20 Mar A Q+A with MIT’s Karilyn Crockett on unearthing the overlooked lives of Boston’s Home for Aged Colored Women
Dr. Karilyn Crockett is a Professor of Urban History, Public Policy and Planning in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. She has provided invaluable perspectives to HBI, serving on our Board of Directors since 2019.
In Cedar Grove Cemetery, two stone slabs with the inscription “Home for Aged Colored Women” mark the burial site of 133 women who had been residents of this home that operated from the 1860s to the 1940s. For decades until it closed in 1944, the Home for Aged Colored Women provided housing to hundreds, funded by an interracial roster of donors. Some of the early residents were previously enslaved, while others were born free. Most had worked and had been insufficiently compensated or recognized for their many contributions to the city of Boston and its residents.
Dr. Karilyn Crockett recently enlisted students in her “(Un)Dead Geographies” planning history class to research the residents of The Home for Aged Colored Women to begin the process of naming and remembering the legacies of the 133 Black women buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery. If you missed her editorial in the Boston Globe, “From a Mass Grave in Boston, unearthing Black women’s lives: Research on the Home for Aged Colored Women offers a poignant window into a past we thought we knew,” you can access it here. Dr. Crockett joined us for a quick interview to shed some additional light on this long overdue research.
1.) You tasked your “(Un)Dead Geographies” students with researching the women who lived in Boston’s Home for Aged Colored Women. Records for the Home are held at the Massachusetts Historical Society. We noticed that a handful of the residents mentioned lived into their 90s in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Was this unusual? Do you have any thoughts on this?
KC: It’s true, there were women in the Home who lived well into their 80s and 90s but most were in their 70s and 80s. There was a small handful of women who lived past the age of 100. The Home provided an important place of care and rest for women who had completed many years of work and service in Boston. The establishment of the Home was important because it offered housing and financial support to Black women who otherwise had nowhere to go. The Home for Aged Women was founded before the Home for Aged Colored Women for the same purpose but did not admit Black women. Many of the social safety nets we have now including social security benefits did not exist then. These women lived long careers of service and had often worked in difficult conditions for minimal pay. So it’s wonderful to recognize what is essentially a labor history as we talk about the longevity of this important pool of Boston workers. It’s reasonable to assume that as domestic workers, many of these women were not recognized or compensated in the ways that they should have been. Despite this, the women were able to create community for themselves in the Home and the wider city itself. They knew the city from years of work and social activities. The Mass Historical records show that some of them remained active members of local churches including Twelfth Baptist Church. We also know that several of the women were engaged in various political issues including the suffrage movement.
2.) In your editorial, you mentioned your hopes for an online digital archive that the public could use to conduct research or contribute additional information to. How have your “(Un)Dead Geographies” students conceptualized moving forward with the data they’ve collected?
KC: Now we are looking for connections between some of the data we have gathered and analyzed. For example, I was fascinated by the different places that the women visited for medical care. This is not something that came out in the article, but may be something of interest to the HBI community. Many of the women would have likely traveled past the Alvah Kittredge House on their way to St. Monica’s Hospital. For many years, St. Monica’s was located in William Lloyd Garrison’s former home at 125 Highland Street in Roxbury. The Hospital was established by an episcopal order of nuns, the Sisters of St. Margaret for the express purpose of caring for chronically ill Black women. My understanding is that the sisters were not happy that Boston City Hospital refused to treat Black women so St. Monica’s was created specifically to serve them. The sisters of St. Margaret are also buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery, which is another nice connection.
Based on our early research, it sounds like they were also part of the early founding and administering of Boston’s Children’s Hospital because at that time there was no facility specifically dedicated to the medical needs of children. So the sisters of St. Margaret wind up being an important part of understanding the early world of care for women and children in Boston. One of the students in my class mapped out what she called an “Ecosystem of Care.” The student reviewed the Home’s administrative files to compile information on hospital and doctor’s visits scheduled for the women. The list of appointments revealed the many places these elderly women traveled to for care and St. Monica’s is prominent among them.
3.) Considering the narratives of Charlotte Cougle and Rebecca Barbadoes that are included in the Globe piece, is finding this level of detail in the HACW records a seemingly rare occurrence, or is this representative of the life stories that are waiting to be unearthed in those archives?
KC: So the fun part of this project is that there are 133 women that we’re trying to explore and the stories can be so varied, right? Because you’re getting traces of things and so top of mind for me are those details found in the administrative records of the home. I was actually just pulling some of the students’ notes. So, in that article, they used this photograph here that you see of Eliza Gardner, but the article doesn’t really talk about her and so that is one of the profiles the student wrote up that I want to share because she’s someone on my mind. But the Mass. Historical Society—what they have are the admissions committee’s records. So, apparently, to be in the home you had to apply or someone had to apply for you and then someone would be taking minutes.
