Garret DuBois and Lilly DuBois, two formerly enslaved “people of couler,” were married at the Reformed Church of New Paltz in 1828 and purchased three acres a year later, making them the earliest known African Americans to own land in what was then New Paltz, in Ulster County, NY.
Garret’s story is illuminated by several documents from the period, most notably in a manuscript entitled the “Society of Negroes Unsettled,” also known as the Bounty Hunters’ Agreement.
This document includes the names of enslaved men who were considered at risk of self-emancipating. A group of twelve men appointed four among them to search for enslaved people who attempted to escape their enslavers.
Members of the “Society” were to be paid $14 a day for travel within sixty miles from home and $16 a day for travel further than sixty miles from home. It was also agreed that every enslaver would reward the captor a sum of thirty dollars when the enslaved person was delivered to his or her enslaver or brought to the Ulster County jail.
Each subscriber was also asked for an advance of $5 to be paid to the bounty hunters about to embark on the search.
Historic Huguenot Street (HHS) in New Paltz will present a virtual talk entitled “On the Road to Libertyville: Resistance, Negotiation, and a Black Man Named Garret DuBois,” on Wednesday, February 19, 2025 at 7 pm via Zoom. The talk will be presented by Josephine Bloodgood, HHS Director of Curatorial & Preservation Affairs.
The will explore the lives and experiences of enslaved men named in the Agreement (especially Garret) and what it meant to their futures in terms of resistance and negotiation.
Following the slide presentation, Bloodgood will be joined by Kate Hymes, Vice President of the Margaret-Wade Lewis Black History Cultural Center (MWLC), for discussion and audience Q&A.
Josephine Bloodgood is the HHS Director of Curatorial & Preservation Affairs and is active with the MWLC Building and History Committees.
She is the Project Director for the New Paltz Historic Documents Project, which, thanks to funding from the National Endowment for Humanities, has made free online over 24,000 documents related to the early history of New Paltz and surrounding towns.
She is the author of the online exhibit “‘Never was a slave,’ Jacob Wynkoop, Free and Black in 19th-Century New Paltz” and other exhibits, talks, and a walking tour app related to Black history in the community.
Registration for the program is $8 General Admission, $5 Discounted admission for seniors, students, active military personnel and their families, and veterans. This program is free for HHS members. All proceeds from the program will be shared by Historic Huguenot Street and the Margaret Wade-Lewis Center.
Illustration: Detail of the “Society of Negroes Unsettled,” also known as the Bounty Hunters’ Agreement, 1810 from the Roelof J. and Ezekiel Elting Family Papers, Historic Huguenot Street Archives.
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