By Tom Dalton
For The Item
LYNN — Frederick Douglass bought a house in Lynn in 1847 just months after becoming a free man, according to a real estate deed recently found in archival online records at the Southern Essex District Registry of Deeds.
The home was located on Newhall Street, between Sagamore and Sachem streets, not far from the waterfront. The house is no longer there, but the location takes on importance as the site of what was likely the first home owned by the most prominent African-American of the 19th century.
Although there has been speculation, based on a newspaper article written more than a century ago, that Douglass lived on Newhall Street, this is the first documentary proof of that residence.
Douglass later owned homes in Rochester, N.Y., where he moved late in 1847 to launch his own newspaper, and Washington, D.C., where President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia.
Two years ago, the city of Rochester put a historic marker at the site of Douglass’s first home in that city. Cedar Hill, the Douglass estate in D.C., is the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.
There is no marker on Newhall Street nor are there any at what are believed to be Douglass’s two other home sites in Lynn. During his six years here, he also resided on Baldwin Street, formerly Pearl Street; and Harrison Court, now the entrance to the MBTA commuter rail station, according to an article a Lynn historian wrote in the Daily Evening Item shortly after Douglass’s death on Feb. 20, 1895.
One of the organizers of Lynn’s 2018 celebration of the 200th anniversary of Douglass’s birth has begun working on a Frederick Douglass Historic Trail in Lynn with way-finding signs marking important sites, but the project remains unfunded.
Until now, the 1895 newspaper story was the only “proof” of where Douglass lived in Lynn. Douglass is not listed in any city directories and there are no other known records establishing his places of residence.
Douglass arrived in Lynn in 1841, three years after escaping from slavery in Maryland. In the winter of 1844-1845, while living in a little house by the railroad tracks in Central Square, he wrote his monumental autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, which the Library of Congress has listed as one of the “Books That Shaped America.”
In the book, the 27-year-old fugitive slave named slaveholders and crimes they committed, and also revealed his true identity — Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Fearing he had made himself a target for slave-catchers, Douglass fled to Great Britain, where he spent 19 months on a lecture tour.
On April 26,1847 — six days after returning home — Douglass bought this house on Newhall Street for $2,200 from James N. Buffum, a Lynn abolitionist who had traveled with him for part of the tour.
Buffum was a wealthy builder, real estate developer and a future mayor of Lynn. He owned a number of buildings and houses, including this one, and likely arranged the transaction. It is not known how Douglass paid for the house and what role Buffum may have played.
While Douglass was in England, friends there raised the money to buy his freedom and more funds to help him purchase a printing press for The North Star, the newspaper he started in Rochester. Funds were sent to his Lynn home that summer by British friends, but it is not known if it was enough to buy this house.
This real estate deal raises another question: Did Douglass plan to stay in Lynn? When he left England, the Manchester Guardian reported that “Mr. Douglass intends to reside in Lynn, Massachusetts, and has been provided with the means of establishing a printing office with the view of enabling him to publish a paper…”
Douglass was talked out of the idea of running his own newspaper by William Lloyd Garrison and other prominent Boston abolitionists, but later changed his mind.
In November 1847 — only months after moving into his new Lynn home — Douglass left for Rochester to publish the North Star, whose mission the former slave proudly proclaimed was “to attack slavery in all its forms…” and “hasten the day of freedom to the three millions of our enslaved fellow countrymen.”
In 1851, Douglass sold the house on Newhall Street for $2,000, according to Registry records.
Tom Dalton is a former Daily Evening Item writer and author of “Frederick Douglass: The Lynn Years, 1841-1848.”