Beginning in 2021, Witness Stones were installed to commemorate persons who lived in servitude in the area of historic Lyme that later became Old Lyme’s village center. In other areas of town, including Black Hall, farmers, merchants, mill owners, lawyers, doctors, and ministers also bought, inherited, or otherwise acquired enslaved workers. Witness Stones placed in 2023, in a triangle of land close to a Black Hall cemetery and the site of the long demolished Black Hall district schoolhouse, commemorate eight persons held in servitude nearby between 1699 and 1808. 

Black Hall does not appear with clearly defined boundaries on any map, but the area stretched south from the Meetinghouse Hills to Mile Creek and included the lower Black Hall River and the location known today as Griswold Point. Land records and town meeting records do not specify when English colonists, including Matthew Griswold (1620-1698), began cultivating land in Black Hall, but the earliest dwelling houses in the area likely date to the late 1650s. His son Matthew Griswold, Jr. (1652-1716), his grandson John Griswold (1690-1764), and their descendants, continued to expand the family’s landholdings. According to Griswold family tradition, Black Hall was named for a shed erected for a black-skinned field hand of Matthew Griswold 1st.

The names of 18 persons enslaved or indentured in Black Hall over more than a century survive, but others held there in bondage remain unnamed. The sale or transfer of slave ownership was often not recorded, and births, deaths, and manumissions were inconsistently documented. Two Negro men owned by John Griswold when he died in 1764, and the enslaved child who passed by will to his widow, are among those whose names were never recorded. For others, a single document reveals their presence in Black Hall.​