Hopedale History
November 2024
No. 433
Frederick Douglass in Hopedale – 1

Hopedale in November  

Yankee Magazine Hopedale article – 1982  

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Twenty-five years ago – November 1999 – The Aggie Bonfire collapses in College Station, Texas, killing 12.

In Seattle, Washington, protests against the WTO meeting by anti-globalization protesters catch police unprepared and force the cancellation of opening ceremonies.

The ExxonMobil merger is completed, forming the largest corporation in the world at that time.

Fifty years ago – November 1999 – The radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory on Puerto Rico sends an interstellar radio message towards Messier 13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. The message will reach its destination around the year 27,000.

A skeleton from the hominid species Australopithecus afarensis is discovered and named Lucy.

One-hundred years ago – November 1924 – Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming is elected as the first woman governor in the United States.

Calvin Coolidge and John W. Davis made their final appeals to voters with radio addresses on the eve of the presidential election.

Republican Calvin Coolidge defeats Democrat John W. Davis and Progressive Robert M. La Follette Sr.

News items above are from Wikipedia. See below this textbox for Hopedale news from 25, 50 and 100 years ago.

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Frederick Douglass Visited Hopedale

By Peter Hackett
Undated Milford Daily News article

The papers of an ex-slave, Frederick Douglass, foremost Black American of the 19^th century, and for a short time a guest resident of Ballou’s Hopedale Community, are being sought by a group of Yale scholars.

They will be searching in community historical societies, in libraries, and in private collections for the speeches, letters and essays of the man who was born in slavery and escaped to become an abolitionist lecturer, author, newspaper editor, advisor to presidents, and minister to Haiti.

The Douglass project is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History at Yale, and will be funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Historical Publications Commission.

Four full-time and five part-time scholars at Yale have started working on the project. The first two years will be devoted to searching for and collecting Douglass’s papers in this country and abroad, he having lived in England for several years.

John W.Blassingame, associate professor of history at Yale, estimates that the Douglass project should produce 10 to 12 volumes.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in 1817. He escaped from bondage at age 21. Throughout his life he worked not only to defend Blacks, but also for women’s rights, the abolition of war and capital punishment, and to combat alcoholism.

It is not certain how he came to Hopedale. At the age of 21, he fled from slavery to New Bedford, where he married, and supported himself by working on the wharves and in workshops nearby. Probably, while still living in New Bedford in 1841, he spoke at an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket.

Since New Bedford was traditionally a Quaker town with sympathetic leanings favoring freedom for the Blacks, it is quite likely that Douglass while there learned about the Hopedale Community and its program of social reform.

In 1842, only one year after his talk in Nantucket, Douglass was in Hopedale. Ballou in his History of the Hopedale Community, under date of April 7, 1842, writes, “Annual Fast. Frederick Douglass, the fugitive slave with us. O, what a fast! A Fast indeed. Such a one as we never observed before. All hearts were moved and melted.”

That same month and year, Ballou writes, “April 19 Our good friend David Stearns Godfrey called and informed us of the triumphant success of Frederick Douglass last evening at his lecture at Milford Academy Hall. Great excitement; the “baser sort” active; people turned out numerously, but they were overcome by his ingenuity and eloquence. The tide (which was turbulent at first) turned strongly in his favor. He lectured again this evening at Milford Town Hall. Eleven from Hopedale to hear him. A glorious lecture to a full house.”

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