Digging up the history of the slave-owning Lorings and Greenoughs in Jamaica Plain

The Boston Archaeology Program is at the Loring-Greenough House in Jamaica Plain, digging down in and under the basement to see what they can find about the site and its early occupants.

These include the Loyalist slave-owning Lorings, who fled in 1774, and the Greenoughs, who bought the house after the revoloutionaries stopped using it as a military headquarters, hospital and arsenal - and who bought at least one slave even after the new state outlawed slave purchasing.

After the war, Anna Doane purchased the home in 1784 just before marrying David Stoddard Greenough, a lawyer and farmer. Despite Massachusetts stating that slavery was unconstitutional within the state in 1783, Greenough purchased 16 years of servitude by a five-year-old Black child named Dick in 1785. Dick was the son of Binah, a woman enslaved by John Morey of Roxbury. In 1786, Stoddard worked around the evolving enslavement rules by signing an agreement with Morey reclassifying Dick as a farmer's apprentice until he was 21. The apprenticeship allowed for Dick's unpaid labor to continue, legally, which was one of the various ways enslavers worked to retain free Black labor as slavery became abolished in Massachusetts.

The first find was cute, if not historical, but now city diggers have found evidence of an early cistern, used to store water back in the days before the area had a public water supply.