SYMHC Classics: Sarah Bradlee Fulton

This 2023 episode covers Sarah Bradlee Fulton, sometimes called the Mother of the Boston Tea Party. But available information about her is basically a series of anecdotes, and can’t really be corroborated.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today is July fourth, twenty twenty sixth, which
is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration
of Independence here in the US. So for Today's Saturday Classic,
I wanted to pick something at least related to the
Revolutionary War. It is our episode about Sarah Bradley Fulton,
who is sometimes called the mother of the Boston Tea Party.

(00:23):
This was recorded in the run up to that two
hundred and fiftieth anniversary. This episode originally came out on
December thirteenth, twenty twenty three. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and

(00:48):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
Boston Tea Party is right around the corner on December
sixteenth this year, which is twenty twenty three. There have
been various events related to this anniversary already, leading up
to a commemoration on the afternoon and evening of the sixteenth,

(01:11):
and the plan for that is to culminate in a
reenactment of dumping the British East India Company's tea into
Boston Harbor. There is an episode on the Boston Tea
Party in the archive from way back in two thousand
and eight, when the show was only about six months
old and was just almost a completely different podcast from

(01:32):
what it is now. And while I definitely don't encourage
people to take the name stuff you missed in history
class completely literally, you can't really describe the Boston Tea
Party as lesser known, at least not in the United States.
At the same time, I wanted to do something connected
to all of this, and eventually I landed on Sarah

(01:55):
Bradley Fulton, who is sometimes called the mother of the
Boston Tea Party. What we know about Sarah Bradley Fulton
is kind of a series of anecdotes. They mostly trace
back to the same sources, and those can't really be corroborated.

(02:16):
We can't prove that they didn't happen, but we also
can't prove that they did, so that is where we
will start. The first written mention at least that we
know of, connecting Sarah Bradley Fulton to the Boston Tea
Party is from eighteen seventy three. It was written by
Eliza M. Gill for the Boston Tea Party Centennial, and

(02:38):
it was printed in the Boston Evening Traveler a day later.
Gill was born in eighteen fifty one and had been
a school teacher before going to work for the city
of Medford, Massachusetts, and she was also active in local history.
She described the content of her letter as something quote
imparted to me by descendants still living of men who

(02:58):
took part in the Boston Tea Party. So this letter
includes some of the same basic points as our main
source of information on Sarah Bradley Fulton that was written
by Helen T. Wilde about twenty five years later. There
are a whole lot of like recently written articles about
Sarah Bradley Fulton that are point for point this article.

(03:22):
Wilde was born in Medford in eighteen sixty. She also
worked as a school teacher before eventually going to work
for the city, first as a clerk and then as
a tax assessor. She and gil knew one another. Both
of them held leadership roles in the Medford Historical Society,
and both of them were among the founders of Medford's

(03:43):
chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. That chapter
was named for Sarah Bradley Fulton, and when that chapter
was first founded, Wild was its secretary and Gil was historian.
Wild's piece on Fulton was written for the eighteen nineties
inauguration of the Sarah Bradley Fulton chapter of the DAR,

(04:04):
and it was later printed in the Medford Historical Record
and in American Monthly Magazine, and just about everything that
comes up in articles about Sarah Bradley Fulton today traces
back to this one piece. Gil had not named the
descendants still living that she talked to in writing her
letter to The Boston Evening Traveler, other than saying that

(04:26):
it was one of the descendants of Sarah's husband, John,
and Wild doesn't name her sources in her piece either,
But Fulton's grandson, also named John Fulton, had been profiled
by The Boston Globe the year before, and he told
some similar stories about his grandmother. As a side note,
this Boston Globe article includes a three paragraph quotation that

(04:50):
as presented as though it is in Sarah Bradley Fulton's
own voice and words. It's not totally clear whether this
was someth things she actually said or wrote, or if
this quotation was more like a literary device that passage
is gonna come up again later. This article also describes

(05:11):
John Fulton as walking quote arm in arm with a
modern analyst. So could that modern analyst have been Wild
or Gill or someone else completely different who can say?
We don't really know. And just to be clear, that's
not analysts like someone who analyzes things. It's analyst an

(05:32):
n al like someone who is involved in the annals
of history. Right, there are some discrepancies between what Eliza M.
Gil wrote and Helen T. Wild's piece a couple of
decades later, Like according to Gill's letter, Sarah Bradley and
John Fulton were not married yet when the Boston tea
party happened, but according to Wild, they were. Wild is correct.

