Primus Mason and the Square That Bears His Name

In eighteen thirty-seven, a twenty-year-old man named Primus Mason borrowed fifty dollars from a private lender. He had been born free, in Monson, Massachusetts, in eighteen seventeen, to free Black parents. He had worked as an indentured servant in his early years, found his way to Springfield, and arrived without money but not without ambition.

With that fifty-dollar loan he bought his first parcel of real estate along the Boston Road, in a part of Springfield where working-class families of many backgrounds had settled. He paid back the loan. Then he bought more land.

Then more. Over the course of five decades, Primus Mason became one of Springfield's most successful real estate investors and one of its most respected citizens regardless of race. He gave land to civic institutions.

He built housing. He financed neighbors who needed a start. When he died in eighteen ninety-two, his estate, following his specific instructions, was used to establish Springfield's first Home for Aged Men, an institution explicitly open to all races at a time when such inclusiveness was far from guaranteed.

The neighborhood where Mason built his holdings is now called Mason Square in his honor, a rare instance of a New England city center formally named for a Black man who made something where there had been nothing. That record, the fifty-dollar loan, the patient accumulation, the endowment that outlasted him, is not always told at the front of Springfield's history. But it sits here in the street grid, embedded in the name of this place.