Milford home may have ties to literary history

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Under a desk in his home office is an opening in the floor where David Palance can climb down to a cellar room. He thinks runaway slaves might have been hidden there during the Civil War era. The house at 19 Maple St.. Milford might also have been the farmhouse described in the book, "Our Nig." Staff photo by Kathy Cleveland

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David Palance outside his home on Maple Street in Milford. The 18th century house is believed to be the place where African-American author Harriet Wilson spent her childhood as an indentured servant. Staff photo by Kathy Cleveland

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JerriAnne Boggis with the statue of Harriet Wilson in Bicentennial Park in Milford.

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Under a desk in his home office is an opening in the floor where David Palance can climb down to a cellar room. He thinks runaway slaves might have been hidden there during the Civil War era. The house at 19 Maple St.. Milford might also have been the farmhouse described in the book, "Our Nig." Staff photo by Kathy Cleveland

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MILFORD – It’s just a modest Cape Cod, but the house might be one of the most important buildings in African-American literary history.

Historians are not positive, but there is some evidence that 19 Maple St. was the farmhouse where Harriet Wilson could have spent her girlhood as an indentured servant, cruelly mistreated by the mistress of the house – a personal history that led her to become the first African-American woman to publish a novel.

And in an ironic twist, there is also evidence that decades after Wilson lived there, the house was a stop on the Underground Railroad, a place that runaway slaves hid on their way to freedom in Canada.

Wilson’s novel, “Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black,” published in 1859, is considered an autobiographical novel, the story of a girl named Frado, a free, mixed-race child abandoned by her mother at a farmhouse. She is considered Wilson’s alter-ego,

David Watters, the director for the Center for New England Culture at the University of New Hampshire, has toured 19 Maple St. and says it is one of the few documented sites connected to a 19th century African- American author.

“(It) embodies all the contradictions about freedom, prejudice and slavery in America,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Although much remodeled, one can see the closet she was shut in with a piece of wood wedged in her mouth, the pantry where she was abused, and the unheated ell where she was put, too ill to work, after the town no longer wanted to pay for her support.”

David Palance, the current owner, was unaware of his house’s possible connection to black literary history when he and his wife, Lisa, bought it in 2001.

Palance is a history buff, and he was thrilled at the news about his house and started his own research. He now opens the house to tours, including Milford’s Black Heritage Tour, and likes to look for clues in the book that relate to parts of the house.

For example, there is a narrow corridor, “a dark unfinished passageway” in the book, now blocked by a wall, that seems to match the corridor where 6-year-old Frado, the novel’s main character, was led to her tiny sleeping space.

That part of the book describes her first day in the home of the Bellmonts, believed to be fictional counterparts of Nehemiah and Rebecca Hayward, who owned the house in the mid-1800s when it was part of a 118-acre farm with fields stretching down to the Souhegan River.

On the first-floor there is also an inconspicuous door cut out of the floor that leads down to a small basement room where Palance thinks runaway slaves might have hidden in the later 1800s. The door is under a desk and he uses a ladder to climb down to it.

He has also found clues to more recent history.

Under the basement stairs is a part of a shipping crate with the words “fragile” and “Miss Abbott,” a sign that the house was likely owned by the Abbott family, who owned mills in Wilton in the 20th century.

“I come down here to see what this place tells me,” Palance says. “I’m sure it has more stories to tell.”

Architectural historian James Garvin, however, is more cautious about correlating the house with “Our Nig” because it has been remodeled many times during its more than 200 years of existence.

Garvin, who works for the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources, tried to create an original floor plan, which he describes in a 2006 report: “The author could have taken almost any building where she grew up and imagined it differently when describing it in the book.”

But UNH’s Watters is convinced that this was the place Harriet Wilson spent her girlhood.

“Wilson was beaten and worked nearly to death in this house, a free mixed-race child treated like a slave,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Cabinet.

“Wilson wanted to show that the shadow of slavery was in the North, in the kind of house, family, and town usually associated with New England traditions of freedom and equality. It’s a landmark of profound questions about freedom and race relations in the supposedly abolitionist North.”

The Harriet Wilson Project has presented the house for consideration by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is trying to get a grant to do more historical detective work.

The Harriet Wilson Project was created after a story in The Cabinet about Harriet Wilson’s book led JerriAnne Boggis to form it.

“We know that’s the area where she lived, and the house matches the story to some degree,” Boggis said, but it’s “not 100 percent” definite.

“It totally exciting to me to imagine there’s a concrete place where she was, where she went out to school,” she said. “I am very cautious. Every time we find something, it leads to more questions.”

Nevertheless, Palance will continue giving tours of the house and says he only considers himself its caretaker.

“It’s owned by the community,” he said.

Kathy Cleveland can be reached at 673-3100, ext. 21 or kcleveland@cabinet.com.