Northampton’s Slave EconomyA Walking Tour of Northampton
with Elizabeth Sacktor, Museum Educator & Program Coordinator
Maynard’s Hoe Factory, Northampton, Mass. Courtesy of Forbes Library.
Event Details
For as long as Northampton has existed, slavery has been a part of its history.
In this walking tour of upper Main Street, Elm Street, and Green Street, museum educator Elizabeth Sacktor will lead the group to local sites that reveal Northampton’s direct involvement and complicity in the slave economy.
Among other locations, we will visit the land where Joab Binney and Amos Hull Sr. were enslaved and stop at the houses where abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and slave trader Thomas Napier were next-door neighbors.
Finally, we’ll loop over to the site of a Northampton factory that made tools for southern plantations. Together these stories help tell Northampton’s legacy of slavery, which extended from the 17th-century to long after slavery became illegal in Massachusetts in 1783.