(05:56):
We also don't really know the explanation for the discrepancies,
Like you see, information came from different people, or if
Wild and Gil each talked to the same person and
their recollection changed over the years, or if new documentation
was unearthed, or some other possibility. Regardless, what we're talking
about today was definitely part of local law in Medford

(06:17):
and Fulton family law by the mid to late nineteenth century,
but there's no direct evidence to substantiate a lot of it,
and no corroborating accounts from the same time, like there
were no friends of Sarah Bradley Fulton who wrote about
her in their diary that we have unearthed so far
to kind of back up these stories. Although some of

(06:40):
the Bradleys were documented as being actively involved with the Colonists' uprising,
there are no written mentions of Sarah Bradley Fulton or
her family members in connection to the Boston Tea Party
until about one hundred years after the fact. Her grandson
John was in his thirties when she died and he
did know her, but that was also decades after the

(07:03):
Boston Tea Party happened, and then the Boston Globe profile
and Wildsbeasts for the Dar those are written another sixty
more years or so after her death. There are also
some details that seem maybe a little questionable. We will
talk about them. We do know that Sarah Bradley Fulton
was a real person. She was born Sarah Bradley on

(07:25):
December twenty fourth, seventeen forty in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Her birth
was registered with the town of Dorchester, although her last
name in the registry is spelled Bradley bradl e Y
instead of Brdlee. Allegedly, this spelling change was intentional because
there were so many Bradley's that it was getting hard

(07:46):
to keep up with who was related to who. At
the time, Dorchester was its own town, but it was
annexed by the City of Boston in eighteen seventy. In
seventeen sixty two, so skipping ahead quite a bit, Sarah
Bradley married John Fulton. Later they moved to Medford, where
they lived for the rest of their lives. They had
at least ten children together, with seven or eight of

(08:08):
them surviving to adulthood. I found slightly different names and
counts among different sources. A few years after getting married,
Sarah Bradley Fulton reportedly became active in the Daughters of Liberty.
As with the more widely known Sons of Liberty, the
origins of the Daughters of Liberty are pretty murky. It
also seems like the name Daughters of Liberty was used

(08:31):
for established organizations as well as more broadly for women
who were, in one way or another working toward the
same overall goals, that is, resisting British taxation and advocating
for the rights and freedoms of Britain's colonies in North America.
This is another case or we don't have specific documentation
of what she was doing, but both the sons and

(08:52):
daughters of Liberty started to coalesce in seventeen sixty five
in response to the Stamp Act. This is a tax
on legal documents and printed materials that Parliament passed in
the wake of the Seven Years War as a way
for Britain to bring in more revenue. All such documents
had to be stamped as proof that the tax had

(09:12):
been paid, and a lot of people in the colonies
objected to this tax, both because of the tax itself
and because the colonies did not have direct representation in
the Parliament that had passed it, so, in other words,
no taxation without representation. In the wake of protests and
unrest and various threats against tax collectors and other British officials,

(09:37):
Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in seventeen sixty seven, while
stressing that it did have the right to tax the colonies.
Soon after, Parliament passed another set of acts known as
the Townsend Acts. One of the towns In Acts was
the Revenue Act, which established duties on various goods, including lead, glass, paper, paint,

(09:57):
and tea. Another of the acts, the Indemnity Act, was
passed a few days later and lowered the duty on
the East India Company's tea imports into England and also
refunded duties on tea that was then exported to the
American colonies or to Ireland. This was really an effort
to try to save the East India Company from financial collapse.

(10:18):
Smugglers were bringing a lot of Dutch East India Company
tea into the colonies, which could be sold much cheaper
than British East India Company tea with all its duties
in place. People were still not happy about these taxes though.
While the Sons of Liberty were known for public and
sometimes destructive protests like hanging officials in effigy and eventually

(10:40):
the destruction of the tea that later became known as
the Boston Tea Party, the Daughters of Liberty were not
usually out in the streets demonstrating. Instead, they wrote letters
and gathered signatures. They organized boycotts of British goods, and
they sought out locally made alternatives. When the Sons of
Liberty organized non importation associations in which merchants would agree

(11:04):
not to import British goods. The Daughters of Liberty worked
on ways to deal with all the resulting shortages. Linen
and cloth were among the goods that merchants refused to
import from Britain, so the Daughters of Liberty's part in
this included a lot of spinning. Spinning bees were already
a thing, but especially in the Northeast, they became a

