NORTHAMPTON — They stand throughout the room, life-size and conspicuous, yet faceless. One plays a fiddle. Another holds a hammer. Others carry lanterns or babies. They are identified by name and a few dozen other words — most of the time, little else is known about them. Many of them stand in front of the locations where they were forced to spend years of their lives — a farm, a house, a blacksmith’s shop, a mine. Sometimes they stand with their spouses and children. Sometimes they stand alone.
The figures are silhouettes representing the at least 50 enslaved people who lived in Northampton centuries ago, and they make up the exhibit “Slavery and Freedom in Northampton, 1654-1783” at Historic Northampton. It opened in July and runs through Friday, Dec. 11, 2026.
The exhibit is the result of research that began in 2019 and is still ongoing.
“We knew that there had been enslaved people in Northampton. When you read the histories of Northampton, you see, like, six or eight names mentioned, and we knew that couldn’t be all of it,” said Betty Sharpe, Historic Northampton co-executive director. The only way to fill in the gaps was to “go through every single record — public record, civic record, civil record — in Northampton and find every single reference that you could possibly find, and then put it all together.”
A team of researchers, including Historic Northampton staff, local scholars and Five College student interns, drew from records of births, deaths, marriage licenses and church membership. They dug through letters, wills, probate documents and inventories — as Sharpe put it, “looking through every haystack to find every needle.” Sometimes they’d have to search for records in Berkshire County or Boston or Connecticut to follow a lead.
The team published their research on Historic Northampton’s website in 2023. That same year, they put on three commissioned plays about Northampton history for a series called “Pulling at the Roots.” One of those plays was about Rose, who was enslaved by the Rev. Jonathan Edwards. As Edwards faced expulsion from Northampton and a possible relocation to Scotland, Rose had to negotiate with him to be able to stay in Northampton so she could be with her love, Joab, a freed slave.
“In the talkbacks after the plays, people in the audience were absolutely surprised and shocked that there was slavery in Northampton, and they clearly expressed that they wanted to know more,” Sharpe said. “They wanted to know what this all was about. We would say, ‘You know, it’s on our website,’ but that just isn’t really good enough.”
Sharpe reached out to Laurie Sanders, the museum’s co-executive director, and said, “We need to do an exhibit on this, and we need to do it now.”
‘People who actually lived’
Designer Michael Hanke, who created the silhouettes, wanted to show that the enslaved people of Northampton “were not a few mentions here or there in the physical record, but that these were people who actually lived.” He created the silhouettes by looking at contemporary photos of historical reenactors based on the information he had about each enslaved individual, no matter how little there was.
It was easier in some cases than others — knowing someone worked as a blacksmith implied that they likely had a certain amount of strength, for example. Still, he made sure to vary the figures’ poses, builds, hairstyles and headwear as much as possible. When necessary, clothing historian Lynne Bassett would give him revisions to make for historical accuracy, letting him know one man’s trousers needed to go below the knee, or another needed a hat, for example.
Hanke had designed exhibitions related to slavery for other museums, including Historic Stonington in Connecticut, the North Star Underground Railroad Museum in New York, and the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Florida, but he didn’t know the full extent of slavery in Northampton before he started working on this exhibit.
“We like to believe, in Massachusetts, we didn’t have enslaved people, but they were all over New England,” he said.
Still, Hanke noted that by putting all of the figures together, even with family members or other people enslaved at the same location, the exhibit “conflates a great deal of time,” though doing so was unavoidable. The people in the exhibit didn’t all live at the same time; at any given time, he said, there were no more than 10 enslaved people in Northampton.
“Some of these people lived earlier, some of them later,” he said. “But they were there.”
In any case, the silhouettes have made an impact: Sharpe said more than 1,000 people have seen the exhibit since it opened, and a number of those have come back to see it multiple times.
“Going into the exhibit room for the first time and there was just one silhouette — I think it was Elizabeth — just the one, I immediately got tears in my eyes, and I had to leave the room. I couldn’t stay in the room. I just could not stay there,” said Gina Nortonsmith, a member of the research committee and Historic Northampton’s board of trustees. When the museum projected the silhouettes onto its Parsons House in July, she had a similar reaction when she saw the Hull family.
“The two younger sons standing together were exactly the same size and age difference of my two sons. That also hit me and makes me tear up now when I’m not looking at it, just thinking about it,” she said.
Minimizing distractions
Still, there is a certain irony in how the exhibit depicts those enslaved people: if the intent is to show that they were real human beings, why make them silhouettes rather than, for example, paintings or photos based on reenactor portrayals? Why make them faceless?
A silhouette “emphasizes the fact that we cannot be specific,” said Sharpe. “We don’t know what this person looked like. All we have is this human form.” Beyond that, the minimal amount of available text — usually just a first name, plus “25 words, 50 words if you’re lucky” — is “visually impactful of what we don’t know.”
“The more information we provide that we are just making up is distracting,” Nortonsmith said. With a silhouette, “There’s nobody critiquing the hairstyle or the color or whether the nose is correct, all of these little things that we do as humans when we look at a person … But if it’s a silhouette, we take away the ability to focus on those distracting things, because the point is that this was a real person.”
