e-Newsletter | February 17, 2023
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Caroline C. Cottrell (1856-1918)
by Kristen Fehlhaber, Assistant Director
In honor of Black History month, I’d like to introduce you to Caroline C. Cottrell (1856-1918). She’s the subject of an ongoing research project, inspired by the Newburyport Black History Initiative. I first “met” Caroline late one afternoon while flipping through old photo albums here at the Museum of Old Newbury. In an album devoted to a High Street house, I saw this page:
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There were two photos of a woman in a kitchen. She’s seated in both, with a bowl and a paper in her lap. The first photo is a bit blurry because she's leaning back, rocking in a rocking chair, caught off-guard. In the second, she’s ready for the photo, sitting up and holding still. Who took these photos? What was their relationship to this woman? And why were they in an album full of formal family portraits and detailed images of empty rooms in a grand High Street house? Curious, I spent a few minutes trying to identify her. It didn’t take long, as the house was labeled with an address, 207 (now 209) High Street. Locals might know this as Morrill Place, still standing here in Newburyport, though no longer in the Morrill family. |
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I find Caroline C. Cottrell living with the Morrill family in the 1900 U.S. Census. She’s listed as Black, age 38, a house servant, born in North Carolina, as were her parents. Working alongside her is another servant, Margaret Reardon, white, age 24, born in Ireland and in this country for only 3 years. The Morrill family consists of two parents, two adult children, and one 14-year-old son. I wonder how Caroline and Margaret got along and what life was like in that big house. |
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1900 U.S. Federal Census, Newburyport, Ward 5, Essex, Massachusetts.
It would be easy to assume that life was hard for Caroline as the only black woman in the household and so far from her birthplace. I’m also aware of stereotypes of black “mammies” being devoted and selfless to their families. Researchers must be careful not to insert their own assumptions into the record, so as much as possible, I want to let Caroline speak for herself.
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1910 U.S. Federal Census, Newburyport, Ward 5, Essex, Massachusetts.
Caroline is again listed with the Morrill family in the 1910 Census, with Margaret Reardon still working there. Besides these census appearances, there’s little record of Caroline until her death on March 12, 1918. The Morrill family holds the funeral at their home and the burial is private.
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Death announcement, March 12, 1918; Funeral description, March 15, 1918, Newburyport Daily Herald. |
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Caroline C. Cottrell is buried with members of the Morrill family, Union Cemetery, Amesbury. Photo courtesy of Ghlee Woodworth.
All of this was relatively easy to find online - the census records, the newspaper clippings, the grave site. That she was buried in the Morrill family plot was intriguing. This led to additional research, with invaluable contributions by John Miller of Tacoma, WA, Caroline's great-grandnephew, and members of the Morrill family. Based on what's been uncovered, let’s start at her beginning…
Caroline C. Cottrell was born enslaved in 1856 in Anson County, North Carolina. Her parents were Martha and Lawrence Cottrell. Shortly after Caroline’s birth, their enslaver moved Caroline’s family to northeast Tennessee. She appears in the 1860 Slave Schedule as a 4-year-old, below her brother Albert, her sister Louisa, and mother Martha, and two others - possibly a grandmother and perhaps her uncle Hiram.
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The Cottrell family in 1860, with names inferred. Martha’s future husband, Primus J. Hale, might be the 27-year-old male next door enslaved by Lewis Hale. 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedule, District 15, Sullivan County, Tennessee.
The United States Census included Slave Schedules in 1850 and 1860, listing the owner, the enslaved person’s age, gender and color. Their names weren't listed, making it incredibly difficult today for Black Americans to find their ancestors before the 1870 census.
John B. Cottrell, a white physician, enslaved 16 people in 1850 in North Carolina but only six in 1860 after the move to Tennessee. Was Caroline’s father sold or had he died? We don’t know. After gaining their freedom, black families searched for missing relatives for years (see this web site for examples), but no ads were found for Lawrence Cottrell. (We know his name because much later, Caroline's brother Albert's death certificate lists Lawrence Cottrell as his father.) On November 29, 1865, Martha A. Cottrell married Primus Jackson Hale, a man that would come to be seen as father and grandfather to the Cottrell family.
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Marriage License, Primas (Primus) J. Hale to Martha A. Cottrell, November 29, 1865, Sullivan County, Tennessee.
The marriage record proved key to finding the family in the 1860 Slave Schedule. It places Martha Cottrell in Sullivan County, where the white, North Carolina-born Cottrells lived. And if the Black Cottrells had taken a different last name upon gaining their freedom (not uncommon), it would have been much harder or impossible to find their enslaver.
