A new historic marker recognizing and honoring enslaved people’s contributions to Manchester’s textile industry will be unveiled in the city on Saturday. The project is part of a collaboration between the Black Heritage Trail and the Manchester Historical Association.
Dariya Steele, the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire’s outreach coordinator, and Jeff Barraclough, executive director of the Manchester Historical Association, worked on this historic marker together. They joined NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about this project.
Transcript
Dariya, what brought this topic to your attention?
So this is a topic that the Black Heritage Trail has been aware of for a long time now. It's something that our executive director, JerriAnne Boggis, had known about previously and had researched herself, along with other members of our staff and volunteers. So when we decided that Manchester would be a good place to put a marker, we reached out to Jeff and we discussed ideas. But something that really stayed with JerriAnne specifically was the textile industry. And it was a huge part of Manchester and New Hampshire as a whole. So we wanted to make sure that the enslaved people who worked there and played such a critical role in that entire industry were honored correctly. There's a lot of stories that we are aware of that happened specifically in Manchester, and we hope that this will not be our last marker in Manchester. But it was definitely hard trying to figure out which one should be our first.
The historic marker will be unveiled at the Millyard Museum in Manchester. What's the significance of that location?
The Millyard Museum is right in the middle of the historic Amoskeag Millyard, and our museum talks about the history of the city of Manchester, specifically the industrial history. And this marker is on the south side of our building, which was originally the location of a picker house, and that is where employees would have picked the cotton in order to make it more pure, get all of the sticks and dirt out of it. And so that's one of the first places that the cotton would have arrived in Manchester from the South.
So Jeff, you told us something interesting that was found while working on this project. It was a ledger from 1859. Can you tell us more about it?
Yes. So this ledger is part of the records of the Amoskeag [Manufacturing] Company that we have in our archives. It's called a cotton report, and it listed every week the number of bales of cotton that the company procured and where it came from. So it listed all of the cities from the South that the cotton came from, and then where the cotton was then distributed once it arrived in Manchester. So, for example, there were 1,239 bales of cotton that were received from New Orleans and others from Charleston, South Carolina, from Savannah, Georgia. And it kind of gives you a sense of the magnitude of the amount of cotton that was coming into Manchester at this time. This is late 1850s – so pre-Civil War – and, of course, ties directly into our national history and the issue of slavery and the fact that this cotton would have come from plantations where enslaved people were growing and picking the cotton.
And Jeff, for those who may not know, the textile industry was a large part of New Hampshire and especially Manchester's history and economy, right?
Yes, absolutely. Manchester was a textile city. It was founded really with that purpose. At its height, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester was the largest textile manufacturer in the world and employed approximately 18,000 workers, many of whom were immigrants from around the world.
Daria, what do you hope people will take away from this historic marker when it's unveiled [and] when they see it?
One of the reasons that we do this state wide marker project is to promote awareness for these stories – the stories that are often forgotten, often whitewashed, and look past. We do this to tell people that there is Black history in New Hampshire. Although it's a predominantly white state, there are Black people here and there's history here, and we find that a lot of people aren't educated on it properly. And the reason why we make these markers is so that this history can be told throughout many generations after us. So we want to make sure that the history is still there. We want to make sure that it is in the right perspective, the right narrative, and it's overall correct. Something that I just really hope people take from it is just the value of stories like this and how important they can be for people of African descent or Black people in the state of New Hampshire, where there's not a lot of us. And not only to show that, I don't know, there were people ahead of them working hard to get to where we are now, and there's still a ton of work that needs to be done, but we just want people to remember who sacrificed so we can get where we are today.
And I'll turn that question to you, Jeff. What do you hope people will take away from this marker when it's unveiled?
This is a really important story that should be told. It's something that we don't always think about. We know that there was a lot of textile production here and in Manchester, as well as other New England and Northeast industrial cities, but we don't think about how those textiles [came] to be here. And of course, that is with the cotton. And where did the cotton come from? It was grown in the South with the labor of enslaved peoples. So I think that it's something that we don't always think about, but that we should think about, and it's a really an important part of our history.
