A look back at black history in Warner reveals a lot, the good and the bad.
Black people fought and died in American wars, before the chains of slavery had been broken. Black people worked and contributed to their community. Black people had skills and business savvy, producing items like baskets for sale in this small New Hampshire community.
But, alas, the Granite State was not free of racism, which will be discussed as well Sunday, during the first-ever Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire bus tour in Warner. Black people continued to be stereotyped after the Civil War, often hired as servants in mansions for rich people. And, once upon a time, a road in Warner included the N-word, which came before “Plains Road.”
“There were different ethnic groups in New Hampshire, and there’s always more to it,” said Lynn Clark, executive director of the Warner Historical Society. “There’s always more to find, always questions that need to be asked to get everybody’s history.
“Not just the white man’s history.”
Here in the Granite State, some might be surprised over the limited-yet-rich history attached to African Americans here.
That’s why Clark, Rebecca Courser – whom Clark replaced as director at the Warner Historical Society – and JerriAnne Boggis, a community activist and leader in the black community, want to set the record straight as to the impact and contributions that the small African American community made 100 years ago and beyond.
Boggis is the director of the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail, and her influence directly led to a branch of that program opening in Warner, where a proud black community prospered in its own way.
“She came out and suggested we do this tour,” Clark told me. “They were aware of our work and they came out to meet and we talked about ideas of expanding the trail and doing the tour here.”
Boggis was unavailable for comment, but her thoughts were crystallized in a recent published report.
“Warner. Can you imagine, when you think of this out-of-the-way place?” Boggis, who is black, was quoted as saying. “But there was a community of colored people there, and it was not just one family. They were integrated into the community. They were part of the town.”
They fought in three wars: the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. If you take the tour, which begins at 10 a.m. on Church Street and will last about 1½ hours, you’ll see the names of four black men inscribed on the War Memorial in the center of town.
You’ll learn about Ichabod Twilight, who fought in the Revolutionary War, and cousins James and John Haskell, who joined Massachusetts Colored Regiments during the Civil War.
You’ll see Foothills restaurant, once a mansion that employed black people after the Civil War, but kept them boxed into one area of employment.
“A lot of people came north from Virginia to work in the mansions,” Clark told me. “It’s one of the few jobs they were allowed to do. They were called domestic servants.”
Elsewhere, you’ll see photos of African Americans who added to the personality of the town, the former sites of tiny schoolhouses and a house in Davisville that used to be a tavern in the 18th century and will forever carry historic significance.
“The Davises were involved in the Underground Railroad,” Clark said. “One of the Davises, after the Revolutionary War, would take a tour of the country and he did not like how blacks and Native Americans were being treated, so that inspired him to get involved in the Underground Railroad.”
The bus will stop at some point and give visitors the opportunity to walk into Poor Farm Cemetery, where at least one black soldier – from the War of 1812 – is buried, and where the cemetery’s trustees hired someone to use a ground-penetrating radar machine to find more African Americans buried there.
The gismo found 18 bodies.
“We will keep pouring through any sort of records having to do with Poor Farm,” Clark said. “People were here but we don’t know where they were buried and we’ll keep at it. Surprisingly, things still turn up, and we are hopeful.”
Clark has spent much of her life examining the past. Armed with a graduate degree in anthropology from Binghamton University in New York, she was the director, a trustee and a volunteer for eight years at the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner. She worked for the Hopkinton and New Hampshire historical societies as well.
Her attention toward the state’s black community surfaced in full force while she worked at the now-closed Howard Sargent Museum. Sargent, who died in 1993, was one of the first professional archeologists in the state, and he contributed many of the artifacts now on display at the Mt. Kearsarge Museum.
He told Clark about a community of African Americans who lived on the Newport-Croydon line. From there, she combined forces with Courser, who had found records of African American life dating back centuries. She and Clark had a thought.
“I thought then that there wasn’t much about black people in New Hampshire,” Clark said. “She noticed vital records for black people and we both said, ‘Hmm. People don’t know about this. We should tell people about this.’ ”
So they are.
I couldn’t reach Courser, the former director of the Warner Historical Society. But she was quoted in the same article that included Boggis.
“The fact is there was a community (of African Americans) from at least 1810,” Courser said in the story. “But it was not until 1850 that they were listed in the census.”
Clark said that the tour will highlight accomplishments in the black community years ago, while not shying away from some of the ugly pieces that have filtered into history books.
“We find with Revolutionary War records that by the 19th century these people and their contributions were being downplayed,” Clark said. “Records say they were soldiers fighting on the front lines, but in town history, it says he was a waiter for George Washington to demean their experience.”
Nothing hits harder, however, than the old name of the old street, now known as Poverty Plains Road. The bus tour will stop there.
“Just imagine,” Clark noted, “what it used to be called back then.”