By 1870, the family is regrouping and another of Caroline’s uncles, Lister, is now living with the Hale-Cottrell family. The older woman isn't with them. Caroline is listed as being “at home” at age 14 and the census says that she can read, cannot write and did not attend school that year. We have examples of her beautiful handwriting, so it’s likely she went to school at some point. Her brother Albert is working as a farm laborer, possibly for the white Hale family that lives nearby.
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1870 U.S. Federal Census, District 19, Washington County, Tennessee.
By 1880, Caroline and her family live 200 miles away in Chattanooga TN, a town that was growing rapidly. Caroline is reported to be 22, not 24. She'll "lose" a few more years later in life, which happens due to reporting errors or for other reasons.
During and after the Civil War, it experienced an economic boom and needed labor as industry expanded rapidly. According to Michelle R. Scott, author of Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging Urban South, many Southern cities were the first destination of African Americans as they began to leave the rural farms where they had been enslaved. This preceded the later Great Migration to cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles, made necessary by the racist Jim Crow laws of the South.
On Caroline’s 1880 census page, of the 50 people listed, only 23 were born in Tennessee. The other 27 residents were born in Bavaria, Belgium, Russia, Switzerland, Württemberg, as well as Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina (including the six Cottrells), Kentucky, New York, Indiana and Ohio.
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1880 U.S. Federal Census, 1st Ward, Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Primus is no longer a carpenter but now working as a drayman (hauling goods with horse and wagon), while Albert and Caroline both work as house servants. Martha is keeping house for her family and her brother Hiram still lives with them, working as a cook in a hotel. Lister and Louisa aren't present.
In 1880, Caroline might already be working for Mary Helen Hamilton, a white transplant from Mississippi whose husband, a native New Yorker and Confederate Army surgeon, had recently died. Mary Helen had two young children and she would be the person who would lead Caroline to moving to Newburyport.
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Ad showing Frank F. Morrill as Secretary/Treasurer. Chattanooga Daily Times, 5 May 1882
It was the industrial growth of Chattanooga that led Frank F. Morrill to that city, Frank Forrest Morrill, born in Waltham, MA, was an executive at the Wason Car and Foundry Company. According to his obituary, he worked in Chattanooga for a number of years before he married Mary Helen Hamilton in 1884. Surprisingly (to me), Caroline Cottrell acted as a witness to the marriage.
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Caroline witnessed the marriage of Frank F. Morrill to Mary Helen Hamilton in 1884, shortly before moving to Newburyport. Image courtesy of Jim Morrill.
The Morrill newlyweds took a honeymoon trip to New England to select a home, probably leaving Caroline to care for the children. The whole family and Caroline moved to the Newburyport area in June. A year later, Mrs. Morrill and her children (and presumably Caroline) go back for a visit. It would be the first of many visits back to Tennessee.
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Chattanooga Daily Times, 6 Jun 1885.
On May 10, 1886, Mary Helen Morrill gave birth to a son, Gayden Wells Morrill, in Newburyport. A few months later, wearing the fashion of the day, Caroline sat for a portrait with the baby.
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Caroline C. Cottrell, age 30, and Gayden W. Morrill, late 1886. Collection of the Museum of Old Newbury.
We’ll pick up the story in the next newsletter. In Part 2: a postcard from Caroline, a moment of joy, and Caroline’s legacy.
With special thanks to John Miller, Jim Morrill, Mary Haslinger, Bob Morrill, Sharon Spieldenner, Ghlee Woodworth, and Geordie Vining.
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SOLD OUT - Stream link below - "Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad" Friday, February 24, 2023, 7 pm
Sailing to Freedom will highlight little-known stories and describe the less-understood maritime side of the Underground Railroad, including the impact of African Americans’ paid and unpaid waterfront labor. This talk by Dr. Timothy Walker will reconsider and contextualize how escapes were managed along the East Coast, moving from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland to safe harbor in northern cities such as Philadelphia, New York, New Bedford, and Boston. While scholarship on the Underground Railroad has focused almost exclusively on overland escape routes from the antebellum South, this new research expands our understanding of how freedom was achieved by sea and what the journey looked like for many African Americans.
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History of Old Newbury in 3 Drinks:
Part I: Beer (1635-1700)
Thursday, March 30, 2023, 6:30 pm
Museum of Old Newbury, 98 High Street, Newburyport
Did you know that Newbury's Dionis Stevens Coffin brewed beer in her Newbury tavern and went to court in 1653 to protect its stellar reputation? Did you know that a low-alcohol "small beer" was brewed to be consumed all day by all Newbury citizens, even children? Court and property records provide rich details of how and what people drank in Newbury in the 17th century, and what sometimes befell them afterward.
