#1: Freedom Fighters

Fact: Exeter has the distinction of having had the largest percentage of Black residents in NH, directly after the Revolutionary War. There were 82 free Blacks (and 2 enslaved) and 1639 whites or 4.8% (1722 total persons). Many Black soldiers, like Jude Hall, settled in town and raised families. If the community had been allowed to flourish, there would be about 700 Black Exeter citizens today. Prior to the war, Exeter had a handful of enslaved Black persons, all of whom were freed by or after 1790*. (*See Dixon report listed in RESOURCES section at the end)

#2: Squelched

After the Revolutionary War soldiers died off, Exeter’s Black community was slowly squelched over a period of one hundred years; at times violently as the Civil War loomed. Exeter-born poet James Monroe Whitfield wrote angrily of the national injustice in his 1853 book “America and other poems.” By 1910, census indicates only three Black residents.

#3: This happened here?

After the Revolution, both Blacks and whites attended schools together, intermarried, and owned businesses and homes. As the Civil War approached, sentiments changed. Forms of discrimination and oppression included a limp abolitionist lecturer (Stephen Foster) being dragged out of the First Church on a Sunday morning, an 1827 mob tearing down the house of a Black family on Portsmouth Ave (Benjamin “Jakes” Paul), an 1819 kidnapping of an 18-year-old boy from Drinkwater Road (James Hall) who was then sold into slavery in the South.

Justice was never served in these cases; nor were they reported in the newspaper.

#4: Where did they go?

Some Exeter Blacks moved away to larger cities in search of jobs and safety in a community of relations (Boston, Belfast, Buffalo). Some were sent to live or grow up in the town “poor farm” (Freeman Wallace). Some bucked the odds and owned very successful businesses in town (Rufus & John G. Cutler, George Harris all at 125/127/129 Water Street). Some became famous Baptist preachers (Rev. Thomas Paul). The history is as full of casualites as it is of triumphs.

The descendants of this community are spread far and wide today, as we can see in a recent genealogical reports via the Jude & Rhoda Hall Society page, but their ancestors are buried in the Exeter cemeteries in both marked and unmarked graves.

This part of our history has been neglected for too long. Restoration is needed.