FLORA WAY and the ARNOLD ARBORETUM

Immortalizing one of the Eleven Names

Hello, friends -

It’s Wayne. Yes, I’ve been a ghost since starting my job at the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program. But one of the first people I wrote about now has a street in Boston named for her.

In September of 2021, I wrote about eleven people enslaved by the Dudley family of Roxbury. Flora, along with a boy named Caeser and men named Quam and Peter, were enslaved in today’s Roslindale by Col. William Dudley.

After learning about Harvard/Arboretum benefactor Benjamin Bussey’s ties to the slave economy—and engaging my research—a group of citizens, led by Roslindale resident Jerry Mogul, spent two years advocating to change the name of the road that bisects the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University from Bussey St to Flora Way.

Your humble author, October 26.

They succeded, and Boston rededicated Bussey St as Flora Way on Saturday, October 26. I believe this is only the fifth street/square named in honor of a Black woman in the City of Boston.

The event was held on beautiful Arboretum grounds in perfect-for-late-October weather.

Here is Universal Hub’s coverage of the event. It’s comprehensive and worth reading.

And, by request, here are my remarks (as written):

FLORA  

I am Wayne Tucker, a citizen historian and an associate research fellow for the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program. To be clear, I do not speak for Harvard, and I do not speak for my colleagues; I speak for myself.   

I’ve been asked to make a few remarks because my original research underpins Flora’s narrative, which aided the renaming committee in advancing Flora’s candidacy. If you look at the handout of Jerry Mogul’s article for the Jamaica Plain Historical Society, you’ll see images of the original documents I surfaced in 2021. 

It’s immensely gratifying to see scraps of evidence I mined from a 1740s probate file transformed by neighborhood juggernauts and enthusiastic City Hall partners into a new, legible Boston landmark. What a miracle. 

Early Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonists captured, enslaved, and exported local native people in exchange for enslaved Africans. English colonists trafficked the first enslaved African women into Massachusetts in 1638; this was 18 years after Plymouth Rock and eight years after John Winthrop and the Arabella arrived.  

Black women have been here and have significantly contributed to Boston and New England society ever since. Sixteen thirty-eight.  

Massachusetts was the first North American colony to codify legal slavery in 1641, and by 1700, 1,000 enslaved African people were held captive in Massachusetts. At the height of slavery in Boston, 12% of the city’s population was enslaved, and 25% of all households held African and African-descended people in slavery.   

As historian Gloria Whiting demonstrates, the Black population of Massachusetts wanted the freedom to form and build families. Through heroic deeds, including dozens of freedom suits litigated in Massachusetts courts, Black wives, mothers, husbands and fathers built families, won legal battles, and made slavery untenable in Massachusetts as the Revolution approached.  

Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker cauterized the end of slavery with two monumental court cases against their enslavers, forcing the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to rule in 1783 that slavery was (and is) counter to the constitution of the Commonwealth.   

Flora did not live to see 1783.  

But now we’re making Flora and her community visible in the landscape. We, of course, have Flora Way, and less than a mile south of here on South Street is where Flora lived at the house of her enslaver William Dudley, a military leader, legislator, and a Harvard College Overseer.    

In the 1740s, Flora was enslaved alongside a boy named Caesar, a man named Quam, and Peter Bridgham, who was starting his young family as William Dudley’s estate languished in probate court. We don’t know how or if these four people were related because the sole witness to their lives (at the time) is a probate file. Were they a nuclear family? Were they completely unrelated? Right now, we only have our imaginations.    

Dudley’s land holdings were extensive. Just yards from where we’re standing is the Walter Street entrance to Harvard’s Weld Hill Research Facility; that parcel was part of the hundreds of acres owned by Flora’s enslaver.    

We also know that after enslavement, Peter Bridgham owned a quarter-acre lot and a dwelling house very close to the spot we now occupy.    

Now we can look up at the street sign and see that Flora Way intersects with Walter Street, named for the Rev. Nathaniel Walter, a Harvard-trained minister who enslaved Cuffee. . . and his wife Grace, and their four children: Caesar, Charles, Phillis, and Zipporah. This family likely lived and labored at Rev. Walter’s parsonage on the corner of South and Walter Streets.   

And one last note about Flora’s landscape. Exit the gate on Flora Way, cross Peter’s Hill, and visit the Walter Street Burying Ground, again named after Rev. Walter. There is a high likelihood that this is Flora’s final resting place. There are no extant headstones to memorialize the enslaved and free Black folks buried in this burying ground now under the Arboretum’s care–but Flora’s community is most certainly there.    

I hope the next time you visit the burying ground or any of Boston’s historic burying grounds, you consider the entirety of who is buried there and how they shaped their neighborhoods’ landscape.  

Thank you, Flora, and thank you all.