Last updated on August 20, 2024
The Arnold Arboretum and the Boston Parks and Recreation Department have petitioned the Public Improvement Commission (PIC) to change Bussey Street to Flora Way in honor of an enslaved woman who lived nearby.
The petition will come before the PIC for the first time at its September 26 meeting.
The name was selected after an engaged community process led by Jamaica Plain and Roslindale residents and leaders. The community was asked to vote on five names that the Bussey Street Renaming Initiative Committee selected, three of which were chosen honoring people were were enslaved locally.
Flora was the clear choice of the 378 residents, as well as from an additional 120 citywide and statewide respondents who submitted their input, according to a press release.
People who selected Flora liked that her name was related to the Arnold Arboretum:
- “Flora is also the most poetic and apropos for the environs of all the names.”
- “I chose Flora because women are so very overlooked in our history…Plus, Flora & Arboretum go together & it rolls off the tongue in a lovely way.”
- “I just love Flora. I want to honor a person who was enslaved, and I want a beautiful name for the street that also celebrates the trees.”
Flora lived on a farm in the rural reaches of Roxbury, which at the time included current-day Jamaica Plain and Roslindale, and was owned by enslaver Colonel William Dudley, who died August 5, 1743. Upon his death in 1743, his various properties, including four enslaved people, were listed in the probate court inventory of his estate. It may have taken until 1745 for the records to have been compiled, but Flora one is not known to have been freed and was probably passed on to an heir or sold when the estate was settled, according to research by the Roslindale Historical Society. According to the accounting listed in the probate, she was still enslaved at the farm in 1751-52, as shoes, aprons and gowns were purchased for her.
Flora, described as an “old woman” and valued at 40 pounds, considerably less than the male field hands, along with a listing for her shoes, apron and other accoutrements needed for her household chores.
Flora was chosen because “renaming Bussey Street for Flora would elevate a person from the most marginalized community in our past of enslaved people, who did not even have last names, and would redress, in a symbolic and public way, the wrongs of slavery perpetrated and profited from by so many, including not just the Dudleys but Benjamin Bussey, as well. Written history has lauded and recorded the good deeds of Bussey and his peers, but we know nothing of the character and suppressed potential of Flora and enslaved people like her throughout the region.”
Flora worked on a nearby farm across about 1/4 mile from what became the Arnold Arboretum, down Walter Street in the direction of South and Centre streets.
Bussey Street is a vehicular street that intersects the Arnold Arboretum. The street is named after Benjamin Bussey, whose legacy is complicated due to some of his wealth deriving from the profits of trade in products produced by enslaved people in the American South and the Caribbean, according to the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, a major initiative by Harvard University “focused on researching and day-lighting connections between Harvard and its community to both the institution and economy of slavery.” A large portion of the Arnold Arboretum, land now owned by the city and leased to Harvard to operate the arboretum, was donated by Bussey, according to the Arnold Arboretum. There are numerous things named after him including Bussey Hill, Bussey Brook and Bussey Brook Meadow on the Arboretum grounds.
