MARBLEHEAD — Residents of Marblehead along with the Marblehead Museum, Historical Commission, Racial Justice Team, St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, and Clifton Lutheran Church all gathered Sunday afternoon to unveil a newly restored gravestone for Agnes, a Black Marblehead woman who was enslaved during the late 1600s and early 1700s.
Agnes was born in 1675 and was a servant to Samuel Russell. She died at the age of 43 on July 12, 1718 and was buried at the top of Old Burial Hill. In the 1970s, there were a number of grave robberies at Old Burial Hill and Agnes’s gravestone was amongst the ones that were stolen. Her grave was then marked only with a small slate that misdated her death and was the only marker that kept her grave identified until this past Sunday.
In a giant collaborative effort between the groups listed above, Agnes grave was restored with a new gravestone made out of Impala granite directly from Africa. The new stone also keeps the misspellings of “Agnis” and “Samuel Russel” in order to keep the historical accuracy of the old stone. The restoration project comes 304 years after her passing and Marblehead Racial Justice Team Chair James Bixby talked about the importance of keeping Agnes’s story and legacy alive in Marblehead.
“We want to get involved and it’s important to get involved in things like this that tell history,” Bixby said. “What happened here with Agnes is a triumph of the human spirit and the dismantling of a white supremacist structure that is supposed to take identity away from people.”
The ceremony started at 1:30 p.m with an opening from Bixby before a number of speeches from attendees including Judy Gates from the Racial Justice Team, Joe Whipple, Chris Johnston from the Historical Commission, the Town Historian Don Doliber, and Associate Director of the Marblehead Museum, Jarrett Zeman. The ceremony also involved the singing of an original music composition at the end. The song was written specifically for Agnes and due to her baptism record, Bishop Gail Harris from the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts attended the ceremony to preside over it and say prayer over Agnes’s gravestone.
The spot at the very top of Burial Hill where Agnes is buried was a plot that the Russell’s owned and she is not buried next to the Russell’s at the bottom of the hill. Bixby states that the fact that she was buried on the hill was likely due to her baptism.
“Agnes, being baptized, is likely one of the reasons why she has a plot,” he said. “There’s a swamp near here where we believe the bones of colored and enslaved people were unceremoniously dumped, and that underlines the standard story, this is the exception to the rule.”
There were a number of things that needed to get approved by the Cemetery Commission in order for the project to get through according to Bixby. The task force needed to make sure there would be no legal troubles regarding the Russell’s owning the plot of land where Agnes was buried and they also needed to find a documented photograph of what the stone actually looked like. Lastly, they needed to make sure that the stone was carved in a way that was “maintaining the historical integrity of Old Burial Hill.”
The ceremony celebrated not only the unveiling of the stone, but it celebrated Agnes’s life as well because her history is something that can’t be forgotten and Bixby hopes that the restoration of her grave can help keep the history of other enslaved people alive and make sure that they are remembered and never forgotten.
“Agnes wasn’t supposed to have a name, she wasn’t supposed to have a living history, she wasn’t supposed to be remembered, but something happened and it involved a lot of people who said ‘we gotta dismantle this way of being’”, said Bixby.