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Join Bethany and James Dorau for an illustrated talk and tasting on the history of beer (and cider and perry) in early Newbury, from European settlement to the ascendancy of rum in the 18th century. Learn how taverns, second only in importance to the meeting house, centered our community, and how brewing, fermenting, and serving beer changed over time. Explore how our former neighbors understood not only the benefits of beer, but its potential dangers as well. This event includes a beer tasting. Tickets $10 members, $20 non-members. |
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Upcoming Events:
Save the date:
John Forti, The Heirloom Gardner - May 18, 7pm (tickets available soon)
2023 Garden Tour - June 10 & 11, 10am -4pm (tickets available soon)
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Woman on the MOON
...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director
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Neither Underground nor a Railroad...
This is unfair. Why? I’m going to talk about the subject of an event that is already sold out, with a substantial waitlist, and if I play my cards right, you’ll want to attend even more desperately. Never fear, dear reader. We are concocting a plan to make sure everyone can experience the wonderful Professor Tim Walker and the book that he edited with nine other authors, Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad.
But since this is my blog, I’m going to tell you about how this book changed MY life and encourage you to read it and think about those moments in your own life when some new information transformed your perception of the world.
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Illustrations like this 1893 painting, entitled The Underground Railroad by Charles I. Webber, helped to establish the image of the overland flight to freedom in the American consciousness. Courtesy of Cincinnati Art Museum.
When I was a girl living without a television in the wilderness of northern British Columbia, my reading material consisted of four general subjects: Horses and the Pioneer Girls who loved them, Christian missionaries and the Very Bad Time they generally seemed to be having, post WWI high British fantasy, à la Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and lastly, a potpourri of history books so old that they escaped the censorious gaze of my parents.
An aside: My mother popped over a few days ago and laughed when I read her the above paragraph. “I poured over the Mennonite book catalog,” she said. We were not Mennonites, but close enough that she felt confident in the appropriateness of their mail-order selections.
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Though Mennonite mail-order catalogues no longer arrive at my door, this slim volume made the trip down from Canada and is still on my bookshelf.
I will credit, not so much the Mennonite texts, but the crusty library rejects with my current profession, as among them I found masterpieces on subjects from early New England to Ancient India, and several biographical volumes written by or about the trials endured by enslaved people fleeing to freedom. Of these last works, I recall a well-thumbed volume of Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, and the U.G.R.R embossed on the green cover of William Still’s The Underground Railroad: A Record, both over a century old by the time they made their way to me. Of course, I did not then grasp the full horror of what these books described, but I read these volumes voraciously, imagining the hounds baying in the woods behind me, following the gleam of a hopeful star.
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William Still’s The Underground Railroad: A Record was published in 1872 and recorded both overland flight and maritime paths to freedom. This volume is from the Smithsonian.
If you had sat me down just five months ago and asked me to describe the Underground Railroad, I would have told you about enslaved people in the Deep South finding ways to escape overland to freedom in Canada with the help of a network of allies. And if you pressed me to explain why Newbury(port) could have been involved with the Underground Railroad, I may have theorized that people were being brought up via New York state maybe? Connecticut? in wagons through Massachusetts to Maine into Canada? This is not without precedent, as I recall my great-aunt Mary Poore telling me about how Richard Plummer would pick people up in his wagon at the Parker River and hide them amongst sacks of grain, en route to Amesbury and, I assumed, another series of wagon rides to Quebec. I also may have (and this is embarrassing), equated the tunnels that run under Newburyport with some form of escape network. The Underground Railroad is, after all, underground, right?
It's not underground. The tunnels under Newburyport were for drainage, storage, and… I’m sure there were plenty of merchants who were not above avoiding customs agents. But…I am going to plant a deeply unpopular flag here and say that the wealthy merchants who owned the big houses in Newburyport were not designing their houses around an intricate network of tunnels for escapees.
It’s not a railroad either, of course, though some, like Frederick Douglass, hopped a train for part of their journey to freedom.
It's boats. It’s ships and dockworkers and ports and cargo and cash and sailors and the sea. You know - all the things we were and are in Newburyport.
“Light dawns on Marblehead,” as my uncle used to say. “Duh,” as my kids still say. But it took a day with Timothy Walker in New Bedford for this all to sink in.
In late September, the New Bedford Whaling Museum hosted a conference around the topic of the Maritime Underground Railroad. I signed up, still not quite getting it.