(11:25):
widespread act of collective resistance among colonial women, as did
wearing homespun like Here's a description from the Boston Chronicle
in seventeen sixty six. Quote on the fourth instant eighteen
Daughters of Liberty, young ladies of good reputation assembled at
the house of doctor E. Fhram Bowen in this town,
in consequence of an invitation of that gentleman who had

(11:48):
discovered a laudable zeal for the introducing home manufacturers. There
they exhibited a fine example of industry by spinning from
sunrise until dark, and displayed a spirit for saving their
sins thinking country rarely to be found among persons of
more age and experience. In the wake of all of this,
the value of imports from Britain into the colonies dropped

(12:11):
enormously between seventeen sixty seven and seventeen sixty eight, although
this drop was largely focused in the North. In terms
of British imports, things didn't really change all that much
in the South at all, with the exception of the
tax on tea. The Townshend Acts taxes were repealed in
seventeen seventy. We're going to come back to the Tea

(12:31):
and the Boston Tea Party after we have a sponsor break.
While Sarah Bradley Fulton and her husband John established their
home in Medford, which is northwest of Boston on the
Mystic River, her brother Nathaniel Bradley continued to live in Boston.

(12:56):
He was a carpenter and a craftsman, and according to
Helen's Ta D Wilde's account, friends and neighbors gathered at
his home at the corner of Hollis and Tremont Streets
for codfish suppers on Saturday nights. In her words, his
carpenter shop and kitchen became quote meeting places for Boston's
most devoted patriots. And again, according to Wilde's account, the

(13:20):
Bradley home in Boston was one of the places where
men prepared for the Boston Tea Party, although that name
was not coined until decades after it happened. The Boston
Tea Party circled back to Britain's efforts to keep the
British East India Company afloat in terms of both revenue
and offloading enormous amounts of tea that were sitting in
London warehouses unsold. Enormous as in about seventeen million pounds

(13:46):
of unsold tea. Parliament passed the Tea Act on May tenth,
seventeen seventy three, which gave the British East India Company
the right to ship tea directly to the colonies, rather
than having to ship it to Britain first. The company
was also allowed to employ its own agents to sell
tea rather than going through colonial merchants, since it was

(14:07):
no longer having to ship tea to England and pay
a duty on it there. This meant the British East
India Company could start selling tea in the colonies for
less than the price of smuggled Dutch tea. But to
a lot of people in the colonies, access to cheaper
tea was not what mattered. It was that tax they
would be paying if they bought it. Although the Townshenacts

(14:28):
tax on tea had still been in place between seventeen
seventy and seventeen seventy three, and there were still a
lot of people in the colonies who refused to drink
tea during those years, the Tea Act really revived people's
anger and frustration over this issue. A lot of people
in the colonies really doubled down on their boycott of tea,

(14:49):
and the Daughters of Liberty promoted alternatives sometimes called Liberty Tea,
including mint, raspberry leaf, and various herbs and roots. Ship
arriving in American ports were met by angry mobs and
forced to leave still laden with their tea. On November
twenty eighth, seventeen seventy three, a ship called the Dartmouth

(15:11):
arrived in Boston. The Eleanor arrived on December second, and
the Beaver on December fifteenth. Each of these ships carried
more than one hundred chests of East India Company tea,
but the ships themselves were owned by local merchants. Newspapers
had started reporting on shipments of tea that were headed
for the colonies in October, so the Sons of Liberty

(15:32):
had been holding public meetings on the issue for weeks
before these ships started arriving, at locations including the Liberty
Tree near Boston Common and Faniel Hall. These meetings grew
after the Dartmouth arrived, with organizers moving to the Old
South Meetinghouse to accommodate the larger crowd. So people like
the Sons of Liberty demanded that these ships be sent

(15:54):
back to England, but the Collector of Customs refused to
let them leave the harbor without the duties being paid
on the tea. Of course, the people who owned these
ships did not want to pay a duty on a
product that could not be unloaded or sold. While officials
in other port cities had allowed ships carrying tea to

(16:15):
return to England, Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor Thomas Hutchinson insisted
that the ships remain in the port until the tea
was unloaded, and he stationed two gunships at the harbor
to prevent their departure. He was not interested in de
escalating the situation at all. The last of a long

