Book Signing and Conversation with Local Author Jane Sciacca

Local author Jane Sciacca joins us to talk about her latest book, Enslavement in the Puritan Village: The Untold History of Sudbury and Wayland, Massachusetts. Signed copies will be available for purchase after the talk. After discussing her book, guests may gather with the author in The Wayside Inn's exhibition room for an exclusive conversation on our ongoing exhibition, A Revolutionary Inn.

Cash bar will be open for guests during and after the event.

This event is FREE to the public!

Space is limited; to reserve your spot today for this exclusive book signing and conversation, please call the Inn directly at 978-443-1776x1.

About Our Educational Programming

As institutions across the country reflect on the legacy of the American Revolution 250 years later, The Wayside Inn is proud to contribute to this milestone with programs that examine not only the fight for freedom, but also the complicated truths that underpinned colonial society. This program explores the often-overlooked history of people whose stories are essential to understanding the full scope of American history. By understanding the realities of enslavement in Puritan New England, we deepen our understanding of the tensions and contradictions that ultimately shaped the Revolutionary era — and continue to shape the nation's legacy of liberty.

About the Book

Colonial Sudbury (modern-day Wayland and Sudbury), Massachusetts was designated the quintessential Puritan Village by author Sumner Chilton Powell in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the founding of this New England town in 1638. Yet this quiet rural village, like many others in New England, also had a darker history that is often overlooked. Sudbury’s early inhabitants, including some of the most prominent citizens in town, held and sold enslaved Black people throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Never before published, these stories from preserved records highlight the lives of men, women and children held in bondage. The accounts of life in colonial Sudbury and their interactions with nearby towns, including bills of sale, marriages, medical and military records expand the knowledge of enslavement and its pervasive impact, yet unquestioned acceptance, in Sudbury and similar pre-Revolutionary New England villages.

The book contains over 30 pages of notes and an extensive bibliography to aid in conducting research on rural colonial New England towns.