Lucy Terry Prince
(1725-1821)

At age five, Lucy Terry Prince was brought as an African slave by Ebenezer Wells (1691-1758) to Deerfield, Massachusetts, where she was owned by Wells and his wife Abigail (Barnard) Wells (1692-1772). Lucy was known for her storytelling abilities and is credited with writing the poem "The Bars Fight," describing the last attack by Native people on residents of Deerfield on August 25, 1746. In 1756 Lucy married Abijah Prince, a free African American. They lived for a time in a house built at the eastern end of the Wells homelot and eventually moved to Vermont, where they owned land and farmed. When she died, Mrs. Prince was memorialized by an unusually lengthy obituary published in both a Vermont and a Greenfield, Massachusetts, newspaper, describing her as a remarkable woman possessing "an assemblage of qualities rarely to be found among her sex."