The History of Enslavement in Sudbury and Wayland with Jane Sciacca

Jane Sciacca

On January 21, 2025, a new history of Sudbury and Wayland was published. Enslavement in the Puritan Village: The Untold History of Sudbury and Wayland, Massachusetts by Jane Sciacca challenges the widely held belief that slavery was only a Southern institution.

Colonial Sudbury (modern-day Wayland and Sudbury) was described as the quintessential Puritan village by author Sumner Chilton Powell in Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town, his 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the town’s founding in 1638. Yet Sudbury’s early inhabitants, including some of its most prominent citizens, held and sold enslaved Black people throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Never before published, these stories from preserved records highlight the lives of men, women and children held in bondage and expand our knowledge of enslavement and its pervasive impact in Sudbury and similar pre-Revolutionary New England villages.

At Beth El and on Zoom (link here). Books signed by the author will be available for sale at this event.

Jane Sciacca is a retired national park ranger with a degree in history education from Simmons University. Her work as an interpreter for the National Park Service in Concord, Boston and Cambridge led to her interest in researching enslavement and abolition in her own community of Wayland, where she has lived with her family for more than fifty years. As chair of the Wayland Historical Commission, she oversaw the 1981 publication of the first history of Wayland as a separate town, The Puritan Village Evolves.

Co-sponsored by the Beth El Antiracism Working Group, Jewish Learning Opportunities for Teens (J-LOFT) and  First Parish Unitarian Universalist of Sudbury.