Such stories bridge the interpretive gap between the Freedom Trail and the Black Heritage Trail, deepening the narrative of the former and building a prologue for the latter. The Smith, Watts, and Barnes families are used as case studies of those who subdivided, developed, and sold land and homes along today‘s Joy Street to house other families of color and formed a physical neighborhood that would thrive as black Beacon Hill for generations to come. Following the Revolutionary War, the legacies of activism and property ownership combined on Beacon Hill.
Others, such as Lancaster Hill, organized and petitioned against slavery and exploitation alongside the freemason Prince Hall. However, by the 1760s, the first landowners of color on Beacon Hill purchased and developed their land: Tobias and Margaret Locker and Scipio and Venus Fayerweather. Slavery dominated the lives of people of color through much of the century.
Four generations of communities and people of color were studied, spanning the entire eighteenth century. Using methods successfully employed in researching the antebellum black community on Beacon Hill, this thesis makes use of government minutes, deeds, court documents, census data, church records, and other public records to fill a gaping hole in the Freedom Trail‘s narrative. This divide among the different heritage trails threatens to "resegregate" history as perceived and interacted by the public. However, with so many trails possessing so many particularized foci, many different narratives compete for the limited attention of visitors to Boston. These organizations have attempted to provide a revisionist counter-point by telling stories of internal struggle and by exploring groups traditionally overlooked by historians. Other heritage trails-most notably the Black Heritage Trail-have been established to correct the deficiencies of the Freedom Trail. Yet since its Cold War-era inception, the Freedom Trail has remained problematically focused on a consensus history of leading white men who brought forth the American Revolution. The Freedom Trail has become an iconic symbol and major tourist attraction in the City of Boston.
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