students have worked to clean the dataset to ensure its accuracy and consistency, while a new grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in conjunction with Enslaved.org will eventually lead to the publication of these local materials on this national open-access platform.

This ongoing project welcomes contributions from anyone who wishes to engage in this urgent work! If you are an individual researcher and would like to volunteer, or a member of an organization that may have relevant records in your collections, please get in touch! Read more at the Get Involved tab, and find us at pioneervalleyhistory@gmail.com.

Participating Organizations and Dataset

As of spring 2024, the project has unearthed more than 4,400 records spanning 30 towns across the region.

The location of participating organizations are indicated in orange on the map.

All towns noted in dark gray are also represented by records in the dataset.

Participating organizations in the initial round of grant-funded research include: the Amherst Historical Society and Museum, Belchertown Historical Association, the David Ruggles Center for Early Florence History and Underground RR Studies, Forbes Library, the Hadley Historical Society, the Historical Society of Greenfield, Historic Northampton, the Longmeadow Historical Society, the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum, and the Wood Museum of Springfield History.

Participating organizations joining after 2022 include South Hadley Historical Commission.

Towns with records in the dataset include: Ashfield, Bernardston, Blandford, Charlemont, Chesterfield, Chicope, Colrain, Conway. Cummington, Deerfield, Granby, Hatfield, Longmeadow, Montague, Monson, Northfield, Pelham, Plainfield, Palmer, Russell, Shelburne, Shutesbury, West Springfield, Westampton, Westfield, Whately, Wilbraham, and Worthington.

Acknowledgments

Initial funding for this project came from the UMass Amherst Public Service Endowment Grant program and Mass Humanities and we are grateful for their support and partnership. We also thank the participating history organizations who joined this pilot project: Amherst Historical Society, Belchertown Historical Society, Forbes Library, Greenfield Historical Society, Historic Northampton, Longmeadow Historical Society, and David Ruggles Center. Additional support has been contributed by the UMass Amherst Department of History. In 2023, the project was a member of a successful application to the National Endowment for the Humanities. This award will allow the local project to expand and become accessible through Enslaved.org, an open-access website publishing datasets and biographical narratives with information about the lives of individuals who suffered under slavery and who were part of the transatlantic slave trade. 

We are deeply grateful to the project’s consulting scholars for sharing their insight and expertise: Joseph Carvalho, Ian Delahanty, Gretchen Gerzina, Marjory O’Toole, Ousmane Power-Greene, Erika Slocumb, and Emma Winter-Zeig. And to the steering committee for guiding this work.

We are grateful to these additional history organizations for their support and collaboration: Hadley Historical Society, the Pan African Historical Museum USA, the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum, and the South Hadley Historical Commission.  We also thank Sharon Leon from OnTheseGrounds and Kristina Poznan from Enslaved.org for productive conversations about shared aims, and our evolving process.


Photo courtesy of the Lyman & Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History, Springfield, Massachusetts.