June 25, 2 to 3 pm in the Museum Auditorium. No charge.

Lucy Terry Prince was born in Africa and brought to the colonies as a slave when she was five years old. When she was 70 years old, she moved to Sunderland, Vermont with some of her children. At that time only 0.2% of the people of Bennington County were Black. She struggled to obtain land that she felt was rightfully hers. Eventually many of the townspeople came to accept this loquacious woman, who is best known as America’s first African-American poet. This presentation will cover Lucy’s years in Sunderland, her fight to keep her land, and stories about her children and grandchildren.

Avis Hayden has been a hobby genealogist since 1990. After retiring from her career in health care, she delved deeper into that field, completing a program in Genealogical Research from Boston University in 2016. She has published five research articles and has presented at the New England Historical and Genealogical Conference. She volunteers at the Bennington Museum Research Library and with the Russell Collection of Vermontiana.

Lucy Prince was well regarded in Deerfield and considered to be the village poet and historian. At the age of 16 she wrote Bars Fight and it was only remembered orally until being published over a hundred years later in 1855. It is believed that Lucy witnessed the killings described. It is a remarkably detailed account of one of many terrible events which took place in the frontier town of Deerfield, in an area known as “The Bars”. This was a common colonial term for a meadow. Here is the poem: