Harriton House, Bryn Mawr, PA | Photo credit: Monica Mercado

by Grace Pusey

Unlike the projects that inspired Black at Bryn Mawr, including the Black and Blue walking tour at the University of North Carolina and student-led digital humanities projects on histories of slavery at Harvard, Brown, Princeton, and Yale, Emma and I assumed that Bryn Mawr had no ties to American slavery when we started our research five months ago. That all changed when we visited the local colonial cemetery and started asking questions about its unmarked graves. In our search for answers we learned that Richard Harrison, who built Harriton Family Cemetery in 1719, owned the northernmost tobacco plantation cultivated by slave labor in the American colonies prior to Independence. While most of the unmarked graves that sparked our curiosity did not belong to slaves, we learned that two graves were thought to belong to Harrison’s house slaves, and that there was a separate cemetery on Gulph Road where his field slaves were buried. We learned that the Vaux family, related matrilineally to the Harrisons and also buried in the graveyard, bequeathed part of Harrison’s 688-acre estate to the College, including the building that is now English House, and donated the mineral collection displayed in Park Science. Thus, our initial curiosity about rows of rocks yielded a surprising discovery: Bryn Mawr College likely benefitted handsomely from wealth founded on slave labor.

At the end of the spring semester, however, I still had questions about Harriton Family Cemetery. I was curious: The cemetery’s history obviously disrupts the myth that only the American South is implicated in the legacies of slavery, but is it also significant for understanding the role of white women in those legacies? Even though women could not will property under colonial Pennsylvania law, when Richard Harrison died in 1746 he gave the property to his wife, Hannah, bypassing his sons for unknown reasons. When Hannah died in 1774 she bequeathed the property to her daughter, also named Hannah, who joined deeds with her husband Charles Thomson in 1798 to convey the property to the descendants of her son-in-law Robert McClenachan. Under this arrangement, the plantation went to McClenachan’s granddaughter Naomi, who allocated one-third of the property to her eldest daughter Sarah. Sarah married George Vaux. Did Richard Harrison’s descendants purposely manipulate the law for generations to pass the property down to women in the family? Why? Did these women inherit Harrison’s slaves, or have any control over the wealth he built on slave labor? If they did, what did they do with their inheritance?

I also wanted to learn more about the work Harrison’s slaves did, their relationship to the Harrison family, and any other details that Bruce Copper-Gill, Curator and Executive Director at Harriton House, could provide. In the days leading up to my visit to Harriton House last week, I read about colonial Pennsylvania history and early settlement on the Main Line. My independent research, combined with my visit to Harriton House, revealed that the town of Bryn Mawr harbors a complex and astoundingly dynamic Black history. Harriton Plantation is a useful case study for understanding both enslaved and free Black life in the eighteenth century — two strands of historical experience often obscured in a country that remembers the era first and foremost for the Founding Fathers. Continue reading →