PROVIDENCE – The Providence Preservation Society has paused its attempt to sell the Shakespeare’s Head Building so it can investigate evidence that the site has a historic connection to slavery and was possibly a stop on the Underground Railroad, the nonprofit announced Thursday.
PPS had issued a request for proposals for the purchase of Shakespeare’s Head on April 30 following a PPS board decision in 2023 to authorize the sale of the building. That request has been put on hold.
The society this week became aware of documentation that alleges that the
5,000-square-foot building built in 1772
at 21 Meeting St. was home to enslaved African Americans in the 1770s and 1780s and may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad in the 19th century. The s
taff began a review of archaeological scholarship on slavery to understand the role the building may have played.
An amendment published in 2018 to the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the College Hill Historic District, states that John Carter, the building's first owner, “enslaved African Americans” in the building and freed them in 1789. The report lists several other homes on College Hill in which enslaved African Americans lived and about 10 homes that listed African American residents but did not specify their status.
Architectural renderings of the three-story clapboard Colonial, completed by the National Park Service as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1936, include references to two locations in the basement at 21 Meeting St. that may have housed enslaved people or those fleeing slavery via the Underground Railroad, marked as “probable slave pits.”
The survey notes that in three locations at 21 Meeting St., there were bars on one exterior and two interior windows when the renderings were completed in 1936. “The house was a general meeting place for influential settlers, and, so legend has it, dungeons in the cellar were used in the famous ‘underground system’ of aiding slaves to escape to Canada from bondage of the South,” the survey noted.
The preservation society leadership became aware of this after studying the Historic American Buildings Survey documentation this week.
“PPS is pausing the sale of Shakespeare’s Head to conduct a thorough review of the building’s connections to slavery and, possibly, the Underground Railroad,” PPS Executive Director Marisa Angell Brown said. “We know that so much of Black history in our country has been unrecorded, lost and erased, so we may not be able to come to a conclusive understanding of how these spaces were used, but we are committed to uncovering as much as we can about this history with the assistance of field experts … This particular part of Shakespeare’s Head’s history needs to be acknowledged and understood more fully, and we are determined to make that happen.”
The preservation society, which has owned the home since 2015, issued a request for proposals for the purchase of Shakespeare’s Head on April 30 following a board decision in 2023 to authorize the sale of the building.
The building once housed Providence’s first newspaper in the colonial era, a “precursor to The Providence Journal,” which throughout its history served alternately as one of the city’s first post offices, a print shop, a boarding house and a family home, according to the nonprofit.
The building is named for a sign featuring famed English playwright William Shakespeare’s head that once hung outside the building, as part of an advertisement for its print-related enterprises.