So what the students have done is they have read through all of the admissions files and every time a woman’s name was said, with some biographical detail about her, we have this massive spreadsheet to log all of their names and biographical information and then they use that as the beginning of a research trail to then go to census or go to ancestry or go to county deed records and then from there pulling out more and more so that we start to get a glimmer of that person’s life a little bit.
4.) Have you unearthed additional narratives of residents from the Home that you could share with us?
[Dr. Crockett shared the story of Eliza Gardner, a religious leader and community activist who died at the Home on January 4, 1922 at age 90.]
KC: It’s rare that a woman would have an obituary that was in the newspaper like Eliza Gardner did—otherwise you’re trying to do forensics, literally, [to pull a life story from what’s available in the archival record.] She’s really prominent, which is why we have a picture and she was someone who was born in New York. So, another really good story because she’s not from the south where so many other women were from.
Eliza Gardner moved to Boston when she was 14 and she lived in a house that her family owned on Irving Street in Beacon Hill. So this is sort of an early instance of us getting to a story of someone who lived on Beacon Hill at a time where there were many African American residents who were there. To be able to trace that line back to Beacon Hill’s African American history is something. Politically, Gardner was a prominent member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (currently located on Columbus Ave in the South End) and there is a church in Springfield that is named for her. It’s the Gardener Memorial Ame Zion Church and going into that church’s history, they honor Eliza Gardner life and service.
She’s also mentioned in William Monroe Trotter’s newspaper, the Guardian newspaper and was known as a fiery and commanding speaker. She was someone who was just very outspoken in this work of what we would call civil rights or racial equality. She was a founding member of the Women’s Era Club of Boston, a vital organization connected to the Black women-led national movement for women’s clubs.
So, I love her story because there’s so much about her biography that gives us a sense of just how active she was politically, how outspoken she was, and that she came from a family who owned their home. So there’s some modest wealth that she comes from and her story challenges the kind of stereotypes or broadstroke ideas that we might have about who lived in The Home for Aged Colored Women. One assumption could be that these women were destitute, without family or friends and withdrawn from society. But the evidence we’ve gathered suggests a much fuller story about these women, their lives and the life of the city they were still helping to shape even in their latter years. There’s as much richness and variation amongst these women as there are in the wider city and sometimes more.
5.) Funded in part by the Legacy Fund, in conjunction with the Friends of Cedar Grove Cemetery, and Boston’s Women’s History Trail, a memorial to these women is in the works to replace the current vague place marker of their graves. Do you have an idea of what is in mind for this memorial to the 133 women buried at Cedar Grove or when we can expect it to be installed?
KC: The Friends of Cedar Grove Cemetery, a volunteer group that’s leading the project, has received this $50,000 grant from the Legacy Fund which is going to help them create a plan for what the public can do in terms of next steps. So I think this is a moment within a bigger planning moment and maybe the online digital archive will be part of that plan. Maybe it will have some public component to it in terms of people being able to participate and learn together. I will certainly say that. But I’m not sure how the online digital archive will be put together.
The Friends of Cedar Grove Cemetery is really focused on the creation of a monument or memorial— some kind of public marker– that will commemorate their stories. To commemorate the women, I’m also eager to think about this online archive as a digital tribute that complements whatever is placed in the cemetery and can allow the public to learn more and possibly share additional details about these women.
We’ve been able to discover and explore so much with basically no money at all. The Legacy Fund grant will allow us to hire support staff and move toward a more formal process of planning and public engagement. In the meantime, the students in my “Undead Geographies” class will continue with their research based on the comments and the questions that they were raising yesterday. I love the way that this project just grabs your mind and imagination immediately. It gets your research juices flowing and then you’re time traveling to a different world. One student told the story of a woman named Catherine Bell whose obituary they discovered in the Globe. The obit writer mentioned that before Catherine entered the Home, she sold pastries and tarts on State Street in downtown.
It’s such a tiny detail, but right away, you start to wonder about all these things: What kind of tarts were they? Who was on State Street? I’ve been on State Street — where was she? Did she have a basket or a cart? These kinds of details can create a world in your mind that starts to be filled up with ideas and visions that can fuel research paths. This is thrilling because, again these women are largely unknown to us yet there are traces of their stories that give us a chance to get to know them, their times, and the city itself in profound new ways.