West Cambridge’s Lewisville Neighborhood Highlights Challenges, Resilience of Black Community

By Beth Folsom, 2026

Although there are many in Cambridge who have never heard of Lewisville, this area of West Cambridge has been a vibrant and enduring part of the city’s history for over two centuries. The neighborhood, roughly bounded by Concord Avenue, Garden Street, and Shepard Street, was a community made up largely of Black residents, a mix of free-born individuals and those who had been born into slavery and either received their freedom or self-emancipated during the Revolutionary War. The rich history of this area highlights the perseverance of the city’s Black community and its efforts to carve out a space of equality and resource sharing in the post-Revolutionary era and beyond. An upcoming History Cafe program by History Cambridge will explore the long and important history of this area as part of the evolving story of the Black community in West Cambridge.

The oldest existing mention of slavery in Massachusetts was recorded in 1638, when African prisoners arrived in the colony on the slave ship Desire, built in Marblehead the previous year. In 1639, the mention of a “Moor” living in the household of Nathaniel Eaton, master of Harvard College, marks the oldest surviving mention of slavery in Cambridge. Massachusetts was the first American colony to formally sanction human bondage under the Body of Liberties law, which was enacted in 1641 and remained in place until 1783. In 1749, 6% of taxpayers were slaveholders (12 out of 208 in Cambridge). These slaveholders were tanners, judges, innkeepers, and merchants; several owned plantations in the West Indies. In 1759, each Cambridge slaveholder had one slave (aged 12-50) with the exception of Henry Vassall, who enslaved four adults—for a total of fifteen enslaved adults in Cambridge (children were not counted). By the 1770s, John Vassall had seven enslaved people on his property, Penelope Vassall had five, and Thomas Oliver had ten.

Parish records from 1754 list fifty-six Black inhabitants in all three parishes of Cambridge. The three parishes are now separate towns today: 1st Parish, Cambridge; 2nd Parish, Arlington; 3rd Parish, Brighton. Most of them were enslaved, although the 1777 census lists nine free Black residents who paid a poll tax. By 1765, the number of Blacks had increased to ninety in all three parishes of Cambridge, out of a total population of 1,582 (6%).  In 1790, there were only sixty Black inhabitants listed in all three parishes of Cambridge (2.8% of the total population). This number is lower than previous years because, after slavery ended in the 1780s, many Black Cantabrigians moved to Boston. By the time of the 1800 census, only twenty-five black residents were recorded in Cambridge out of a total population of 2,453 (1%).

Many of those who did remain in Cambridge post-1800 lived in Lewisville. A core group of the area’s earliest residents came from the Black members of the Vassall family. In a 1778 claim to the British government after their holdings were confiscated, the white Vassalls listed 105 acres of “Meadow & Orcharding [and] a large Dwelling House with very extensive Gardens and Stabling and three other houses” whose annual income was £150. Among the “property” listed in this claim were seven enslaved people: Cuba, Malcolm, James, William, Dinah, and two small boys (likely Darby and Cyrus), valued at £200. Listed at comparable monetary value were the Vassalls’ livestock, including two yoke oxen, six cows, a bay mare, and two horses.

Tony and Cuba Vassall had at least six children: James (Jemmy), Dorrenda (Darinda), Flora, Darby (Derby), Cyrus, and Catherine. They may have also had another daughter, Nancy, but there is the possibility that she was another (unrelated) woman enslaved by the white Vassalls. Darby (ca. 1769-1861) is perhaps the most well-known of Tony and Cuba’s children. Darby was born on the property of 105 Brattle Street around 1769 and was about six years old when George Washington arrived to take up residence there while he was commanding the Continental Army. Darby Vassal lived to be 91 years old and was a prominent figure in the early Black community of Cambridge and Boston, known for his stories about life in Cambridge during the Revolution and the years after Independence.

Following the Revolution, members of the Black Vassall family moved to the area that would come to be known as Lewisville, establishing what would become a community of mutual support and assistance for those who were increasingly marginalized by Cambridge society. Although enslavement was legally prohibited in Massachusetts beginning in 1783, the realities of life for Black Cantabrigians were often stark. They faced great difficulties obtaining steady work at an adequate salary, and they were excluded from many of the mainstream channels of political and economic opportunity. As a result, the Black community relied on one another for support, creating religious and community networks for mutual assistance.

Tony and Cuba Vassall’s daughter, Catherine, married Adam Lewis, the nephew of Quock Walker, a formerly enslaved man who won his freedom in a 1781 suit before the Massachusetts court. Adam Lewis’s family was part of a Black community in western Massachusetts, many of whom were active in national antislavery campaigns in the first part of the 19th century. Adam Lewis’s parents, Peter and Minor Walker Lewis, moved to Cambridge in the early 1800s, building a house for their family in 1820 at the corner of Concord Avenue and Garden Street.

Catherine and Adam Lewis’s outspoken opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which would have not only allowed but required that ordinary citizens in any state turn in those fleeing enslavement so that they could be returned to bondage, put them in such imminent danger that they fled for a time to Ontario. Upon their return to Cambridge, the Lewises were key members of a group of Black Cantabrigians who founded the Cambridge Liberian Emigrant Association, whose mission was to support a Black colony in Liberia that would provide an alternative to what many saw as the failure of an interracial society in the United States. The Lewises were among a group of over 150 Black Cambridge residents who sailed to Liberia in the fall of 1858; no records of the settlement survive after 1858, however, so we do not know the fate of the settlement or its members.

The demographics of Lewisville shifted significantly by the end of the nineteenth century; in 1850, there were six Black families (with a total of 19 individuals) living in five houses in Lewisville, but by 1870 only three Black families remained. One of the last members of the Lewis family to live in the neighborhood was George Washington Lewis, Jr., (1848-1929), who worked as a steward at the Porcellian Club. Lewis bought a house on Parker Street in 1890, where his descendants lived until the 1970s. Despite the dwindling of Lewisville’s original founding families, the area has remained a touchstone for Black residents, especially in West Cambridge, who have continued to purchase property in the neighborhood and pass it down to their descendants.