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12 Days of Design
Downtown Providence and Beyond
Featuring: Designers, Leaders, Makers,
Partners, Thinkers, Doers, Inventors, and More
4th Annual
September 13-24, 2017
Over 50 events across Rhode Island spotlighting the talent,
innovation, and influence of the RI design community.
designweekri.com See schedule at:
Hosted by in partnership with with support from
first black whaling captain, leading his ship
Industry on a six-month voyage that returned
with 70 barrels of whale oil and its entire all-black crew alive.
The Nantucket African Meeting House
anchored the New Guinea community, whose
roots went back to Absalom Boston’s father’s
purchase of a plot of land there in 1774. For
Seneca, a black man and a former slave, to
purchase land nearly a decade before slavery
was abolished in Massachusetts is remark-
able. L’Merchie Frazier, director of educa-
tion and interpretation at the Museum of
African American History, which has o;ces
on Beacon Street and owns both the Boston
and Nantucket meetinghouses, puts it this
way: “To have, to hold, and to build — these
were major ownership accomplishments that
defied the odds of the time.”
Seneca’s land stayed in the hands of
his descendants for nearly two centuries. In
1920, it was purchased, along with a classic
19th-century house on it, by Florence Hig-
ginbotham, a black woman who worked on
; ;;.; ;;;;;;; restoration in 2010 brought the building up to
code and its interior back to its handsome self with pews
carefully replicated with today’s physiques in mind. Read more
about the restoration in “A Welcoming Renewal” in the January/
February 2012 issue of Design New England. P E T
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