PRINCE BROWN

Plaque location: 482 Hamburg Rd, Lyme Public Library

​

Prince Brown served with at least eleven other enslaved persons on the large estate of William Browne (1737-1802), whose Loyalist sympathies brought the confiscation of his property in 1778. An inventory of Browne’s property taken in July 1779 lists those whom he enslaved. Great Prince, age 26, thought to have later taken the name Prince Brown, had the highest appraised value.

​

Two months earlier in May, Great Prince and eight other “Slaves lately belonging to Col. Wm Brown now forfeited to this State” had signed a petition requesting that Connecticut’s General Assembly “Grant them Freedom.” The Upper House rejected the petition, and no manumission document for Great Prince or those enslaved with him has been found. His identification as Prince Brown appears in an application from Lyme’s selectmen in 1831 requesting state support for “a man of colour the name of Prince or to take the name of his former Master Prince Brown.”

​

Prince Brown had apparently been freed by 1790 when he bought a small plot of land in North Lyme. Whether he is the “Prince Negro” listed in the census count in 1790 with five persons in his household is uncertain, as he did not marry Phyllis Williams from Norwich until 1792. That same year he purchased two additional plots in North Lyme, one of which included a small house.

​

Prince Brown and Phyllis Williams had two daughters, Nancy and Sylvia. Whether Nancy Prime (1785-1855) who, according to New Haven church records, married in New Haven’s North Church David Ruggles, Sr. (1775-1841), a blacksmith from Norwich, is Prince Brown’s daughter Nancy has been assumed but not proved. Their first child David Ruggles, Jr. (1810-1849), who devoted his life to the cause of abolition, is thought to have been born at Prince Brown’s house in North Lyme, or in Norwich where the Ruggles family appears in the census count in 1820.

​

In multiple transactions between 1811 and 1820, Prince Brown sold or mortgaged portions of his property. Court records between 1814 and 1823 show him being sued for debt, further indicating his financial difficulties. When Lyme’s selectmen applied to the state in 1831 for his financial support, they described Prince as “poor and destitute.” He died the next year at about age 79.

​

Probate records in 1832 show that Prince Brown owned 13 acres, a house, very modest furnishings, and a cow. Appraisers valued his estate at $164, while claims from creditors amounted to $179.11. Six years later in 1838 Norwich selectmen informed the town of Lyme that “an old Colored Woman an inhabitant of Lyme the Widow of the Late Prince Brown” was destitute.

​