The Newport Historical Society opens its Edward W Kane and Martha J Wallace Center for Black History on June 19, 2026. Juneteenth.

The Center for Black History occupies the historic Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House built in 1697 for Stephen Mumford, a merchant and founding member of Newport’s Seventh Day Baptist congregation. It is the oldest documented house in Newport. A proud history.

An ugly history as well.

People worked in bondage at the house.

Extraordinarily, some of their names are known.

“The earliest documentation we have of (enslaved people in the home) is in a probate record (1743) for Anne Conklin; her husband dies, and he leaves her all of his property, and listed along with the skillets and the guns are three individuals: one named Bristow, one named Casan, and one named Jenny,” Akeia de Barros Gomes, Director of the Edward W. Kane and Martha J. Wallace Center for Black History Newport Historical Society, told me via video interview. “We're fortunate because most records like that wouldn't even list the name, it would just say ‘negro man,’ ‘negro boy,’ ‘negro girl,’ but we have the names, and so we can speak those names.”

Names make history personal. Make enslavement real in a way numbers don’t. Allow for specific stories to be told instead of generalities.

“We know they were in the house during the Stamp Act riots and Martin Howard, who was their enslaver, was also a Loyalist, and so he wrote this pamphlet supporting the Stamp Act and supporting the sugar tax, and the town tried to burn the house down,” de Barros Gomes continued. “We can imagine what that would have been like from the perspective of the three people enslaved in the house.”

The Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House has been home to Loyalists, Revolutionary War soldiers, merchants, and generations of Newporters, including enslaved Africans. As a center for Black history, this treasured property will find a new purpose and provide once more opportunities for the community to explore, learn, and connect.

The 1774 census reports two black men over age 16 and one indigenous boy under 16 living in the house. One of the Black men’s names is known: Cardardo.

“His enslaver, John Wanton, got the house after Martin Howard fled. He enslaved those three people in 1774. He was also a Quaker, so he wasn't supposed to be enslaving people, but a lot of Newport Quakers were enslavers,” de Barros Gomes explained. “We have in our collection a document that came from the Society of Friends that listed all of the people who were Quakers who weren't heeding advice and we're still holding fellow creatures in bondage; John Wanton was one of them. This document came out in May of 1775, and they call him out, they're like, ‘We're going to pick this up in our next meeting.’”

The name Cardardo comes to us through his manumission papers after Wanton freed him. Sort of.

“Within that manumission, (Wanton) says Cardardo is addicted to alcohol, so much so that he can't take care of himself, so I'm going to stay his legal guardian, but you know, he's free,” de Barros Gomes said. “We can generate discussions about was John Wanton this benevolent guy that wanted to take care of this man he had been enslaving, presumably for decades, or was it his way of maintaining that free labor, but not being an enslaver by the law. We have that story.”

Cardardo would finally break free of Wanton for good by serving in the Revolutionary War.

Subsequent owners would enslave subsequent workers at the house at least through the 1790s.

Diaspora

Today, Newport is best known for its Gilded Age mansions, sailing, and volleyball sized summer blue hydrangea blooms.

“Newport had, at one point, a dominant role in the transatlantic slave trade, and that's not a history a lot of people know,” de Barros Gomes said. “Sixty percent of the ships that engaged in the transatlantic slave trade from the middle of the 18th century onward were ships that were registered in Newport, they were financed by Newport merchants.”

This was a boom period for rum distilleries in Newport and throughout Rhode Island. Rum. Sugar.

“A lot of enslaved labor was doing the distilling. It created what must have seemed to slave traders like this common-sense system where you take the rum from Newport, you ship it to West Africa, and use rum to purchase captives,” de Barros Gomes explained. “Those captives would be sent to the West Indies to sugar plantations, where molasses would then be shipped to Newport to be distilled into rum. It was this vicious cycle, and it didn't matter to enslavers or plantation owners that the life expectancy of an enslaved person sent to the West Indies was only about seven or eight years because they felt like there was this constant consistent ready supply, and so Newport was really an important link in that triangle of people and sugar and rum.”

A jarring interactive display in the new Center for Black History allows visitors to determine the value of a human life at the time as represented in booze.

“For an adult woman, it may have been 30 gallons of rum. For an adult man, it may have been 112 gallons of rum, but you're seeing how much life was devalued at that time, and you're really seeing that central role that Newport played in the transatlantic trade,” de Barros Gomes said.

A Black child’s life was worth even less.

That, however–the misery and barbarity and capitalism inherent in the transatlantic slave trade–is not the primary story being told at the Center.

“We want people to be aware of Newport’s role in the slave trade, but we're not a museum of slavery, we’re a center for Black history, and so how do we make sure that people are aware of that system and the devastation of that system, but not focus on that system,” de Barros Gomes said. “It's about the humanity of people of African descent and our history in Newport and beyond. In that space where we're talking about the transatlantic slave trade, the focus is actually on the birth of the African diaspora and Newport as a part of that diaspora.”

