A Black preacher disappeared from Norwich in 1890. His alleged killer confessed, but was never charged (Lexi Krupp, January 22, 2024, VPR)
One of the attendees, Claudia Marieb, piped in: Her question hadn’t been answered. It was about a name that appeared on her deed — “Darkey Bridge,” from the section of Norwich where she lived called Beaver Meadow.
“Obviously I thought of that as a racist term, and I wondered, ‘Why?’ Like what was the story here with African Americans? Or was there racism here? Or what was the history? And I would bring it up with different people, but there wasn’t a whole lot of information.”
Rooker paused before answering.“It is a story of racism,” she said. “And it is a story that I want to spend time thinking about how to share to the community in a way that promotes conversation.”
Then, she gave a brief explanation of where the name might have come from.
“There was a minister who lived in Beaver Meadow at the corner there, in the mid-1880s,” Rooker said. “He was harassed and abused by local young men in Beaver Meadow and he was eventually murdered.”
This minister was named John Harrison. He was one of the only Black men living in Norwich at the time, according to town records.
And all that was left to mark his memory was a racial slur in town documents.
“It’s also known as ‘Darkey Corner,’ it also is known as ‘N- corner’ and ‘N- bridge,’” Rooker said. “There’s some pretty racist pieces.”
That same night, Marieb emailed me. At the time, I was living next door to her on a dirt road, about a two-minute walk away.She forwarded me an 1896 newspaper clipping about John Harrison’s alleged murder that Rooker sent her after the event.
It describes where Harrison lived as “a little one story shanty which sat in a fork of the road about a mile from Beaver Meadow on the road to Sharon.” A stream controlled by a trout club ran past the property “within a stone’s throw of the house.”
I started reading the article, then stopped. It was violent, and I wanted to wait until daytime. Because this account of where John Harrison had lived, it was where I was living — where two dirt roads come together, upriver from the same trout club.
I felt confident it was the same place, because the line in Marieb’s deed about “Darkey Bridge,” it described where her property line ended and mine began. I rented a house there until last year.
A newspaper article from 1896 described where Harrison lived as a “shanty which sat in a fork of the road about a mile from Beaver Meadow on the road to Sharon.” A house built in the 1980s now stands on the property.
Marieb had been wondering about the name on her deed ever since she bought her home in 2018.“Obviously I thought of that as a racist term, and I wondered why,” she told me last year. “Like what was the story here with African Americans? Or was there racism here? Or what was the history? And I would bring it up with different people, but there wasn’t a whole lot of information.”
Marieb added: “So when the historical society asked residents for questions, I asked that question.”