There is a list of enslavers in the exhibit, too, though it’s not immediately obvious. It’s almost hidden, tucked away on a small wall beside the entrance.
“I see people looking at the list and seeing their mouths drop open because of how many names they recognize,” said museum educator and program coordinator Elizabeth Sacktor.
Edwards. Hawley. Lyman. Parsons. Pomeroy. Strong. Names that appear on streets and buildings in Northampton (though Sharpe pointed out that there were often multiple families in the area with the same last name, not all of which were enslavers). Even Ethan Allen is on the list. He was part of a group of investors in a lead mine, which enslaved three men: Cato, Cesar, and Tom.
“This history is still with us today. These names are still with us today. The community that we live in in Northampton is the product of a system like this,” Sacktor said.
“These are the people who were raised up,” Nortonsmith said.
“So, how did they get there? All of the labor, the things that they didn’t have to do for themselves, the labor that they exploited, the wealth that was created for them, resulting in their being elevated and remembered by street names,” she added.
Slavery was a choice
It’s a mistake, though, to think that just because enslaving was “structurally common” and often socially acceptable, it was “just this thing that everybody did,” Sacktor said.
“It’s important to remember it’s a deliberate act. It’s a choice to enslave somebody, and not everybody with money and stature and power does,” Sharpe said, “and you see that also in the next generation. Children of slaveholders often are enslavers, but not always.”
“It’s a choice that has to be made every single day, to turn another human being into a piece of property,” Sacktor said. “Those are choices that are made every single day in the way that you treat them, in the way that you speak to them, in the way that you write about them in historical sources or don’t write about them in historical sources.
“If you choose to write down their name or choose to write down another word that refers to them by the color of your skin, the liberties that you allow them in terms of everyday life — those are all choices that are made every single day. It’s not just one choice to enslave someone, and then the rest of your life [you do nothing]. It’s a continual effort.”
Though the Rev. Jonathan Edwards’ slave-owning is not a secret — in fact, the Princeton & Slavery Project noted, “For New Englanders of their elite status, the [Edwards family’s] participation in the slave trade and slave ownership was unexceptional” — it often still surprises people, Sacktor said.
“I think it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around that a minister or someone that is supposedly godly would be participating in such a dehumanizing act,” she said. “But the thing that I always remind people is that, at this time period, in the 18th century, the minister is the person with the most power. They have the most social influence and power, and when we think about who are the people that are the most likely to be enslavers, it’s the people with power. It’s the people with money. It’s the people with influence.”
Tools of the trade
On a recent Friday morning, a group of students and adults from North Star had come to the museum to tour the exhibit. After they walked around it on their own, they regrouped to join Sacktor as she led them in a deep-dive through two wills created by enslavers.
The goal was to interpret the wills to infer things about the enslaved people they left things to — to think like a historian. Mercy Dudley Bartlett left her slave Dinah three specific books, including a New Testament, which meant Dinah was likely literate. Bartlett’s husband Joseph left his slave Peter tools like a scythe and a gun, plus four pigs and “my one-eyed horse,” meaning Peter probably did a lot of agricultural labor.
The group also looked at a trowel, representing the Northampton company that produced it. That company, the Bay State Tool Manufacturing Company, changed names (and products) several times over the years, but in the 1850s, it produced hoes to be used by enslaved people on Southern plantations. (In fact, one employee, John Deming, was fired in 1856 for supporting the anti-slavery Republican Party and its presidential candidate, John C. Frémont.)
Sacktor explained to the students that although Northampton was far from the center of the slaveholding economy, it still contributed to the slave trade.
“If all of your industry is doing the actual picking of the cotton, then who’s making the tools that you would use to farm that cotton? Well, small towns in New England, such as Northampton,” she said. “The only way that the South can be entirely devoted to this one single activity of picking cotton is if you have other communities in the North that are doing all of the rest of the supportive work.”
Is it possible, in the year 2025, for the city of Northampton to extricate itself from its complicity in slavery? Arguably, it’s a question for the country as a whole. As Nortonsmith noted, the lasting aftereffects of slavery didn’t end when slavery became illegal in Massachusetts, nor with the end of the Civil War, nor after the Tulsa Race Massacre, nor with the establishment of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, nor with the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, nor even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
“After 1783, the story didn’t stop,” Nortonsmith said. “And it didn’t stop in 1865. And it didn’t stop in 1921. And it didn’t stop in 1946. And it didn’t stop in 1956. And it didn’t stop in 1964. There’s traceable tendrils of this history. To really reckon with the whole thing is a lot. Every decade or two decades, there’s a reckoning point, and I don’t know that there are places in this country that have really come to terms with the decisions made at those reckoning points.”
Locally, though, “One of the most important things to do is to recognize it, to tell the story, and to make sure everybody knows it’s part of Northampton history,” Sharpe said.
“That first step of recognizing harm is so necessary before you move on to the rest of them, and I think, up until this point, Northampton has not fully done that,” Sacktor said. “These stories are out there. What the town of Northampton and the community of Northampton chooses to do with that information is something that we’ll see.”
In any case, Sharpe said, “The past isn’t past.”
“Slavery and Freedom in Northampton, 1654-1783” is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is donation-based.
For more information about the exhibit and the research that created it, visit historicnorthampton.org.
