Royall House to Host 2 Colonial Life Programs

Mehetabel Coit and Joshua Hempstead were next-door neighbors in 18th-century New London, Connecticut. Both kept detailed diaries about their everyday lives, and fortuitously both diaries survive. These diaries inspired two recent thoughtful and revealing histories of life in colonial New England. Upcoming lectures feature the authors of these two fascinating titles.

One Colonial Woman’s World: On Wednesday, November 20, 2013, at 7:30 p.m., historian Michelle Coughlin will give an illustrated talk based on her book, “One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit.”

Coughlin’s book reconstructs the life of Mehetabel Chandler Coit (1673-1758), the author of what may be the earliest surviving diary by an American woman. A native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who later moved to Connecticut, she began her diary at the age of fifteen and kept it intermittently for over a half century.

Michelle Coughlin has woven a vivid portrait of a colonial American woman and the world she inhabited. She explores the numerous and sometimes surprising ways in which Coit’s personal history was linked to broader social and political developments. The author provides insight into the lives of countless other colonial American women whose history remains largely untold.

Michelle Marchetti Coughlin is an independent scholar and former editor who holds graduate degrees in history and in English and American literature. She has recently been serving as a Mass Humanities scholar-in-residence for the Westport Historical Society, researching the life of Elizabeth Cadman White (1685-1768), one of the first owners of the society’s Cadman-White-Handy House.

For Adam’s Sake: On Wednesday, January 15, 2014, at 7:30 p.m., historian Allegra di Bonaventura will give an illustrated talk based on her book, “For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England.”

Joshua Hempstead was a well-respected farmer and tradesman in New London, Connecticut. As his remarkable diary — kept from 1711 until 1758 — reveals, he was also a slaveholder who held Adam Jackson in bondage for more than thirty years.

In this engrossing narrative of family life and the slave experience in the colonial North, Allegra di Bonaventura describes the complexity of this relationship between slaveholder and enslaved, and traces the intertwining stories of two families until the eve of the Revolution. The lines between slavery and freedom were blurred as colonial New England families across the social
spectrum fought to survive. In this enlightening study, a new portrait of the era emerges.

Allegra di Bonaventura is an assistant dean at the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in New Haven, Connecticut. Her dissertation was awarded the George Washington Egleston Prize.

Both events will be held at the Royall House and Slave Quarters at 15 George Street, Medford, and is free to Royall House and Slave Quarters members. General admission is $5. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for the museum shop and exhibits. On-street parking is available, and the museum is located on the 96 and 101 MBTA bus routes. Copies of the featured books will be available for purchase and signing at the event; please note that the museum accepts cash or checks. Please email director@RoyallHouse.org for more information or visit RoyallHouse.org.

About the museum: In the eighteenth century, the Royall House and Slave Quarters was home to the largest slaveholding family in Massachusetts and the enslaved Africans who made their lavish way of life possible. Architecture, furnishings, and archaeological artifacts bear witness to the intertwined stories of wealth and bondage, set against the backdrop of America’s quest for
independence. The Slave Quarters is the only remaining such structure in the northern United States, and the Royall House is among the finest colonial-era buildings in New England

– Submitted by Tom Lincoln, Royall House Director