Possible Site of the Old Mill Pond (Longmeadow Country Club)

At the end of September 1756, an enslaved man named Tom escaped from his owner: the Reverend Stephen Williams. He had resisted the conditions of his enslavement before; in 1754, Williams had written in his diary that “Tom behaved Saucily & unbecomingly - that we were forced to tye him up.” Tom’s absence was noted on September 21st, and on September 30th Williams wrote “I fear ye poor creature has destroyed himself of living.” The next day, October 1st, “poor Tom was found Dead in ye mill pond.” The coroner concluded that Tom “then and there voluntarily and Feloniously as a Felon of Himself Did kill and Murder Himself by Drowning himself in a Certain Mill Pond in the Precinct of Longmeadow.” Elizabeth Hoff presents the events of Tom’s escape and suicide alongside the case of Cato, another man enslaved by Reverend Williams, who drowned himself in a well seven years later. 

Although unknown and possibly unrecoverable, one possible location for Tom’s death is a pond in the modern-day Longmeadow Country Club. 19th century property transfers mention a “mill pond” on the Longmeadow Brook, three-quarters of a mile from the old meeting house. This location is consistent with the pond in the center of the country club golf course, but local geography may have changed in the intervening centuries. Further research would be required to support or deny these speculations, but the country club pond is a possibility worth considering. The Longmeadow Country Club was founded in 1922. At a public meeting of Longmeadow’s Racial Justice Task Force, a former employee described a long history of barring Black and Jewish applicants from membership during the 20th century. More information from the records of the town, and the country club itself, would be necessary to confirm that its central pond was where Tom killed himself in 1756. 

Tom would have fled southward, away from town green and the Masacksic floodplain. We cannot know whether or not he travelled in a straight line. From most angles of approach to the modern-day country club, he would have had to go up and down a steep hill. The specific decision to drown himself in the pond may have been an act of desperation or opportunity, but it is worth noting that drowning held a special significance in the history of African slavery in the Western Hemisphere. In Saltwater Slavery (2008), Stephanie Smallwood explains that enslaved West Africans often committed suicide — during the Middle Passage or after reaching the Americas — with the hope that their spirits would cross the water and return to communities of descendants and ancestors in Africa. Nascent African American cultures developed epistemologies around water and death which “only had meaning outside Africa.” Tom might have been entirely disconnected from this spirituality; enslaved communities in the Northeast were often too small to maintain knowledge of African traditions. Moreover, Tom in particular was enslaved by a minister who took special cares to Christianize the people he enslaved. Other transgressive meanings around Tom’s death are more difficult to deny. After Tom’s autopsy, the coroner wrote that he “Feloniously as a Felon of Himself Did kill and Murder Himself.” Smallwood describes a similar rhetoric in the logs of slave ship captains, who considered enslaved suicides the “robb[ery] of… property… by that property.” Through taking their own lives, Smallwood argues, enslaved people were “staking a claim on their own bodies.” 

“Historic Buildings.” Longmeadow Historical Society. 

http://chc.library.umass.edu/longmeadow-historical/category/historic-buildings/

Hoff, Elizabeth. “Enslaved in Longmeadow.” Longmeadow Historical Society. 

https://www.longmeadowhistoricalsociety.org/towncrier/enslaved-in-longmeadow.html

Smallwood, Stephanie. Saltwater Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2008.