Cuming, Freeman live on
Posted on | April 8, 2010 | No Comments
by Elise Lemire
Editor’s note: The following is part of a series from the Drinking Gourd Project, dedicated to preserving the Caesar Robbins house as an educational center for the untold stories of Concord’s early Africans, African-Americans, Abolitionists and other civil liberties advocates.
Most of us know who Thoreau Street commemorates.
And we can identify the people honored by Alcott’s Elementary School, Emerson’s Cliff, Hawthorne Lane, and the Isaac Davis Trail.
Other places in Concord, however, are named after people whose stories are less well known but no less compelling.
The Cuming Medical Building, for example, at Emerson Hospital is named after one of Concord’s most important but largely forgotten residents. John Cuming was a doctor, a land speculator, a justice of the peace, an officer in the French and Indian War, and a member of Concord’s Committee of Safety during the Revolution. At the peak of his powers in 1776, he was offered the position of brigadier general, a post he would have relished but which he ultimately turned down at his wife’s request.
(The couple had lost their one child, a daughter, in her youth, and Abigail Cuming had no intention of losing her husband as well.) Childless, John was able to bequeath a large portion of his vast fortune to Concord for poor relief. He also gave a silver communion set to the town and money to Harvard for the founding of a medical school. Years after his death in 1788, residents commemorated his generosity with a picnic on John Cuming Day.
Situated at the top of Burial Hill, John’s tombstone attempts to explain how he managed to rise to the very highest echelons of the colonial elite. In all, 20 character traits are engraved there.
But John’s success has as much, if not more, to do with the man after whom Brister’s Hill is named.
For the first 150 years of its existence, Concord was a slave town. Its doctors, lawyers, merchants, and ministers relied on slaves to grow their food and tend to their increasingly elaborate wardrobes and domestic furnishings. Slavery allowed these town leaders to pursue professions away from their plows and appear on the colonial stage as gentlemen.
Like the master whose rise he facilitated, Brister left his mark on Concord.
When he enlisted for a third time in the Continental Army, he announced the new status this afforded him by boldly renaming himself Brister Freeman.
Then, in 1785, when a significant number of former slaves were either still living with their masters or squatting where they could, Freeman teamed up with a former slave from Groton and purchased an acre of what was described as “old field” in Walden Woods.
As landowners, Freeman and his partner were required to pay pole taxes.
When Freeman fell behind on this obligation, the selectmen took the title to his land rather than use a small bequest John Cuming had left them for his former slaves’ support. Freeman, who seems never to have received so much as a fraction of John’s bequest, refused to acknowledge the loss of his legal title. He stayed on what he regarded as his property until his death in 1822.
Freeman’s tenacity in the face of poverty and harassment earned him local renown, and the hill on which he lived thus came to be named after him. And while “Brister’s Hill” reduces Freeman to his slave identity by robbing him of the last name he fought so hard to claim, it’s a reminder nonetheless that Concord’s former slaves also battled for a place in Concord to call their own.
The Minutemen and the Transcendentalists put Concord on the historical map, giving locals good reason to be proud of their storied town. But Concord has other important tales to tell. To find them, we need look no further than the traces left in the cultural and physical landscape.
The Drinking Gourd Project, along with many town historic organizations, is working to restore the Robbins house for use as a civil liberties educational center. You can help by coming to April Town Meeting and voting ‘yes’ on article 35 for CPC funding approval and article 36 to lease land next to the North Bridge parking lot as the new location for the Robbins House Educational Center. For further information, see www.drinkinggourdproject.org.
For the complete life story of Brister Freeman and other Concord slaves and former slaves, read Elise Lemire’s “Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts.”