Farmington, Connecticut: Grand Central Station of Freedom
Near Hartford, Connecticut
Farmington was founded in sixteen forty by settlers from Hartford, who called it by the Tunxis people's name for the river bend here: Tunxis Sepus. It is one of the oldest English settlements west of the Connecticut River, incorporated in sixteen forty-five, and its Main Street is lined with colonial houses that have barely moved in two centuries.
But the history that has given Farmington its deepest meaning in American memory is from the nineteenth century, specifically the eight months between March and November of eighteen forty-one, when thirty-five Africans from Sierra Leone lived here, attended school here, and prepared to sail home after the most celebrated legal case of the era.
The story had begun two years earlier. In eighteen thirty-nine, Portuguese slave traders abducted hundreds of people from West Africa. Fifty-three of them were purchased in Havana and loaded onto the schooner Amistad for transport to a Cuban plantation. Three days into the voyage, a man named Sengbe Pieh broke free of his shackles, freed the others, and seized the ship. The Africans tried to sail east toward Africa but were intercepted by a United States Navy vessel off Long Island. The case that followed became a national argument about slavery, international law, and American identity.
Former president John Quincy Adams argued before the Supreme Court that the Africans were free people who had never been legally enslaved. The Court agreed in eighteen forty-one. Farmington's abolitionist community, already known as a center of Underground Railroad activity, the town had become so active that antislavery networks called it the Grand Central Station of Connecticut, stepped forward to house the Mende survivors while they prepared for the voyage home.
One of the Africans, a man named Foone, drowned in the Farmington River before the others could leave. He is buried in the town's cemetery. The remaining thirty-five sailed for Sierra Leone in November of eighteen forty-one. The houses where they lived still stand on Main Street.
