Elizabeth Matelski, PhD, and Abby Battis, ALM
Slavery’s Legacy in a New England Town
In 2019, Historic Beverly launched its first free online exhibit, Set at Liberty: Stories of the Enslaved People in a New England Town. The exhibit tells the story of almost 100 years of enslaved history in the city of Beverly – stories of citizens, black and white, battling against the unjust system of slavery; of enslaved men fighting for the freedom for our nation, though not free themselves; of a woman using the law to emancipate her family; and of the racism that affected the lives of Beverly’s black population, long after they were freed from bondage. One such story is that of Robin Mingo (c.1661-1748) who lived with his wife, a free indigenous woman named Deborah Tailer, on a small plot of land that overlooked the ocean. A legend describes that Mingo’s enslaver, Thomas Woodbury, promised Mingo his freedom if the tides recessed enough for him to walk from the shore out to a rocky passage known as ‘Aunt Becky’s Ledge’—a rare phenomenon. Rather than bury, silence, or ignore these stories, our task as historians is to bring that history to light and to draw attention to the under-examined lives of enslaved and indigenous people on Boston’s North Shore.
Abby Battis, ALM, is the Associate Director for Collections at Historic Beverly. Battis holds a Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from the Harvard Extension School where she has been an adjunct instructor for nine years teaching classes on the future of historic house museums and museum exhibition design fundamentals. Battis is also an adjunct faculty member at Endicott College where she is a professor of Art History and Arts Administration. She has served as a consultant for various museums, including the Wenham Museum, and an exhibition consultant for the Southold Historical Society and the Issaquah History Museum.
Elizabeth Matelski, PhD, is Associate Professor of History at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts where she teaches classes on race, gender, and sexuality in American history. Matelski received her AB from Ripon College and her PhD from Loyola University Chicago. Her teaching interests include incorporating digital technologies into the history classroom. In addition to teaching American history, she also created Endicott’s Public History concentration. Matelski is a past director of two NEH summer institutes about the Salem Witch Trials. Her current research is centered on Robin Mingo, a formerly enslaved Black man who lived in Beverly in the 1700s.
