Originally published in the Times Argus/Rutland Herald Weekend Magazine, February 4, 2023 for the “Remember When” column with the title, Lucy Terry Prince
On August 14th, 1821, an unusual obituary ran in the Bennington’s Vermont Gazette. It was particularly detailed and for a woman, a black woman. Furthermore, this “remarkable” and “much respected woman” in whom “there was an assemblage of qualities rarely to be found among her sex,” was one of the first settlers in what would become the state of Vermont.
If that’s not enough, she is considered this country’s first known African American poet.
The story of Lucy Terry Prince is as fascinating as it is complex. The many twists and turns of her 90-plus years cannot possibly be captured here – what follows is the barest outline of a life that bore witness to the very beginnings of what would become the United States. (For a meticulously researched, in-depth study of her and her family, see Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina’s Pulitzer Prize nominated Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend.)
In approximately 1730, a little girl was born in Africa, who, when barely out of toddlerhood, was kidnapped and shipped off to the American colonies. Most likely landing in Boston, she was sold to Samuel Terry and given the name Lucy. From there she was sold to Ebenezer and Abigail Wells of Deerfield, MA, becoming an integral – but far from equal – member of the family.
“Early devoted to God in baptism” and using her “tenacious memory” to memorize the Bible, Lucy was fluent in English by age ten. By the time the Wells opened a tavern in their home, Lucy was already considered a “prodigy in conversation.” Her stories and “fluency of her speech captivated all around her,” including the soldiers who, after the relative peace of the mid-1720s to mid-1740s, were sleeping in the kitchens and attics of Deerfield’s families.
When this peace was shattered in 1746, Lucy turned her storytelling skills into the poem for which she is remembered, “Bars Fight,” the tale of how two families were attacked by French-allied Indians as they were working in a Deerfield meadow (or bar).
Lucy may well have been reciting her poem to tavern-goers when she first caught the attention of a soldier 25 years her senior by the name of Abijah (Bijah) Prince.
Bijah, an enslaved man from Northfield, MA, had joined the Deerfield militia in 1747 as war was once again breaking out with the French. Four years later, Bijah was a freeman, released from slavery by his then owner. When he became Northfield’s first black landowner, he was ready to share his life with someone else – a certain storytelling barmaid from Deerfield.
In 1756, not long after Bijah and Lucy married, Bijah used his military salary to purchase Lucy’s freedom. They moved to a small house on the Wells’ property where, according to 19th century Vermont historian Abby Hemenway, Lucy attracted visitors with the “wit and wisdom” of “her rhyme and stories.”
Lucy and her new husband lived “amid a surprisingly sizable black community,” according to Gerzina, where white people and their black “servants” (as they were euphemistically called) lived in the same homes, worshiped in the same churches, and – when they managed to scrape some money together – shopped in the same stores and drank in the same taverns. Their children attended school together. Despite this, there were very few free blacks. It was surely with great pride, then, in 1756, Lucy and Bijah baptized Caesar, the firstborn of their six children, as the first free-born black in Deerfield.
Four years, three children, and a near-death child-birth experience later, Lucy found herself caring for home and educating her children alone for long stretches of time. A day’s horse-back ride away, Bijah was clearing five-acres of still-wild land in Guilford (near Brattleboro) in what would in thirty years become the State of Vermont. In reward for this back-breaking work, Bijah was promised rights to 100 acres of his own.
In 1775, the family moved to Guilford where Bijah had built a house and established a farm on their own land. In Guilford, where the “live-and-let-live attitude” of early Vermonters tended to prevail, residents generally accepted black people. Their neighbor, John Noyes, a Connecticut-native, however, did not.
When Noyes and his cronies attempted multiple times to destroy the farm and almost fatally beat the two youngest Prince children, 10 and 14 at the time, Lucy went to court. Although having a black woman addressing the state’s highest officials would be considered highly unusual, she traveled to Norwich, VT to testify before Gov. Chittenden, begging him to intercede. And he did. Noyes was fined and the town of Guilford was instructed to offer protection to the family.
This wasn’t the last time Lucy used her speaking skills in court. After Bijah died in 1794, Lucy and some of her extended family moved northwest towards Bennington where thirty years earlier, according to Hemenway’s record, Bijah had been an “original grantee, named in the charter of Sunderland, Vt.” However, in the intervening years, unscrupulous land-grabbers had, without the Prince’s knowledge, sold their land out from under them.
Lucy took the unrightful landowner to court – all the way to Vermont’s Supreme Court – and finally, in 1804, won. Kind of. Although offered $200 (approx. $5,000 today) compensation, she was not granted the land itself. Not satisfied with this decision, she reminded the town selectmen that the law required them to provide for the widow of a proprietor. In 1806, Lucy’s eldest sons were granted back a portion of their late father’s land and she was provided a home on another lot.
When Lucy died in 1821, Lemuel Haynes. a black minister from Rutland, offered the eulogy before she was buried in a long-lost location in Sunderland. Then Lucy was mostly forgotten for over a century. However, in 2021, the town of Sunderland declared July 11th, Lucy Terry Prince Day and unveiled a quilt made in her honor. An historical marker celebrating this amazing woman and her husband, two of the earliest settlers of our state, was erected at the Guilford Welcome Center on I91, hopefully never to be forgotten again.
“Bar’s Fight” by Lucy Terry
August 'twas the twenty-fifth,
Seventeen hundred forty-six;
The Indians did in ambush lay,
Some very valient men to slay,
The names of whom I'll not leave out.
Samuel Allen like a hero fout,
And though he was so brave and bold,
His face no more shall we behold.
Eleazer Hawks was killed outright,
Before he had time to fight,—
Before he did the Indians see,
Was shot and killed immediately.
Oliver Amsden he was slain,
Which caused his friends much grief and pain.
Simeon Amsden they found dead,
Not many rods distant from his head.
Adonijah Gillett we do hear
Did lose his life which was so dear.
John Sadler fled across the water,
And thus escaped the dreadful slaughter.
Eunice Allen see the Indians coming,
And hopes to save herself by running,
And had not her petticoats stopped her,
The awful creatures had not catched her,
Nor tommy hawked her on her head,
And left her on the ground for dead.
Young Samuel Allen, Oh lack-a-day!
Was taken and carried to Canada.
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