Western Massachusetts
Deerfield
Historic Deerfield, Lucy Terry Prince House, Wilson Printing Office
Lucy Terry Prince, considered the first published African-American poet, lived as a slave in Deerfield, Massachusetts for sixteen years. As one the victims of an Abenaki raid on the town in 1746, Prince wrote “The Bars Fight,” a poem that describes the attack in detail. Prince came to Deerfield as a small child, and lived with Ebenezer and Abigail Wells as a slave. At the age of 25, she married a free black man, Abijah Prince, and the two lived on land given to them by Wells, at the end of his property. Eventually, the Princes moved to Vermont.
The house where Prince first lived in Deerfield, known as the Wells-Thorn House, is now part of Historic Deerfield. This mile long street of thirteen museum homes, combined with the Flynt Center of Early New England Life, presents life in New England from 1650-1850. Also in Historic Deerfield is the Wilson Printing Office, which houses an operating letterpress, a 1950’s replica of Isaiah Thomas’s press.
Historic Deerfield is open daily April through December. January through March the Flynt Center is open on weekends.
Historic Deerfield
Old Main Street, Deerfield, MA 01342
413.775.7214
www.historic-deerfield.org