Lucy Terry Prince: Deerfield

"August 'twas the twenty-fifth,

Seventeen hundred forty-six;

The Indians in ambush lay,

Some very valiant men to slay..."

Lucy Terry Prince, considered the first published African-American poet, lived as a slave in Deerfield, Massachusetts for sixteen years. As one of the witnesses of an Abenaki raid on the town in 1746, Prince wrote “The Bars Fight,” a poem that describes the attack in detail.

Terry came to Deerfield as a small child, and served Ebenezer and Abigail Wells as their 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.

The house where Prince first lived in Deerfield, known as the Wells-Thorn House, is now part of Historic Deerfield. Historic Deerfield is open daily April through December, and features twelve additional museum homes and an educational center of early New England life.