Nathan and Polly Johnson, New Bedford Caterers
1834
The residents of New Bedford, Massachusetts, were already lining up to taste Mary “Polly” Johnson’s iced cakes and ice cream delicacies. The thirty-five-year-old widow, who had remarried a man nine years her junior, had been to culinary school in Paris, France, and had just opened a confectionary shop in town. Nathan Johnson, Polly’s husband, ran his successful catering business serving the city’s elite. The townspeople who frequented the cake, confectionary, and catering shop at 23 Seventh Street would have been shocked had they known what was really going on behind the scenes of the bakery.
Polly and Nathan Johnson were both free blacks who had worked for Quaker employers before becoming financially independent. In time they purchased a block of residential and commercial properties on Seventh Street. Their two-story Federal-style house was well known—for several reasons.
Polly Johnson was widely accepted in white society. She was described as a “fair mulatto, always lady-like and pleasant.” Indeed, Polly charmed customers who entered her shop, who most likely mistook her smirk for a smile. Polly’s candies, sponge and loaf cakes, cookies, and ice cream were highly sought after. Together the Johnsons catered wedding receptions for New Bedford’s wealthiest families, threw cake-and-ice-cream parties, and hosted all sorts of celebrations.
Nathan and Polly Johnson enjoyed a fine reputation, but they were well-known among abolitionists for their clandestine operation as well. No slave-holding families suspected that the Johnsons were harboring fugitives and forwarding them on to the next station on the Underground Railroad. For over thirty years, none of the aristocratic members of New Bedford white society ever realized that the money they spent at the bakery was being used to aid fugitive slaves, nor that runaways were actually hiding inside the bakery itself.
Having a function catered by the Johnsons was a huge draw. In 1844 when Wendell Phillips, president of the American Anti-slavery Society, was asked to come speak in New Bedford, he was enticed by being told that “Polly Johnson will freeze her best ice and ice her best cakes.” Countless fancy partygoers in New Bedford who hired the Johnsons unknowingly provided funds for the town’s Underground Railroad network.
New Bedford, Massachusetts, was a small, bustling port city and an attractive location for blacks, both free and fugitive. Nathan had begun working for Charles Morgan, an investor in the whaling industry. Polly began as a domestic servant in Morgan’s home. As free blacks, they were proud of the fact that their city had contained no slaves since 1785.
In the mid-1800s New Bedford’s major industries, the maritime and whaling trades, provided job opportunities to blacks. Sea captains sympathetic to runaway slaves often transported them north from southern ports. These escapees usually found ready employment in town. The owners of the Seventh Street properties, Polly and Nathan Johnson, as agents on the Underground Railroad, often assisted New Bedford’s fugitives—upwards of seven hundred between 1840 and 1860.
In 1834 Nathan and Polly took in five black boarders who had formerly belonged to a Georgia plantation owner. They began educating them, and upon their master’s death three years later, the Johnsons took legal action to see that the former slaves were not remanded to slavery by claimants to the man’s will.
In September 1838 a twenty-year-old man named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey dressed as a sailor and escaped on a train with borrowed free papers. He then took the steamer John W. Richmond to New York. His fiancée, Anna Murray, a free black woman from Baltimore, arrived and they were married on September 15. Two days later Frederick and his new bride, Anna, arrived safely at the Johnsons’ doorstep, courtesy of New York’s Underground Railroad.
Nathan Johnson lent the penniless newlyweds $2 to retrieve their luggage, which was being held by the stage driver until they paid for their passage. The destitute couple were welcomed into the Johnsons’ home, where they lived for one year. Frederick had taken the surname Johnson in New York, but Nathan advised he take a new name. “Johnson” had become a surname often taken by fugitives and might suggest they were not free blacks. Nathan suggested the name Douglas from a character in Sir Walter Scott’s poem “The Lady of the Lake,” which he was currently reading. This Frederick did, adding an s, and thus Frederick Douglass was born.
Douglass found employment refitting ships in New Bedford, and went on to become one of the most significant figures in American history. A famous orator, abolitionist leader, and advisor to President Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass was perhaps the nineteenth century’s most effective American voice for equal rights.
In the late 1840s the Johnsons suffered a reversal of fortunes, and Nathan moved to California in 1849, searching for gold. During his twenty-year absence, Polly successfully managed their heavily mortgaged properties and businesses.
Polly Johnson lived in the house at 21 Seventh Street until her death in 1871 at age eighty-seven. Nathan died in the home at the age of eighty-three. Their granddaughter, Mary J. Buchanan, lived in the house until 1891. Upon her death in 1918, she designated that the income from the Seventh Street Johnson properties be used for the general uplift of the black race in New Bedford. The monies from the sale of the properties were donated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the purpose of educating “deserving and ambitious young men of color, of respectable northern parentage, in whatever department of physics they may elect, as being best adapted to their capabilities.”
Today this same location houses the New Bedford Historical Society, an organization dedicated to preserving the rich history of African Americans.