#5    1780-1793 Town Inventory

Like today, early Peterborough inventoried the assets in town for tax purposes – the dreaded tax valuation.  This inventory dated from 1780 to 1793 details the town’s taxable assets including acres of orchards, arable land, pastures, horses, oxen, etc.  A document like this could be just a curiosity- wow, there were 337 cows in Peterborough!  But, there is more revealed in this document than just curiosities.  This seemingly mundane list illuminates a part of Peterborough’s past that has been lost to later generations; the fact that some early Peterborough citizens owned slaves.

The inventory begins with the number of polls (the taxable residents in town) and the number of male and female slaves.  Peterborough’s slave population was relatively small; one man and two women.  Slaveholders in the Portsmouth area owned the majority of New Hampshire slaves. The 1790 United States Census counted 158 slaves in New Hampshire.  Slavery was abolished in New Hampshire in 1857.

We don’t know the names of these Peterborough slaves or who owned them, although the History of Peterborough by Dr. Albert Smith records that “Baker Moore, a colored man, born in Boston, 1755, bought as a slave and brought to this town by Deacon Moore, in 1763…There may possibly have been others.”  Smith reports that Baker Moore bought his freedom at the age of 22 (1777), so he is not the male slave included in the inventory.