WIREFRAME ONLY - NOT YET DESIGNED
1723 - 1808
According to George Sheldon, the author of The History of Deerfield Massachusetts, “Jinny Cole, or simply Jin, as she was called, was a native of Guinea. By the tale she always told, she was daughter of a king in Congo, and when about twelve years old, she was one day playing with other children about a well, when they were pounced upon by a party of villains…. and the whole party were seized and hurried on board a slave ship”. Jin lamented that she and the other children would never see their mothers again. [i]
A few years later, in 1738, Jin, with her infant son, Cato, were for sale in Boston, Massachusetts. Both were enslaved by the Reverend Jonathan Ashley of Deerfield, Massachusetts. He and his wife, Dorothy, had been married only a couple of years. The young couple (Jonathan was 26 and Dorothy was 25) had lost their first child, a baby of nine months, the same year that Jin and baby Cato were brought into the Ashley household. [ii]
Jin’s days were spent cooking, doing household chores, gardening, and tending to the Ashley’s growing family while also tending to Cato. She cared for Dorothy during her pregnancies, which included the loss of another infant and a toddler. By 1755, the Ashleys had five children ranging in age from 1-16 years, and in 1757, Dorothy would have her last child. [iii]
Sheldon wrote of Jin that, “she fully expected at death, or before, to be transported back to Guinea; and all her long life she was gathering, as treasures to take back to her mother land, all kinds of odds and ends, colored rags, bits of finery, worn out candlesticks, fragments of crockery or glassware, peculiar shaped stones, shells, buttons, beads, cones, — anything she could string. Nothing came amiss to her store.” [iv]
Sheldon's description of Jin’s “treasures” suggests that she may have been engaging in the African practice of gathering objects she believed were infused with spiritual power. Her certainty that upon her death she would travel “home” was shared by other Africans living in the Americas in this period. Her son Cato gathered a similar collection; Sheldon remembered that for many years Deerfield residents continued to refer to buttons as "Cato's money." [v]
Jin's treasures and Cato’s money offer glimpses of a dynamic spiritual life and persistence of African lifeways even in small, rural communities like Deerfield. Sheldon’s account suggests that enslaved and free Africans might draw upon other beliefs and traditions beyond Puritan sermons and other religious instruction they received from the Reverend Ashley. [vi]
Jin outlived Reverend Ashley and the gradual end of slavery in Massachusetts but continued working for Ashley's widow Dorothy as well as helping to raise the Ashley’s son Elihu’s children during the remainder of her long life.[vii]
Jin died on September 1, 1808, of a broken neck when she fell down a neighbor's stairs. She was about 85 years old. Dorothy Ashley survived her by only a few weeks. Days before Jin’s death the
two women had been observed chatting together as they worked on a sewing project that later turned out to be a shroud for Jin. She had served the Ashley family for 70 years.[viii]
[i] George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts: The times When the People by
Whom it was Settled, Unsettled and Resettled : With a Special Study of the
Indian wars in the Connecticut Valley: With Genealogies (Deerfield, Massachusetts: Press of E.A. Hall & Co.,
1895), Vol. II, 896-897; See also, George Sheldon, “Negro Slavery in Old Deerfield,” New England Magazine, vol. 14, no. 1 (March 1893): 49-60.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid, Vol. II, 48, Barbara A, Mathews, “Family, 18th Century Style: The Ashleys of Deerfield” Historic Deerfield Magazine, Autumn 2013, Vol. 14, 12.
[iv] Sheldon, History of Deerfield, Vol II, 897,
[v] Ibid., 898.
[vi] Ibid, Barbara A. Mathews, “’At the dispose and command of others’”: Slavery in 18th-Century Massachusetts,” unpublished paper, 2021.
[vii] Sheldon, History of Deerfield, Vol. II,
[viii] Ibid, 897