CONTENT WARNING: the third image in this post contains a historical quotation with racially insensitive language. A sanitized but accurate summary of its contents is written below.
The house in the first image is 301 W. Foster Street, built in 1798 by Phineas Sprague IV. This house replaced an earlier house that had been located on the same spot, where Phineas IV had been raised by his father, Phineas III. Phineas III was likely living here with his son when he died in 1805.
When the Phineas Spragues are remembered, it is mainly for providing the rendezvous point for the local militia on the eve of the Battles of Lexington & Concord. Eighteen North Malden militiamen gathered under the Elm tree that stood across from this house on that night, among them the two Spragues. The spot is now marked by the memorial in Gooch Park in the second image.
Phineas III was an especially manipulative slave master. Many years later, Artemas Barrett, a Sprague relative who grew up in the neighborhood, recalled in a private letter (image three) how Phineas had a chalkboard on which he would scrawl numbers which he claimed could be used to learn the secrets of his enslaved people. In his book Black Yankees (1988), the scholar William D. Pierson recognized Sprague’s seemingly eccentric behavior as an appropriation of West African beliefs in numerological magic, which he deployed to intimidate and dominate his enslaved people.
The Gooch Park plaque informs us that the Melrose militiamen “fought in the first battle for freedom.” The contradiction inherent in their position as slave-owning freedom fighters was likely not lost on them. It should not be lost on us.
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