Black Heritage
Project

The Black Heritage Project centers on the history and people of the Talcott Street Church, Hartford’s first Black church and school for Black children, which was located on a site next to CT State Capital from 1826-1954.

"Who knew we had people right here in Connecticut that had an impact on Black History?"

Asharee Banks, ENG 1020, Fall 2023

Talcott St. Church

Shocked to learn that the center of Hartford’s Black community in the 19th century is currently an unmarked space in a defunct parking garage, four black students set about researching its history in published material and local archives.

Who was James Pennington?

The question may be asked, Why I have published anything so long after my escape from slavery?

Rev. James W.C. Pennington was born in 1807. He was born a slave in Maryland to Tighlin Frisby after Frisby’s father passed away. He and his siblings and mother lived on one plantation and his father, Basil, on another. Pennington had witnessed brutal beatings both on his father and other slaves. Having had enough after his own savage punishment, on October 22, 1827, he escaped to freedom along the Underground Railroad, a harrowing journey in which he was captured more than once before finally making it to Pennsylvania. After taking shelter with a Quaker farmer who gave James his first reading lessons, he made his journey up north and advanced quickly in his ability to read, write and speak of God’s message. Soon after becoming a pastor, he was called on to officiate the wedding of Frederick and Anna Douglass. He later attended Yale Divinity School for four years as a non-matriculated student, the first black man to attend. He served as reverend at Talcott Street Church from 1840-1847, 1853, 1856-1857. He became a well known name in the community and abroad, preaching in various places in the United States and Europe. Pennington wrote his biography, The Fugitive Blacksmith, Or Events in the History of James W.C. Pennington, in 1849. Pennington’s call to the church coincided with the trial of the Amistad captives at the nearby State House, and he and his congregation assisted the captives throughout their stay in Connecticut, eventually raising funds for their return to Africa and sending several Talcott Church members with them.

Community Formation

In these foundational churches members found freedom, shared consent, and nurtured their religious and political authority, building vibrant Black communities in 19th- century Connecticut. Click on the following images to expand student-authored biographies and to visit related websites.

Please note: The following biographies were written by a student research team from the Liberal Arts Action Lab in Spring 2020. The students – Julian Hogan (Capital), Aliyah Freeman-Johnson (Capital), Armani Parnther (Capital), Mercy Unoh (Trinity) – were surprised to learn that the center of Hartford’s Black community in the 19th century is currently an unmarked space in a defunct parking garage. For this project, they researched the church's history in published material and local archives.

Reverend Hosea Easton (1798-1837) & son, Hosea Easton (1849-1899)

Reverend Hosea Easton was born in 1798 in Middleborough, Massachusetts. He descended from a long line of activists. During the 1820s he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and pursued a career in ministry while building his abolition profile. He grew his reputation as an abolitionist leader and an effective abolitionist lecturer. In 1828, Rev. Easton delivered a speech “To the Colored People of Providence, Rhode Island,” attacking racism and slavery. Five years after this speech, he took over the pastorate of the Talcott Street Congregationalist Church in Hartford, Connecticut. High racial tensions and violence occurred during the 1830s, and a racially charged incident took place outside of Easton’s church in 1835. Easton founded another church that was tragically burned down, causing Easton to be extremely disheartened. Months before his death, Rev. Easton published Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and the Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the United States, where he continued to dicuss themes of racial uplift, abolition of slavery, and politicized discrimination.

Hosea Easton was the son of activist Reverend Hosea Easton. He was an African American minstrel performer who was also an extremely talented banjo player. Aside from being a banjoist, he was also a comedian, singer, and actor. During the height of his career, he toured different regions as a musician and actor for dramatic companies and minstrel shows. Easton was the first black man to play the lead role in Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the southern hemisphere.

Hosea Easton was highly praised for this role and his various talents. In 1899, Easton unfortunately died from cancer in Sydney, Australia.