My childhood Underground Railroad volume spells it out (though I missed it then). “some (were) guided by the North Star alone, penniless, braving the perils of land and sea…occasionally fugitives came in boxes and chests, and not infrequently some were secreted in steamers and vessels, and in some instances journeyed hundreds of miles in skiffs…”
I was not alone in my limited understanding of how people escaped to freedom. In his presentation at the conference, Dr. Walker noted that the Underground Railroad was primarily conceptualized as a “terrestrial event”, and indeed, the primarily overland routes that enslaved people took to find freedom in the north were the focus of scholarship over the last 120 years. Many of us have seen the famous National Geographic visual indicating the most common routes of the Underground Railroad, and to be fair, it does represent some traffic along the Atlantic coast. But most traffic seems to be coming from Alabama and Mississippi and moving through the Midwest to Canada. But – if a voyage from a Southern port could be made up the Atlantic maritime superhighway in a few days, why are we stuck on this idea of people running through the woods and into wagons, jolting for weeks down country roads and hiding under false floors and under trapdoors?
My friend Kate Clifford Larson said it best in a review of Professor Walker’s book for the journal Civil War Book Review. “Travel by water during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was the equivalent of quick motor vehicle traffic along today’s superhighways and local road systems. People and commodities were transported most efficiently by small watercraft, larger bay and ocean-going sailing vessels, and steamships rather than overland via terribly limited, unstable, and rutted roads.”
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Another perspective shift – most freedom seekers came not from the Deep South, but from within a few miles from a border with a free state. Harriett Tubman was from Maryland, as was Frederick Douglass, whose journey to freedom took less than 24 hours. “It was very, very difficult to escape long distances overland through the hostile territory which was the slaveholding South prior to the Civil War.” According to Dr. Walker, these escapes “almost never happened.”
This thing that I, a well-educated, generally thoughtful human, had assumed was the typical flight to freedom for enslaved people in the 19th century ALMOST NEVER HAPPENED.
There are a variety of reasons for why the narrative of escape has become identified with overland networks – too many, and too interesting to do them justice here. I encourage you to read the book. But let me just say that as the day progressed, the picture I had formed since those days reading musty narratives in Canada was filled in with communities of Black mariners, networks of vessels that could be found with the help of a friendly dockhand, abolitionists who arranged voyages north, and clever captains who waited to report “stowaways” long enough to allow successful escapes.
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This notice in Newburyport’s Essex Journal and Merrimack Packet, published the day after the Declaration of Independence, offers a reward for an enslaved man named Robin and specifically warns that “all masters of vessels & others are hereby forbid harboring or carrying off said Negro, they would avoid the penalty of the law.”
This, for me, is the beauty of history as a practice. New sources arise and light shines onto the past in new ways. I am proud to do this work, and grateful to those who continuously open my eyes and change my perspective. I am now scouring early newspapers and other sources anew, looking for clues that could lead to a new understanding of how Newburyport helped or hindered freedom seekers. I encourage you all to join me as we explore history as an ever-evolving, multi-faceted experience, subject to the limitations of language, fettered by the perspectives of its interpreters, and awaiting the discoveries of the future, devastating and delicious in their turn.
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Something Is Always Cooking... |
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Jollof Rice
Michael W. Twitty is a food historian, writer, and educator. He won the James Beard award for his book "The Cooking Gene," which looks at the influence of African culture on Southern cooking (as well as many other topics - history, Judaism, genealogy - it's a great book!). Jollof rice is a classic West African dish becoming better known in the U.S. This recipe is inspired by Wanda Blake's recipe in Michael Twitty's book, Rice.
Red Sauce
- 1 pound tomatoes, chopped (this will go in a food processor, so only rough chopping needed
- 1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
- 1/2 medium onion, chopped
- 1/2 habanero pepper, seeds removed and chopped
- 1 tablespoon kosher salt
- 1 cup water
Place the tomatoes, red bell pepper, onion, habanero pepper, salt, and water in a food processor and purée. Taste, and if you want it hotter, add some habanero seeds.
Rice
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 2 cups long grained rice, washed and drained
- 1 tablespoon curry powder
- 1 tablespoon smoked paprika (optional)
Place the olive oil in a medium pot over medium heat. Add the rice and sauté for 4–5 minutes. Add the red sauce, curry powder, and smoked paprika (optional). Bring to a boil and boil for 5 minutes. Reduce heat to low and cover. Cook until the rice is done, about 30–40 minutes.
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Click the image to do the puzzle
"Sunshine" (Agnes Childs), 1911, by Laura Coombs Hills (1859-1952). Currently on view at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. Photo by Sierra Gitlin.
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Museum of Old Newbury
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Newburyport, MA 01950
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