After first contact with Europeans, indigenous populations in New England were ravaged by diseases and greatly diminished in number. White colonists began arriving in large numbers in the seventeenth-century and colonized the area, disrupting the lives of the indigenous people through conflict, disease, and displacement. By the early eighteenth century, most of the Pawtucket-Pennacook family groups who called this land home were forced to relocate, joining larger and stronger tribes in Canada and further south in Massachusetts. Today, members of the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook-Abenaki people are direct descendants of those refugees.
In 1635, the first English colonists sailed up the Quascacunquen River and established their new town of Newbury on its shores. They claimed the land and built their town center around the Lower Green. White men were given property according to wealth and status and the small community flourished. Decades after colonists forcibly occupied the land, the European colonists retroactively “purchased” large plots through dubious land deeds with the descendants of indigenous peoples. A deed signed in 1701 for 10,000 acres in Newbury included selectman Richard Dole, Jr.. The payment was £10 to Samuel English, grandson of Masconomet, known as the Sagamore of Agawam. According to the deed, English was the heir of Masconomet and he “fully & freely release & relinquish my whole right & title” to the entire township of Newbury.
One of the English colonists who owned property on the Lower Green was Richard Dole, who came to New England as an apprentice in 1639 and became a freeman in Newbury in 1654. He increased his wealth and status by purchasing property throughout the North Shore region including the land that Dole-Little House was later constructed on circa 1715. Richard Dole’s will, written in 1698, included five enslaved people whom he gifted to his heirs. Their names were recorded as Tom, Mingo, Lucy, Grace, and Betty.
There was an attempted slave revolt on the North Shore in 1690 which involved a Black man called James who was enslaved by Richard Dole. On the site of the Dole-Little House, in late May of 1690, James escaped from the household of Richard Dole in pursuit of his freedom. James brought with him all of his clothing and a gun with powder and bullets. James was captured after trying to run away and, when questioned, revealed that he was going to join two white men named Isaac Morrill and George Major with whom he was planning to organize all the enslaved African and Indigenous people in the region to revolt and free themselves from the English. While history did not record the legal outcome of this attempted revolt, it does show that the site on which Dole-Little House sits was a significant site of enslavement in Newbury.
Family Home
Restoration
Becoming a Museum