(16:37):
series of public meetings was held at the Old South
Meetinghouse on December sixteenth, seventeen seventy three. That day, the
Governor was once again asked if the ships could be
sent back to England, and he once again refused. There's
a little bit of fuzziness regarding the sequence of events
from here. There's a popular story that Samuel Adams gave
a pre arranged signal for the men to go down

(16:58):
to the harbor to destroy the tea, by saying this
meeting can do nothing more to save the country. But
this is another thing that didn't appear in writing until
almost one hundred years after the fact. Regardless, shortly after
getting this last update on the governor's refusal, a group
of men boarded the dartmouth the Eleanor and the beaver

(17:19):
broke open the more than three hundred crates of tea
they were carrying and dumped the contents into the harbor.
At least some of these men were dressed in costumes
meant to resemble indigenous people. Here's an account from participant
George Hughes, written in eighteen thirty four, so more than
sixty years after this event occurred. Quote. It was now

(17:39):
evening and I immediately dressed myself in the costume of
an Indian equipped with a small hatchet, which I and
my associates denominated the tomahawk, with whitch and a club.
After having painted my face and hands with coal dust
in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin's Wharf,
where the ships lay that contained the tea. When I

(18:00):
appeared in the street after being thus disguised, I fell
in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as
I was, and who fell in with me and marched
in order to the place of our destination. There's really
no firsthand documentation about why, specifically, at least some of
the men were in these costumes, and it's also not

(18:20):
clear what exactly those costumes entailed. Some participants' first hand
accounts used generic words like Indian or Indian dress, including
that of Joshua Wyeth, who wrote the first published account
from a participant more than fifty years later. One Boston
news report from a couple of days after the event
describes the men as dressed as quote mohawks or Indians,

(18:43):
while another references Indians from Narragansett, and still other accounts
mentioned that at least some of the men were not
in indigenous dress at all. We also don't definitively know
why the Mohawk and the Narragansett were the nations that
were specifically named in various Newsts and other accounts. But
these are not the same indigenous nation. The Mohawk or

(19:05):
the Kenyakinaka are one of the six nations of the Hadenashani.
They're an Iroquoisan speaking people. Their ancestral homeland is in
what's now eastern New York State, as well as adjacent
parts of Canada and Vermont. The Narragansett are an Algonquian
speaking people whose ancestral homeland is in what's now Rhode Island.
So these are two different nations from two different language

(19:27):
groups whose homelands are hundreds of miles apart. Neither of
them are among the nations whose homelands are near what's
now Boston. The reason for adopting this dress also is
not clearly documented anywhere, but a lot of colonists, particularly
colonists who are aligned with groups like the Sons of Liberty,
already saw indigenous people as something of a symbol representing

(19:50):
ideas like autonomy, freedom, and unity. People had worn so
called Indian dress and other protests against British policies. Prior
to the Boston Tea Party in New York, Broadsides signed
the Mohawks had been circulating warning people against assisting with
the landing of ships carrying British tea. The destruction of

(20:11):
the tea was also a symbolic protest, and dressing as
Native Americans or in clothing inspired by indigenous dress was
symbolic of the men's connection to America, not to Britain.
So this may have been meant as a basic disguise
or to try to deflect suspicion away from the colonists,
But Indigenous imagery already had these additional layers of meaning,

(20:35):
and there's obviously also some irony here. Colonists were appropriating
indigenous imagery as an emblem of ideals like freedom while
also waging war against indigenous nations and violating treaties and
generally viewing Indigenous peoples as savage and inferior. Also, the
idea that these men were specifically dressed as Mohawk rather

(20:57):
than more generically Indian or possibly Narragansett like that doesn't
seem to have really solidified until decades later. Okay, So
to get back to Sarah Bradley Fulton. According to Wilde's account,
some of the men who participated in the destruction of
the tea met and prepared at her brother, Nathaniel Bradley's
carpenter shop. Fulton and her sister in law, who was

(21:21):
just referred to as Missus Bradley in surviving accounts, were
there to help. This is also one of the discrepancies
between wild and gil. Eliza m. Gill's letter says this
happened at the home of Bradley's father, not her brother.
The letter also says that John Fulton and four Bradley brothers, Nathaniel, Josiah, David,

(21:42):
and Thomas, were all involved. That passage from the Boston
Globe that reads like a quote from her says that
Sarah Bradley Fulton helped her brothers quote make a perfect disguise,
and some sources describe Fulton as having been the one
to come up with the whole idea that the sons
of liberty should dress like indigenous men. Is really not

