Boston was racially diverse in the decades surrounding the American Revolution, but until recently, the Paul Revere House had relatively little information on Revere’s non-white neighbors.  We were eager to share the information we did have, such as in an early Revere House Gazette article on Black colonists, but we weren’t even sure how much additional information would be discoverable and how much had been lost to time.

The Paul Revere House is nestled in Boston’s North End, which was the city’s main residential neighborhood at the time of the Revolution. Revere’s neighbors included people with very well-documented lives, like Governor Thomas Hutchinson who lived two blocks away until 1765, but also many average people whose stories were not in newspapers and major government records, and whose letters were never published or preserved at all. They included many English settler colonists; immigrants from other parts of Europe and their descendants; Naumkeag, Massachusett, and Pawtucket Native Americans; and Black people, both free and enslaved, some who were born in Africa or the Caribbean and some who had ancestry in those places.

Last year, to help us answer some of our questions about the people who we knew the least about, the Paul Revere House relaunched our research fellowship program, to fund short-term projects by scholars who help us fill gaps in existing research. This program is ongoing, and we hope to fund more projects about Black and Native people in the North End in particular as this is where our most significant gaps are. Recently, research fellow Dr. Ryan Bachman spent eight weeks delving into the evidence about Black people living and working in the North End from 1780 to 1810. He chose this window of time because legal slavery in Massachusetts gradually came to an end in the 1780s, so this generation grappled with inequality in a new, post-slavery context. From his prior research, Ryan knew that Boston had more detailed tax records at the time than many places and that these are still available, but he was also unsure how complete a picture of these people’s lives could be assembled.

As his research unfolded, Ryan and our staff were delighted to learn that there were stories waiting to be put together, some which had also been uncovered in previous scholarship on Black Bostonians and some which had not. Paul Revere’s Black neighbors included people who had emancipated themselves from slavery and people who left tumultuous homelands in the Caribbean, including some who fled the violence of the Haitian Revolution. They included working-class and middle-class laborers, domestic servants, business owners, and landlords. Ryan was able to write profiles of almost 30 individuals and couples, providing glimpses of what their lives were like. To learn more about his research process and some of the stories in the map, listen to Ryan’s interview with our Research Director Tegan Kehoe on our podcast, Revere House Radio.

While none of the homes and workplaces that Ryan researched still stand, he determined their locations based on their historical addresses. He arranged the profiles of people and places in an online map of the neighborhood, which you can explore here.

For context, Revere owned the house in North Square we call the Paul Revere House from 1770 to 1800. He then purchased a home (which no longer stands) a few blocks away on Charter Street, where he lived until his death in 1818. The map tells the stories of people in the North End at the same time as Paul Revere. We don’t know how many of these neighbors he knew, but their stories are valuable in their own right as well as giving us insights into this neighborhood.

You will find the story of Jeptha Fitch and Chloe Perkins, who married while they were still being held in slavery by different people. It’s not clear exactly when they obtained their freedom, but they seem to have lived in relative poverty for at least twenty years following their marriage in 1774. In 1796 they had enough money to appear in the Boston tax rolls, and for another fifteen years they primarily lived in a local boardinghouse. You will also find a profile on First Baptist Church and its pastor Samuel Stillman, who was the person who performed Jeptha and Chloe’s wedding. Another profile features Charles Cummins, who lived in a North End boarding house as a single man, but moved to the newer, more middle-class Black neighborhood on Beacon Hill after he married.

The map is designed to be explored at your leisure – you can click on specific markers on the map that you’re curious about, or use the arrow buttons to view each profile in sequence. While it’s not specifically set up to be a walking tour, the map is mobile-friendly and you can visit the locations of where these buildings used to be: the map’s markers are organized in a loose spiral outward from the Paul Revere House. Regardless of how you use the map, we hope that it inspires you to get to know some of the stories of Black North Enders.

To open the map in its own tab, click here. Or, explore it directly from this page, below.