William Godfrey Wilson was a porter. He and his wife, Charlotte, had nine children, and raised William Jr., Joseph, John, Isaiah, Charlotte, James, Mary, David, and Morris in a house he built in the early 1850s on the fertile land of Seneca Village in nineteenth-century upper Manhattan. They all went to school, probably locally, where they learned to read and write.1 2 William himself was a sexton at the neighborhood All Angels’ Episcopal Church: by the rector’s word, a place “in which white and black and all intermediate shades worshipped harmoniously together.”3 The Wilson family lived alongside Irish immigrants and African-American landowners like themselves, in a settlement marked by stability and what appears to have been a peace composed of white and black “shades” worshipping—and living, to—in harmony.4 5

But by 1858, the Wilson family home was destroyed and the family moved from it to the 33rd ward on the Upper West Side.6 New York City claimed their and their neighbors’ land by Right of Eminent Domain: the town of Seneca Village had been condemned. In its place would grow Central Park, “for the relief of the lungs and the delight of the eyes of our metropolitan population,” a model of recreational green space for the world over.7 Left behind in the earth where the Wilson home once stood were shattered pieces of ceramic bowls and cups, platters, and the tattered remains of a child’s shoe. Among the rubble, too, archaeologists found the remains of a medicine bottle beneath layers of soil.8 As a bottle, unable to stand itself and broken into pieces, it holds no value — but as an object of the past, it offers insight into the life of the Wilson family, absorbed insignificantly into the history of Seneca Village nearly blotted from public record. With it we are transported to the nineteenth century, and to the home of the Wilson family. Through the glass, we see the Wilsons, their village, and how quickly our city forgot them both.

Our bottle is green. There are over a dozen individual shards, all glinting with a rainbow sheen of age, soil, and water. Those with lettering indicate that when intact the bottle read “SARSAPARILLA” and “NEW YORK.” It probably once held a liquid that included sarsaparilla root, of the sort long used by Native American and African American folk healers to cure fevers, coughs rheumatism, and other illnesses.9 Sarsaparilla became a popular patent medicine in the nineteenth-century, as part of a wave of interest in healing through “blood purification.”10 The bottle itself, with “NEW YORK” etched into its glass, could have been blown, filled, and sold locally.11 Perhaps the Wilson family used sarsaparilla as a medicine and perhaps as a connection to their heritage as black Americans. The bottle is a vestige of the culture African-American residents of Seneca Village retained and also created, imprinting values and tradition onto the fabric of the city in the wake of slavery. The Village was certainly a mix of races and ethnicities, but also of the traditional and unprecedented: the Wilson family’s preservation of a medicinal custom drawing on African American tradition and mainstream popular medicine in a young, small, peaceful black and Irish community, successful separately from white institutions, shows Seneca’s saturation in both new and old modes of culture.

Not only culture thrived in Seneca Village; in fact, the estate of black men in the Village far exceeded the estate of black men in the city at large. In 1825, shoe-shiner Andrew Williams bought some land near what is now West 80th Street and Central Park West — by 1850, the town of 260 residents that had sprung up around him housed a fifth of the city’s 71 black landowners.12 Residents of Seneca Village worked as farm laborers, menial laborers, and artisans. Strict property requirements set against black voters in New York after the emancipation of all slaves in 1827 meant that even in 1845 only 91 black men of 13,000 black New Yorkers could vote. Ten of those 91 men lived in Seneca Village.13 14 According to census records, William Wilson himself grew his estate from $600 to $1000 upon moving to town. He was eligible to vote.15 16 And we can assume from our sarsaparilla bottle that he had enough money to spend on his family’s health, no small feat in nineteenth century New York City.

As it expanded, the villagers began to build more institutions. Seneca sported three churches, a few cemeteries, and one school, offering a physical and psychological space apart from the hustle and discrimination of the city that immigrants and black Americans faced in other neighborhoods such as notorious Five Points in Lower Manhattan. It had also absorbed some of the black community of York Hill, near Seneca Village, which was destroyed for the construction of the Croton water system in the 1830s.17 18

Andrew Williams and another founding member of Seneca Village, Epiphany Davis, worked through activist organizations such as the New York African Society for Mutual Relief and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church to support African-Americans in New York City with welfare programs and suffrage lobbying.19 20 Seneca was a community of power, culture, and peace.

On April 30, 1858, the year the village was destroyed, The New York Times reported that “New York demands a Park and will have it, be the cost what it may.”21 It cost a great deal: the Wilsons lost their home, and Seneca Village lost its place in our city’s history. But why? Why did the history lose this story? Why instead do we remember the less peaceful and less-prosperous neighborhood of Five Points, in books and in film? In the place of insufficient written record, the vivid green of our bottle becomes less a color and more a memory, more a sign that Seneca and its villagers existed at all.

We look to a bottle, a shoe, a cup, or a plate to remind us of the humanity of history and to bring life to the past. Inanimate objects illuminate because in their physicality we recognize the three-dimensional nature of history.

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Bibliography

Alexander, Leslie M. African Or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784–1861. University of Illinois Press, 2011.

“Andrew Williams Case Study.” New York Historical Society. https://www.nyhistory.org/seneca/williams.html.

Covey, Herbert C. African American Slave Medicine: Herbal and non-Herbal Treatments. Lexington Books, 2008.

diZerega Wall, Diana, Nan A. Rothschild and Cynthia Copeland. “Seneca Village and Little Africa: Two African American Communities in Antebellum New York City.” Historical Archaeology 42, no. 1 (2008): 97-107.

Dunlap, David W. From Abyssinian to Zion: A Guide to Manhattan’s Houses of Worship. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Foderaro, Lisa. “Unearthing Traces of African-American Village Displaced by Central Park.” The New York Times, July 27, 2011.

Rosenzweig, Roy, and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. New York: Cornell University Press, 1992.

“The Central Park Plans.” The New York Times, April 30, 1858.

Tremante, Louis P. III. “Agriculture and farm life in the New York City region, 1820-1870.” Iowa State University Retrospective Theses and Dissertations 12290 (2000).

United States Bureau of the Census. Population Schedules of the Ninth Census of the United States, 1870.

Research Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

United States Bureau of the Census. Population Schedules of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860.

Research Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

Wiley, John. The Black New Yorkers: the Schomburg illustrated chronology. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2000.