De Barros Gomes is a part of that diaspora.

“If you're a black Newporter like me, you have family all over the world as a result of this horrible and violent and traumatic trade, but as a result, the healing that comes out of that is I have family in the UK, I have family in Brazil, I have family in the West Indies, I have family still in Africa, and so we want to highlight diaspora as the primary theme and the transatlantic slave trade as the context for the birth of diaspora,” she said.

Nkisi Bundle

If you think finding the names of formerly enslaved people living at the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House was amazing, you ain’t seen nothing yet. In 2005, a contractor working on renovations discovered an nkisi bundle beneath the home’s attic floorboards. That’s what started all this. The home has been mostly unused for decades.

“That discovery launched a critical conversation in the community between grassroots Black history organizations, the Historical Society –we'd owned this house since 1927 and had been critically looking at the building in terms of what are the next steps for it, what's the best use of the building,” Newport Historical Society Executive Director Rebecca Bertrand told me via video interview. “Where it’s situated in Newport, it's in this part of the city that's got coffee shops and restaurants and bookstores, a vibrant part of the city that could become the cultural core of the community. We embarked on these conversations to talk about what could a center for Black history look like and, exactly to Akeia’s points earlier, not making it a museum of slavery or a space that is static.”

Nkisi bundles are spiritual objects speaking to the maintenance of African culture and spirituality among the enslaved. This bundle is the only one identified in New England.

“The thinking had always been in New England enslaved people became Christian, and that's it. That's the end of the story. We know that's not the truth. We know it's not the truth because of the bundle, because of traces of African spirituality that we can see in Black Christianity,” de Barros Gomes explained.

Other references to enslaved people in New England possessing nkisi bundles exist, but no others have been found. Remnants of spiritual practices from West Africa were of course forbidden in the United States and needed to be hidden.

“The word ‘nkisi’ actually translates in Kikongo to something that does something, so you use it as a focal point for your prayer, for chanting, for speaking to ancestors,” de Barros Gomes, who has studied African spirituality for over 15 years, said. “There are nkisi bundles, there are nkisi figures–carved figures that have nails in them and shells embedded–and these are all used within African spirituality as a way to focus your prayers, or a way to ask for things, or a way to make promises.”

De Barros Gomes spent most of this past January in Porto Novo, Benin, coincidentally translating to “New Port” in Portuguese. She had a question about the public display of the nkisi bundle found in the home, so personal, so private, and asked a local Boconon–akin to a Catholic cardinal–to help her interpret the item and if it was even appropriate to show.

“We had a conversation, which we recorded, so visitors will be able to see that conversation, where he's saying, first and foremost, not only is it okay for you to show it, but you must show it, because these are knowledges and wisdoms that are being forgotten, even in Africa, so it's important that you use this to explain African spirituality, to use it as a teaching tool,” de Barros Gomes said.

The Boconon detailed each object within the bundle–shells, beads, glass–and why they were included, coming to a remarkable conclusion.

“This is someone who had spiritual expertise,” de Barros Gomes remembers being told. “This wasn't a random gathering of things, this is someone who was putting this bundle together to ask the universe questions, because in African spirituality the belief is there are vibrations in the universe, and there are ways that you can figure out how to tap into those vibrations to ask questions, and that's what these bundles were used for, that's what they're used for throughout the diaspora now.”

Enter Through The Kitchen

Visitors to Newport’s Center for Black History don’t enter the historic home in customary fashion. The front steps. The main entrance. The parlor.

Not for them; not for you.

“One of my favorite things about where we put the entrance and making people enter the house through the kitchen is that is how the enslaved would have had to come in the house, they wouldn't have been able to use the front door, and so that's your entry point,” de Barros Gomes said. “You're really learning about freedom-making in Newport. Whether it's among the enslaved or the free Black community, we're telling all of those stories within the kitchen space.”

Deconstructing the historic house museum tour from the get-go.

“You'll already know inherently, okay, I'm walking into a 17th century house and walking into the oldest documented home in Newport, but this is something different,” Bertrand said. “The experience for visitors will start in the kitchen whereas in traditional historic house museums, you walk into the parlor, and then you're in the receiving room; it's a complete and total different experience for visitors.”

Good.

This country needs a complete and total different experience with its history.

More From Forbes

ForbesNational Juneteenth Museum In Fort Worth Presents Second Freedom Vibes FestivalForbesHBCU’s, Rosenwald Schools, And Education’s Historic Role In Democracy And EqualityBy Chadd Scott

Forbes‘Freedom, Sovereignty, And The Sea’ At Mystic Seaport MuseumBy Chadd Scott