East Boston visitors are mostly unaware that they have landed on what was once known as Noddle’s Island.
Together with most Boston residents, they know little about one of the island’s early proprietors, Samuel Maverick, for whom the square is named. And such ignorance is perhaps comforting. It turns out that Maverick was the first documented enslaver of Africans in the region.
In 1638, some three years before Massachusetts became the first American colony to codify slavery, Samuel Maverick determined that the institution may be profitable. He purchased two women and a man from the captain of a Salem-based ship, The Desire. According to a travelogue by his friend John Josselyn, Maverick, “desirous to have a breed of Negroes,” ordered the enslaved man to “mate” with one of the two enslaved women regardless of her will. Still nameless all these centuries later, her ensuing suffering was recorded by Josselyn as having been expressed in her “tune sang very loud and shrill.”
Long after Maverick passed from the scene and Noddle’s Island changed ownership, Boston’s wealthy would honor Maverick, naming a large hotel and a ferry ship after him in the 1830s. The Maverick home was located just southwest of the square; the original building also spoke to another fact of America’s founding. The house was fortified to fend off attacks from the Pequot people. By the time Maverick purchased the unnamed African trio however, the local Pequot community was largely in forced retreat. And so it is that the first city square most Boston visitors en route from the airport pass through (or under) is named after an individual who truly personifies his nation’s original sins.
Image: Lithograph from 1835. Image in public domain.