(22:04):
clear who first gave her the credit for doing that,
But as we just established, so called Indian dress had
already become part of the culture of protest among the colonists,
especially in the northeast, and doing this already had some
layers of symbolic meetings. So even if she was the
person who said and also where this y'all should do this? Yeah,

(22:26):
like that was something people were already doing. The accounts
we have of Sarah Bradley Fulton's involvement very a little bit.
Either she stayed behind to keep the water hot so
the men could remove whatever they'd put on their faces
when they returned, or she went down to the harbor
to watch from a distance and then left before the
men did to get everything ready. And there's some suggestion

(22:49):
that a British soldier or spy stopped by the Bradley
holme at some point during the evening, either while Fulton
was there with her sister in law or after the
men had come back and remove their costumes. But this
soldier or spy concluded that there was just some laundry
or other housework being done, and he moved along. Wild's

(23:09):
account describes it this way, quote Nathaniel Bradley's principles were
well known, and a spy, hoping to find some proof
against him, peered in at the kitchen window but saw
these two women moving about so quietly and naturally that
he passed on, little dreaming what was really in progress there? Uh,
this is one of the things that doesn't really make sense.

(23:30):
Though Gill's letter and the Boston Globe profile mentioned this
as well. All three of them seemed to make it
sound like this guy came and looked in the window
and left unnoticed. So how did anyone know they had
that he had been there. This is what the Internet would
call a plot hole. Regardless of all that, toward the
end of the nineteenth century, in the Arow, when Wild

(23:53):
and gil were writing about Sarah Bradley Fulton, the Bradley
Home at the corner of Tremont and Hollis became known
as the Tea Party House. There were even photo postcards
of it available for sale, which is what people had
to content themselves with after the house was torn down
in eighteen ninety eight. We will talk about Sarah Bradley
Fulton's life after the Boston Tea Party after a sponsor break.

(24:26):
Tensions between Britain and its colonies and the Americas had
been growing for years before the Boston Tea Party, which
again was not called that until much later, and those
tensions escalated really dramatically, and its aftermath tea protests continued
in Massachusetts and other colonies. In seventeen seventy four, Parliament
passed a set of laws that came to be known

(24:48):
as the Intolerable Acts as one of several putative measures.
The Revolutionary War began with the Battles of Lexington and
conquered in April of seventeen seventy five. According to Helen T.
Wilde's account of Sarah Bradley Fulton's life, she was actively
involved in the war. Hearing Paul Revere's ride to raise

(25:09):
the alarm as he passed through Medford on April eighteenth,
he allegedly made a little pit stop for some Medford rum.
On June seventeenth, the Medford militia fought at the Battle
of Bunker Hill, across the Charles River from Boston and
down the Mystic River from Medford. Fulton organized local women
to work as nurses in a field hospital that was
set up in an open area by Wade's tavern. In

(25:32):
Wilde's words, quote among them, the steady nerves of Sarah
Fulton made her a leader. One poor fellow had a
bullet in his cheek, and she removed it. She almost
forgot the circumstance until years after he came to thank
her for her service. A year later, Major John Brooks
of Medford needed a message delivered to General George Washington

(25:53):
at the front and asked Fulton's husband to do it.
She went herself instead, and according to a story passed
down in her family as recorded by a great great
great great granddaughter, Fulton concealed the message in the hem
of her skirt, and then after the war Washington came
to thank her in person for delivering that message. Again.

(26:14):
In Wilde's words quote, it is said that, according to
the fashion of the day, John Fulton on this occasion
brewed a potation whose chief ingredient was the far famed
product of the town. The little silver mounted ladle was
dipped in the steaming concoction, and the first glass for
Missus Fulton's new punch bowl was sipped by his excellency.

