Lewisville, in West Cambridge, has been a vibrant part of our city’s history for more than two centuries. The neighborhood is roughly bounded by Concord Avenue, Garden Street, and Shepard Street. Here, a community was made by free-born Blacks and formerly enslaved people. An upcoming History Cafe program by History Cambridge explores its history of perseverance, equality, and communitarian flourishing after the Revolution.
The oldest record of slavery in Massachusetts dates to 1638, when African prisoners arrived on the slave ship Desire. The next year records a “Moor” residing in the household of Nathaniel Eaton, master of Harvard College, marking the earliest known mention of slavery in Cambridge. Massachusetts formally sanctioned bondage under the Body of Liberties law, which was enacted in 1641 and remained in place until 1783. In 1749, six percent of taxpayers held slaves. The slaveholders were tanners, judges, innkeepers, and merchants. Several others owned plantations in the West Indies. In 1759, each Cambridge slaveholder had one slave (aged 12-50) with the exception of Henry Vassall, who enslaved four adults—for a sum total of fifteen enslaved adults in Cambridge (excluding children). In the 1770s, John Vassall possessed seven enslaved people on his property, Penelope Vassall had five, Thomas Oliver ten.
Whether enslaved or free, Black Cantabrigians made up a small portion of the city’s overall population in the 18th and 19th centuries. Parish records list fifty-six Black inhabitants in all three Cambridge parishes in 1754. The three parishes are now separate towns today: 1st Parish, Cambridge; 2nd Parish, Arlington; 3rd Parish, Brighton. Most of said inhabitants were slaves, although the 1777 census lists nine free Black residents who paid a poll tax. By 1765, the number of Black residents had increased to ninety in all three parishes of Cambridge, out of a total population of 1,582 (6%). In 1790, there were only sixty Black inhabitants listed in all three parishes of Cambridge (2.8% of the total population). This number is lower than previous years because, after slavery ended in the 1780s, many Black Cantabrigians moved to Boston. By the 1800 census, only twenty-five black residents were recorded in Cambridge out of a total population of 2,453 (1%).
Of those who remained in Cambridge, many lived in Lewisville. A core group of the area’s earliest residents came from the Black members of the Vassall family. In a 1778 claim to the British government after their holdings were confiscated, the white Vassalls listed 105 acres of “Meadow & Orcharding [and] a large Dwelling House with very extensive Gardens and Stabling and three other houses” whose annual income was £150. Among the “property” listed in this claim were seven enslaved people: Cuba, Malcolm, James, William, Dinah, and two small boys (likely Darby and Cyrus), valued at £200. Listed at comparable monetary value were the Vassalls’ livestock, including two yoke oxen, six cows, a bay mare, and two horses.
Tony and Cuba Vassall had at least six children: James (Jemmy), Dorrenda (Darinda), Flora, Darby (Derby), Cyrus, and Catherine. They may have also had another daughter, Nancy, but there is the possibility that she was another (unrelated) woman enslaved by the white Vassalls. Darby (ca. 1769-1861) is perhaps the most well-known of Tony and Cuba’s children. Darby was born on the property of 105 Brattle Street around 1769 and was about six years old when George Washington arrived to take up residence there while he was commanding the Continental Army. Darby Vassal lived to be 91 years old. He was a prominent figure in the early Black community of Cambridge and Boston, known for his stories about life in Cambridge during the Revolution and the years after Independence.
Following the Revolution, members of the Black Vassall family moved to the area that would come to be known as Lewisville, establishing what would become a community of mutual support and assistance for those who were marginalized by Cambridge society. Although enslavement was legally prohibited in Massachusetts beginning in 1783, the realities of life for Black Cantabrigians were often stark. They faced great difficulties obtaining steady work at an adequate salary, and they were excluded from many political and economic opportunities. As a result, the Black community relied on a community network of mutual assistance.
Tony and Cuba Vassall’s daughter, Catherine, married Adam Lewis, the nephew of Quock Walker, a formerly enslaved man who won his freedom in a 1781 suit before the Massachusetts court. Adam Lewis’s family was part of a Black community in western Massachusetts, many of whom were active in national antislavery campaigns in the first part of the 19th century. Adam Lewis’s parents, Peter and Minor Walker Lewis, moved to Cambridge in the early 1800s, building a house for their family in 1820 at the corner of Concord Avenue and Garden Street.
Outspoken opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—which would have required citizens of any state to return escapees —put Catherine and Adam Lewis in such imminent danger that they fled to Ontario. Returning to Cambridge, the Lewises became key members of the group of Black Cantabrigians that founded the Cambridge Liberian Emigrant Association. The mission was to support a Black colony in Liberia that would provide an alternative to what many saw as the failure of an interracial society in the United States. The Lewises and 150 other Black Cambridge residents sailed to Liberia in the fall of 1858. No records of the settlement survive past 1858. The fate of the settlement we do not know.
Lewisville’s demographics shifted by the end of the nineteenth century. In 1850, there were six Black families (19 individuals) living in five houses. In 1870, three such families remained. One of the last members of the Lewis family to live in the neighborhood was George Washington Lewis, Jr. (1848-1929), who worked as a steward at the Porcellian Club. Lewis purchased a house on Parker Street, where his descendants lived until the 1970s. Despite the dwindling of Lewisville’s founding families, the area remains a touchstone for the Black residents in West Cambridge who have continued to purchase property and to pass it down.
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