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Property Purchase May Hold Piece of Guilford’s Black History

A small property on Durham Road may very well hold a piece of the town’s Black history, according to an exhaustively researched report presented to town officials at a Town Meeting on July 5 by Town Historian Joel Helander.

The purchase of the property, located at 3431 Durham Road, was authorized by the Board of Selectmen at a special meeting on June 27 to help address a long-standing issue with the Lake Quonnipaug Dam. The dam has been in a critical state for years, and while negotiations between town and state officials over who bears the responsibility for the repairs continue, the Town has forged ahead to reconfigure the dam and the roads that cross next to it.

“Though the dam is considered to not be a high-hazard dam, it is still of concern. We did do some temporary placement of some fill in front of the dam in an effort to control some erosion that was occurring,” said Town Engineer Janice Plaziak. “But that was short term work, and we now hope to begin the process to repair or replace the dam.”

Plaziak’s purchase recommendation was to fill two needs. The intersection at Route 77, Lake Drive, and Hoop Hole Road had an “odd-shaped configuration” that could be corrected, and additional land availability would also benefit the dam repairs.

“The dam and the culverts near it were in poor condition, and when looking at it overall from a traffic standpoint it just seemed practical to address the odd-shaped configuration at that intersection,” said Plaziak. “Both Lake Drive and Hoop Hole go out to Route 77 at an awkward angle, so combining those two roads into one just seemed to be the right course to go with. Having more land to work with is also a benefit to the actual dam project itself.”

When notified of the pending purchase, Helander, was able to uncover some of the history of the property and its importance to Guilford’s past. As a teenager, Helander had collected several anecdotal bits of information about the area, specially about a structure that may have been a slave quarters for the Scranton family’s slaves.

“Time and time again, the Guilford Preservation Alliance has discovered that many of the most endangered, overlooked, and significant historic structures are the little structures that beg mystery and intrigue. They are often unrecognized and undocumented,” Helander said.

Helander said he had been contacted by the father of Emil and John Hammarlund, Charles N. Hammarlund, Jr., in the summer of 2005 regarding what he called the “little-known history” of the Durham Road property, and was told that “the little house at number 3431 Durham Road had once been a ’slave quarters’ or auxiliary building associated with the first Scranton House in North Guilford.”

Helander said another interview he conducted nearly 50 years earlier as a teenager corroborated part of that information. At that time, he’d interviewed Estelle Goss, a Scranton family relative, and was provided with a 25-page handwritten copy of Goss’ recollection of the Scranton family, the Scranton House, and their history based on her own research and interviews conducted in the 1930s.

“She writes (in part) that the Scrantons…’did keep slaves, and but few Guilford families had this distinction. The little house [that] stands a short distance north of the old homestead, on the opposite side of the road has always been called “the Slave House” and said to have been built for the first slaves that were ever in North Guilford. It stands on land that once belonged to the Scranton farm’,“ Helander said.

According to Helander, Goss’s anecdote of “the Slave House” matched the location of 3431 Durham Road and corroborated Hammarlund’s anecdote.

"Additional title search and documentary evidence for 3431 Durham Road, pre-1890, verifies the Scranton slave-holding practice and supports the claims about the use of the property,” said Helander.

Plaziak and Helander agree that more research is needed to confirm or elaborate on the uncovered information. As it stands now, however, it is unknown how the town will incorporate the new new information into the ultimate intersection redesign and dam repair project.

“We certainly will be working with Joel and the Preservation Alliance to see where this takes us. There is a possibility that if this is something that is worth retaining…we honestly just don’t know yet,” Plaziak said. “But we certainly have some work ahead of us, and it’s undetermined right now what the historic implications are of that building are.”

According to Helander, until historians can gain access to the property and delve into the actual process, it remains unclear what, if any, part of the structure was an actual slave quarters, the home of Primis (or Primus as his name is sometimes listed in records), or if the current structure was built after the era.

“Until we can examine the structure of the house and get inside, we just don’t know what we’ve uncovered,” Helander admitted. “But the site seems critically important and the house may have significant historic value.”

See Helander’s full report here.