Escape from Bunker Hill: A Historical Novel
By Dale Potter-Clark (2022)
It turns out the hill named in Escape from Bunker Hill: A Historical Novel is not the one in Boston. Instead, it is the name of a plantation in Jacksonville, Fla., where author Dale Potter-Clark has based some of this novel’s action.
She blends real history with an imagined story of four young adult Blacks in that part of Florida being helped to reach New England via the Underground Railroad, which included going by ship, wagon, and train, and hiding in places where residents were willing to feed and shelter them.
The story’s primary characters are taken from history, a white married couple, born and raised in Maine, who moved to St. Andrew’s, Canada and then to Florida. Joseph and his wife Myra Mitchell came from Newfield, Maine.
Joseph attended the Parsonfield Seminary, then Harvard (class of 1847), and Boston’s Eclectic School of Medicine, graduating in 1848. In 1852 the couple moved to Jacksonville.
In 1862, Mitchell joined the Union Army and was assigned to a military hospital.
The plantation they bought was outside the city along the St. Johns River, part of an escape route for runaways. Dr. Mitchell had trouble building a medical practice as his opposition to slavery set him apart. He gained acceptance after helping locals fight off a Yellow Fever epidemic.
In 1861, Florida withdrew from the Union and Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C. was fired upon and surrendered to Confederate soldiers, sparking the Civil War. In 1862, Mitchell joined the Union Army and was assigned to a military hospital. He left the Union Army in 1864, after being assigned to work with soldiers torching the city of Jacksonville, including the hospital in which he once worked. He returned to his family in Maine.
The Mitchells contributed money to build a new hospital in Jacksonville and moved back there in 1865, but kept a house in Readfield.
Among Potter-Clark’s few fictional characters are two young Black women who were enslaved on a plantation near Bunker Hill, and two Black men who were free and had some education. All four knew not only the risks they were taking in wanting to flee the South, but that others—both white and Black— were also taking a great risk in assisting them. Dr. and Mrs. Mitchell helped plan and arrange their escape from the South, reaching Readfield, where they were able to reunite.
Potter-Clark draws in other Maine references, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s controversial book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written in Brunswick; Frederick Douglass, who spoke in Augusta in 1864; and Reuben Ruby, born in Gray in the 1820s, son of a North African slave. Living in Portland, he operated a successful taxi company and became a conductor on Portland’s Underground Railroad.
Portland’s first African-American church, the Abyssinian Religious Society’s meetinghouse, was built with money and on land he donated on Newbury Street on Munjoy Hill.
There is plenty to learn in this short book about the ways enslaved Blacks’ quest for freedom and equality was supported here in Maine, with many influential if invisible backers. Another story not often told is what happened in Maine to Malaga Island less than a hundred years later.
The island, 20 miles northeast of Portland, hosted a mixed-race community, but the state forced residents to leave their homes in 1912. The ignorant views of the time suggested the mixed-race residents (Natives, Blacks, and whites) and Black inhabitants were inferior to whites. The state saw the island as prime for rusticator and tourism development, and the residents, who lived peacefully, raised families, farmed, and fished, were evicted.
The Working Waterfront in 2023 published a review of author Paul Harding’s This Other Eden, a book of historical fiction about Malaga. It got a scathing review, in which both the newspaper’s reviewer and Maine’s state archivist agreed “it perpetuates all the myths about early Maine history.”
In contrast, Potter-Clark’s book suggests that before and after the Civil War, Mainers vigorously supported equality and human rights. Her profile of the Mitchells may be idealistic, the couple representing an anomaly. Some Mainers undoubtedly did take great risks to help Blacks gain their freedom and equal rights.
So much needed to be done in secret that the story of support for the cause may never be fully told. Potter-Clark reminds us of the challenges and dangers faced in working for racial equality.
Escape From Bunker Hill can be ordered from its publisher, crossings4u@gmail.com.
Tina Cohen lives on the island of Vinalhaven most of the year.
