Lesson 194:
Violet Thayer
An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted on 07/04/2025,
which may possibly one day be named by history as the official end date for the United States of America
Yeah, yeah, happy fourth of July and all that. For some reason I'm just not in much of a celebratory mood this year --can't imagine why. Maybe I'll set aside some time this weekend to re-read the Declaration of Independence and meditate anew upon its words (see Lesson #15 in this series), but who knows? Anyway, I thought it important to tell you a bit about a name from the 1770's that you almost certainly hadn't heard of: Violet Thayer. Born enslaved into the family of Ephraim and Elizabeth (Heywood) Hartwell in Lincoln, Massachusetts, Violet worked in the family tavern (most of which still stands today); a site perhaps most famous as the location where, on the morning of April 19, 1775, rider Samuel Prescott would evade capture from British patrols and spread the alert to the locals, before then proceeding ahead to Concord. The Hartwells had many children and were in fact among the largest landowners in Lincoln --the tavern and the nearby house sat on a plot of 30 acres. The three eldest sons had already joined the local "minute men" militia and saw action in Concord later that day. According to local lore, Violet was in fact the first person alerted by Prescott, and who in turn alerted the Hartwells and nearby neighbors that morning, though some elements of this tale may be apocryphal.
What is concretely known about Violet, however, happened after the Revolution. In 1783 the still-new Massachusetts State Supreme Court ruled that slavery would no longer be enforceable in that state, as per the Declaration Of Rights in the freshly-ratified state constitution. However this may have been seen as a mere technicality, as the state legislature never actually formally banned slavery until 1790; the reality being that, just as with their neighbors in the South, the hotly-contested question had arisen as to whether or not former slaveowners might in fact somehow be entitled to compensation for their "loss of property." For his part Ephraim Hartwell did not consider Violet to be free, and in fact willed Violet's service to his wife Elizabeth upon his death. Though when he actually did pass away in 1793, an inventory of the estate listed Violet under a category of "All other free persons," which was at the time understood to mean "paid servant." With only a few scraps of surviving financial paperwork available to study, Violet's actual legal standing at the time really does remain unclear, but regardless she set out on her own in 1800. Rather than keep the surname Hartwell, she took the name Thayer for herself, though what prompted this decision is also not known.
Earning money as a seamstress, Violet ultimately accrued enough savings to be able to make interest-bearing loans to several of Lincoln's more prominent citizens --significant in a time when the town itself did not yet have any banks. Also significantly for a single Black woman of the time, she accumulated a fair amount of wealth and possessions for herself, though she never appears to have put down roots of her own at any fixed address ...and that's where things again get complicated. After seven weeks of prolonged illness, Violet is believed to have died in February 1813, having never married nor bore children. Which is where Ephraim's eldest son John Hartwell and his wife Hepzibah, stepped in and petitioned a probate court to appoint them as Violet's administrators. Legally this responsibility should have fallen to Violet's still-living mother, but she was blind and Hartwell was able to make the case. In short order, Hartwell inventoried the full account of every possession, loan, and dollar Violet had to her name --and then reimbursed himself for all of it (a total of $114) for "boarding, nursing, fuel, and candles" for the full seven weeks of Violet's illness. And as a final indignity, Hartwell meticulously calculated that even after having helped himself to literally everything, that he was somehow still owed $4.74.
Violet's lifetime of unpaid servitude to multiple generations of the Hartwell family, is today prominently recorded and described at the still-standing Hartwell Tavern, along the famed Battle Road in Minute Man National Historical Park. Once again I am stymied by the disappointing reality that no visual depiction of my chosen subject exists (not even by another artist!), and so rather than poke away at a meaningless pen-and-ink drawing of the tavern, I humbly present something from my own imagination: a little more abstract... but hopefully a little more respectful. Unfortunately Violet's story has no real triumph in it, no heroic accomplishments nor a happy ending --and that is a stark reality that one must cope with, when studying such histories. For every "uplifting" tale of Black American triumph, there are a hundred unsung, mundane stories of people whose lives were ultimately unelevated. We Americans and our fierce addiction to Heroic StorytellingTM need to be more cognizant of this... particularly on a disappointing day such as today.
For further study: Entangled Lives, Black and White: The Black Community, Enslaved and Free, of Eighteenth-century Lincoln Massachusetts, by Prof. Donald L. Hafner (Lincoln Historical Society).
Also worth reading, on its own merits: A Rich Harvest: The History, Buildings, and People of Lincoln, Massachusetts by John C. MacLean, Lincoln Historical Society, 1987.
Next lesson - Watch this space
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