It took Dartmouth professor Gretchen Gerzina seven years to track down a Vermont couple that died over 200 years ago.
Ever since she first heard the tale of a nearly-blind black woman from Guilford, Vt., who traversed the state every year on horseback to visit her husband's grave, Gerzina said she made it her goal to find out about the couple and the story behind them.
"How could I not go looking for them?" she said.
Gerzina, chair of the English Department, described her seven-year quest to unveil the tale of Lucy and Abijah Prince in a speech on Saturday. Gerzina's speech was based on her book "Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend." Published in 2008, the book chronicled the story of Lucy and Abijah also known as Bijah and Gerzina's search to uncover the truth about the couple's life.
The search ended up "consuming" her life, Gerzina said.
Gerzina said first heard about Bijah Prince from her mother, who told her he was one of the first free black landowners to live in Gerzina's hometown of Guilford. Gerzina then discovered that Bijah was married to the poet Lucy Terry, known for the poem "Bars Fight" about attacks in Deerfield, Mass., during the French and Indian War.
"So with this story, I thought, I'm a biographer, I have a sabbatical I can write a nice little biography about them,'" she said. "I started off going to Deerfield, Massachusetts, where the couple had met, and I was off and running and ended up doing a seven-year search."
Gerzina found that the Princes moved to a plot of 100 acres in Guilford after Bijah Prince received his freedom. There, their neighbor John Noyes began to harass them because of his jealousy over the size of their land holdings, she said. The conflict led to years of court complaints brought by the Princes against Noyes for attacking their family and property, and Lucy Prince ended up defending the family's property before the Vermont Supreme Court.
Gerzina said she never could have discovered the full story which history texts described inaccurately at the time without the help of her husband for research.
"When he joined the search, things that I had not been able to find suddenly began to appear everywhere," she said. "Things that people had been looking for for over 200 years started to appear under his fingertips."
When Gerzina's husband began to aid her with research, she made a startling discovery. She found that she was a direct descendant of the man who owned Bijah Prince when he was a slave.
"It hadn't occurred to me I was from the wrong side of the family," Gerzina said.
After looking through court records, Gerzina said she and her husband were also surprised to discover that the Prince family was literate.
Gerzina said she hoped to expose a little-known perspective of life in the 18th and early 19th century North through her lecture.
"I wanted to shake up what [the audience] thinks and what they know about Northeastern history and slavery," she told The Dartmouth. "I also wanted them to appreciate these people and their story."
Gerzina said the story received attention from the film industry for a potential documentary or feature film, but that interest has waned in the past two years.
"I got a couple of inquiries to my agent about film rights, and then all of a sudden the whole market collapsed [in 2008]," she said. "There just wasn't money for the arts and documentary films."
Gerzina told The Dartmouth that she thinks the story can be easily adapted into a film due to its visual components.
"I think it's a really exciting, positive story," she siad. "There are some terrible things about it, but in the end, people did the right thing."
Gerzina's lecture "Searching for Bijah and Lucy: A Personal Odyssey to Find the Black Settlers of Vermont" was the third installment in the 2010 Faculty Chalk Talk series in Alumni Hall, in which faculty members speak about their studies and research on mornings before home football games.
