William P. Powell, Sr.

William P. Powell, Sr. was honored in 1999. He was a staunch abolitionist and was known for helping and housing black sailors and fugitive slaves at his Coloured Seaman’s Home in New York and New Bedford during the 1830’s.  The boardinghouses and their keepers were critical to the whaling industry. Keepers helped prospective crew register for a protection paper and find a suitable vessel on which to ship out; vessel owners and agents visited these lodgings to recruit crew. The boarding houses also operated as stations on the Underground Railroad. By the mid-1830s William P. Powell, Sr. operated a “seamen’s temperance boarding house” at 94 North Water Street. An avowed Underground Railroad conductor, Powell witnessed the protection papers of numerous black sailors who had come to ship out on a New Bedford whaling vessel; no doubt some were fugitives from slavery. By 1851, William P. Powell, Sr., relocated his family to England to escape the harsh fugitive slave laws, which he described as a declaration of war against the "free coloured population" in a letter he penned to the abolitionist newspaper the National Anti-Slavery Standard.  He once again established a seaman's boarding house and helped newly arrived fugitive slaves find lodging and work.