Here is what historians have been able to piece together about the lives of tavern-keepers Joseph and Lucretia Thomas Brown. Lucretia Thomas was born in 1772 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a rough-and-tumble seaport just south of Salem. She was most likely born free, but her parents had been previously enslaved by Continental Navy Captain Samuel Tucker. When Lucretia was a young woman, she met Joseph Brown, who’d been born into slavery as the son of an African-American mother and a Wampanoag Nation father. Brown had fought in the Marblehead militia as…
