Providence Preservation Society Paused the Sale of Shakespeare’s Head in May to Investigate the Building’s Connection to Slavery and the Underground Railroad
Commissioned Research Reveals New History of Enslaved People Who Lived and Worked in the Building in the 1770s and 1780s
On April 30, Providence Preservation Society issued a Request for Proposals for the purchase of the historic Shakespeare’s Head building (1772), located at 21 Meeting Street in the College Hill neighborhood of Providence. One week before proposals were due, staff and board leadership learned that the building’s first owner, John Carter, enslaved two people in the house. PPS chose to pause the sale to investigate the building’s connection to histories of slavery and emancipation during the 18th and 19th centuries. The organization received grants from the 1772 Foundation and the Rhode Island Foundation to commission this research over the summer and is restarting the sale process this fall while developing plans to share these new histories with the public. PPS has owned the building since 2015.
The local public historian who worked on the project, Traci Picard, was able to add significant chapters to this building’s history. She found that the Carters enslaved two African-American women in the house from the time they moved into it in 1772 through 1789, when they were freed: Ingow and her daughter Fanny. Ingow left the house when she was freed but Fanny remained as an indentured servant for at least one year. From historical records, it appears that mother and daughter were purchased from Arthur Fenner Junior or Senior (Fenner Senior was the fourth Governor of Rhode Island). In this period, urban enslaved women were very likely to work caring for the home and family, preparing food, cleaning the home, washing laundry and caring for children. In addition to Ingow and Fanny, an enslaved man named Primus King (enslaved by Benjamin King in 1777) was an apprenticed laborer in the house’s printing press during this period.
Research conducted by the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission in 2018 states, “Almost a quarter of all East Side families (101 of 431, or 23.4%) had people of color in their households, almost certainly working as enslaved, indentured, or free domestic servants.”
Picard also found that in the 18th century, the Providence Gazette – Providence’s first newspaper, which was printed at Shakespeare’s Head – participated in the economic systems of slavery by advertising for the sale of enslaved people and for the capture of runaway slaves – but it also printed abolitionist content during this time, including articles and letters. Around the turn of the 19th century, the printing press moved out, but the building remained a home to the Carter family through the early part of the 19th century and a boarding house from about 1850 through the early 1920s, when the house had as many as 25 tenants at a time who were laborers, painters, carpenters, and machinists.
Picard says that this kind of archival research is challenging because the archives themselves
reflect gaps, silences and biases: “Who was able to create written records, and whose records were valued and preserved? In the 18th century, we are more likely to find documents created by men, white people, enslavers, employers and administrators and less likely to find those created by women, enslaved people, free people of color, laborers and low-income people.”
PPS has used the research to update the Shakespeare’s Head building description in its online Guide to Providence Architecture, a resource used by more than 30,000 people each year, and has shared the research with the Society of Architectural Historians so they may update the building’s entry in Archipedia, their authoritative encyclopedia of American buildings.
As a consequence of this project, PPS is exploring the option of retaining the property’s historic garden as a place to tell these histories through installations, public programs and creative collaborations, and the revised Request for Proposals reflects this preference. The revised RFP also includes questions in its submission requirements asking respondents to describe their plans to communicate the building’s 18 th and 19th century histories to the public – potentially, with PPS as a partner. PPS has initiated conversations with a range of local and regional institutions and individuals with research interests that relate to slavery and emancipation and is hopeful that the building’s next chapter may build on the research that was uncovered this summer.
The revised RFP is available on PPS’s website; proposals are due by October 23, 2024 with a decision about the building’s future expected by November 25.