(26:36):
This was the proudest day of Sarah Fulton's life. The
chair in which he sat and the punch bowl and
ladele were always sacred and are still treasured by her descendants.
That far famed product of the town mentioned in Wilde's
account was that rum that was allegedly enough of a
draw to entice Paul Revere to stop for some while

(26:56):
warning people of an advancing army. Distilling rum was also
a major part of the New England economy and one
of the ways it was interconnected with slavery. The sugar
that was used to make the molasses that was turned
into rum in New England distilleries was grown and processed
at slave labor camps on islands in the Caribbean. There's
also a story about the Siege of Boston. A load

(27:18):
of firewood was expected to come through Medford, or maybe
was being harvested at one of Medford's woodlots, and it
was meant for Revolutionary troops in Cambridge. Knowing that this
wood would likely be confiscated by the British, Fulton sent
her husband to buy it, hoping that the British soldiers
would respect it as his private property. This didn't work out,

(27:39):
and the soldiers confiscated it anyway. This is one of
the things I have some questions about, like how they
knew about this wood and why they thought that buying
it wouldn't leave it untouched, because you know, the British
confiscating property from people was kind of a thing. In
Wild's words, quote when his wife heard the story, she

(28:00):
flung on a shawl and went in pursuit. Overtaking the party,
She took the oxen by the horns and turned them around.
The men threatened to shoot her, but she shouted defiantly
as she started her team shoot away. Astonishment, admiration, and
amusement were too much for the regulars, and they unconditionally

(28:20):
surrendered as a delightful story, even though there's some question marks, Yeah,
for sure. At some point after the war, the Marquis
de Lafayette reportedly visited the Fulton home, and he was
seated in the same chair and served from the same
punch bowl as George Washington had been years before. In
Wilde's account, the chair, punch bowl, and ladle were always sacred.

(28:43):
The punch bowl was donated to Mount Vernon in Fulton's
memory in two thousand and six. Some accounts described this
punch bowl as silver, but the one that was donated
to Mount Vernon is porcelain. After the war, the Fultons
bought a house on the road that ran from Medford
north to STONA John Fulton died on February ninth, seventeen ninety,
when Sarah was forty nine. Decades later, on November ninth,

(29:07):
eighteen thirty five, Sarah Bradley Fulton died in her sleep
at the age of ninety five, and she was buried
at Salem Street Cemetery in Medford. At the first town
meeting to be held after her death, the road she
had lived on was renamed Fulton Street in her honor.
As we said at the top of the show, the
Medford Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution was

(29:28):
named for Sarah Bradley Fulton when it was established. The
DAR placed a marker at Fulton's burial site in nineteen hundred,
made from the stone that had served as the door
stop at her Medford home. It reads Sarah Bradley Fulton
seventeen forty to eighteen thirty five, Heroine of the Revolution.
Created by the Sarah Bradley Fulton Chapter of the DAR.

(29:50):
Nineteen hundred, Poet and playwright Grace Stewett Austen wrote a
play called Sarah Bradley Fulton Patriot, a Colonial drama in
three acts, in nineteen nineteen. Austin was born in New Hampshire,
but at this time was living in Bloomington, Illinois, and
she wrote this play under the auspices of the Letitia

(30:11):
Green Stephenson chapter of the DAR. Letitia Green Stephenson was
the wife of Adelaide Stevenson, vice president under Grover Cleveland,
and she was one of the founders of that Bloomington chapter.
To circle back on the authors of those two sources
of information on Sarah Bradley Fulton that we've been talking about,
Eliza M. Gill lived in her family's home in Medford

(30:32):
for more than sixty years before eventually moving to Waltham, Massachusetts,
toward the end of her life. She died there on
February tenth, nineteen twenty three, at the age of seventy one.
In addition to her work with the DAR in the
Medford Historical Society, she was also a member of the
New England Historical and Genealogical Society, also of the Society

(30:52):
for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. Helen C. Wilde
died in nineteen forty eight at the age of eighty eight.
In addition to her work that we've already talked about,
wild was part of the Medford Dar's efforts to purchase
and restore a property known as Royal House. To that end,
she helped establish the Royal House Association in nineteen oh six. Today,

(31:15):
Royal House is a museum called the Royal House and
Slave Quarters, which we visited Holly and I back in
twenty sixteen. We talked more about this house and its
history in our episode Belinda Sutton's post enslavement petitions. We
haven't talked very much about slavery in today's episode, but
enslaved people in Massachusetts were advocating for their own liberation

(31:36):
before and during the Revolutionary War, and it was through
that advocacy that the Supreme Judicial Court effectively abolished slavery
in Massachusetts in seventeen eighty three. And during and after
the war. Belinda Sutton, who was enslaved at Royal House,
petitioned to be paid for her years of labor while
she was enslaved by the Royals. We are going to

(31:56):
run our episode on this as our next Saturday Clime. Yeah.
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or

(32:19):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.