John Hooker (1816-1901)

John Hooker was a friend of Talcott Street Church and an admirer of Rev. Pennington, whose freedom he purchased through negotiations with the son of Pennington’s owner.

Hooker was born on April 19th, 1816 in Farmington, CT. He was a lawyer, abolitionist, and suffrage supporter who, along with his wife, Isabella Beecher Hooker and William and Elisabeth Gillette, founded the Nook Farm neighborhood in Hartford that would later become home to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner and other notable people.

John Hooker was a direct descendant of Thomas Hooker, founder of Hartford. His wife Isabella was a prominent women’s rights activist and daughter of Dr. Lyman Beecher and half-sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and together they had four children. His memoir Some Reminiscences of a Long Life, with a Few Articles on Moral and Social Subjects of Present Interest, was published in 1899. He described himself as a Bushnell Congregationalist. He died at his home at Nook Farm in 1901.

Ann Plato (1820/24-?)

Ann Plato authored a book called Essays: Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry that was published in 1841, making her the second African American in U.S. history to publish a book of poetry and the first African American woman to publish a book of essays.

Sadly not much is known about her historically. Born around 1824, she is presumed to be of both African American and Native American ancestry, based on a poetry piece titled: The Natives of America, wherein the speaker asks her father to tell his story of “how my Indian fathers dwelt.”

Plato was greatly influenced by the Bible and the Talcott Street Church, as well as Lydia Sigourney, a renowned American poet and a fellow Hartford resident dubbed the “Sweet singer of Hartford.”

Plato found inspiration in such Sigourney writings as Letters to young Ladies and The Girl’s Reading Book, a work which can be seen in relation to her own. The Talcott Street Church—a mountaintop for black Americans living in Connecticut in Plato's time–was a platform from which she wrote and spoke of her piety as well as the haven in which she could share the gift of education.

Plato served as teacher in the black school established in the church basement before becoming headmistress of the Elm School, a black school established after the Talcott school. She was dedicated to teaching and molding young minds, and, according to her pastor, Rev. Pennington in his introduction to her volume of poetry and essays, she was “devoted to the glory of God, and the best good of her readers.”

Rebecca Primus (1837-1932)

Rebecca Primus was a member of the Talcott Street Congregational Church and may have been a teacher at the black school located in its basement before she left for Maryland to found a school for newly emancipated blacks in Maryland after the Civil War.

Born in 1836, Rebecca was the oldest of four children in an economically secure Hartford family. The Primus’ were socially prominent and active in the small black community and in Talcott Street Church.

Primus was married in 1872. She passed on February 21, 1932.

James Mars (1790-1880)

James Mars authored his own story, Life of James Mars, A Slave born and sold in Connecticut: Written by Himself, which sold widely after publication in 1864.

In his autobiography, Mars tells the harrowing story of his family’s escape from their owner, a pastor in northwest Connecticut who intended to move south and take his “property” with him. James eventually worked to purchase his own freedom. Born on March 3rd, 1790,

Mars played an important role in the African American enfranchisement and temperance movements and wrote his story to remind the people of 1864 that slavery was a reality in Connecticut not twenty years before (Connecticut practiced gradual emancipation from 1784 to 1848, when it was finally abolished).

During the 1830s, Mars worked in a dry goods store in Hartford and was also serving as a deacon at the Talcott Street Congregational Church. In 1864, Mars returned to Norfolk, Connecticut where he died in 1880 and where his grave can be found today.

Augustus Washington (1820-1875)

Augustus Washington, an American photographer and daguerreotypist, was born in 1820 in Trenton, New Jersey. He was born as a free person of color. Washington was a teacher and headmaster at the Talcott Street Church school for black children.

Washington owned his own daguerreotype studio on Main Street in Hartford, a successful business that attracted historically significant patrons such as John Brown and Lydia Sigourney.

Washington also migrated to Liberia because he had lost faith in America’s will to integrate African Americans as equals. He passed on June 7, 1875.

BHP Curriculum

More information is coming soon.