The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Historians hope to save historic Ham Primus house
GUILFORD — While a necessary $3.5 million town project threatens a rare 19th century house that is a link to the town’s “hidden” Black history, officials and local historians aim to work together to preserve it.
Plans are to replace the failing dam and culverts at Lake Quonnipaug in North Guilford and realign the confusing intersection of Route 77, Hoop Hole Road and Lake Drive which traverses around an odd “triangle” lot where the historic home sits.
The road work would put the Ham Primus house right in the path of the new roadway, according to Town Engineer Janice Plaziak, who noted, “The road has to go right through the middle of the building.” The town purchased the land and building for $225,771 in July 2022.
The circa 1816 house at 3431
Durham Road was owned by Black freeman Ham Primus, whose family is important to Black history in the state, local historians say.
Historians and town officials are looking to either move the house to another spot on the original lot or relocate it off site. However, one historian wants the house to stay put.
Preservationists want to save the original portion of the house, a one story and half center chimney cape, which is “cloaked in 20th century renovation materials,” Town Historian Joel Helander said in a report to the town. The dwelling was added onto in the early 1900s and remodeled in the 1970s, he noted.
Luckily, restoration contractors discovered that the wood frame in the original part of the house was in “remarkable shape,” Helander said.
It’s important to save the origi
nal house, according to Tracy Tomaselli of the Guilford Preservation Alliance, “because of the very few number of properties that were ever owned by African Americans — especially prior to the Civil War — that tie into African American heritage,” Tomaselli explained.
Dennis Culliton, who co-founded the Witness Stones project, which remembers “slave people” in the state, fully agrees.
“First of all it’s a unicorn, one of a kind in Guilford,” Culliton said. “A home that is preserved — not well — but preserved since the time of slavery, over 200 years.”
The Primus home “anecdotally” was called “the Slave House,” Culliton noted, based on the mistaken presumption that Primus was enslaved while living there.
He said that the name was a misnomer because “Primus was not a slave in Guilford.” He may have been born enslaved as “probably his father was enslaved in Branford.”
Near the Ham Primus home and still standing is the Deacon Simeon Chittenden house where Shem, an enslaved African American lived.
Shem was enslaved by Simeon Chittenden, a leader in the North Guilford Congregational Church, and his wife Submit; Shem was later buried next to the deacon at the Old North Guilford Cemetery. Another family of Black free persons, Dinah and Peter Gardner, were also neighbors of Primus, but their house is long
gone.
According to Helander, in 1790, there were several North Guilford families who owned slaves. By 1810 there were no enslaved people in Guilford, he maintained.
But the Ham Primus story is singular. Primus married into, “what I would consider a kind of a royal family, a family of African Americans who were very, very important inA merican history,” Culliton said.
Who was Ham Primus and his family?
Primus was either born free in 1787 to slaves in Branford or became free at age 21, according to Tomaselli. “So it’s an evolving story of black heritage.”
Primus had a seaman’s certificate in 1810 at age 23 which was proof of American citizenship, Tomaselli noted.
She said that it is difficult to document who was enslaved in the 19th century as records were incomplete. “Because when we see records where they’re only snapshots in time,” she said. “It’s kind of
tricky with this stuff.”
Culliton agreed. “It’s a hidden history because we don’t talk about African Americans,” he said about their part in American history,” and only now, are we beginning to talk about it.”
Helander noted that it was also difficult to ascertain property ownership of free Black people as land transfers were often made from slave owners and white persons to freed former slaves, sometimes in the form of gifts.
Finding out about the homestead and Ham Primus required some sleuthing.
With funding from Guilford Preservation Alliance, Helander commissioned a structural exam by antique home restorer Jonathan Wuerth; a dendrochronology timber analysis to determine the house’s age by Daniel W.H. Miles of the OxfordDendrochronology Laboratory; and help from Michael Cuba of Transom Historic PreservationConsulting. Helander also spent several months doing title searches and looking up any and all related docu
ments he could find.
“The Primus family managed to integrate into the ruggedly rural North Guilford Society,” Helander said in his report. Ham and his wife Temperance were members of the St. John’s Episcopal Church in North Guilford where several of the baptisms and deaths of some of their children were recorded from 1817-1824. Primus’s notable connections start with his father-in-law, Gad Asher, who has “a very important, interesting story,” Tomaselli said. He was enslaved by a man who lived in East Guilford (now Madison).
“His owner promised him freedom if he would serve for him during the American Revolution,” she recounted. “Gad Asher served, but then his owner did not give him his freedom. Instead, Gad Asher then had to buy his own freedom.”
At that point, Gad Asher had been blinded in the war and had to pay 40 pounds for his freedom, according to Helander.
The Primus house, “shows us that the story from afa mily in general — meaning generation one —
the parents and in-laws going from slavery to Ham,” Tomaselli said, “to a free man who was then able to own property and then his children becoming even more prominent in Hartford.”
Culliton noted that Gad Asher’s story was preserved in writing by his grandson, another prominent African American, “Jeremiah Asher, who was a preacher, a Presbyterian minister and who was the first African American chaplain to die in service of his country in the American Civil War.”
In addition to his distinguished relatives by marriage, Ham Primus had notable offspring.
His son Holdridge Primus “becam e a very i mportant free Black who lived in in Hartford,” helping to found the Talcott Street Congregational Church and “was also considered one of the elite African Americans in Hartford,” Culliton said.
From that line, Holdrige’s daughter, Rebecca Primus founded a school of the Freedman’s Bureau in Maryland, after the Civil War, according to Culliton. “Not only was she a pioneer African American she was also a pioneer of women,” he said.
What happens if house is moved?
“If the house end up being moved off of the foundation to the southern part of that triangular space, it loses it loses its significance,” Tomaselli said.
“If it has to be moved entirely off of that triangle, then it loses, basically, complete historical significance,” she said. “It would no longer be eligible for the [Connecticut] Freedom Trail recognition. The Freedom Trail is now considering the application for it.” She said the Guilford Preservation Alliance hopes the house is not moved from its foundation.
Tomaselli pointed to the fate of a historic house owned by a freed enslaved person, Ebenezer Freeman, at 50 North St. that was demolished in 1999. While a new house was “built as a replica” in its place, “that house no longer truly exists,” Tomaselli said, noting it now has no historical value.
As far as the Ham Primus house, town officials, she said are “open to communication. I’m not sure if they are willing to spend any funding on it. I think they’re totally agreeable to someone else coming in and doing all of that.”
“We are working with local, state historic groups,” First Selectman Matt Hoey said in a text message. “We intend to move forward with the dam project. The roadway realignment is also important but obviously the subject of concern because of the apparent need to relocate or remove the house