Atlantic World Connections
An Online speaker series Hosted by Atlantic Black Box
Featuring Dr. Eben Miller
and respondent Linda Ashe-Ford
Wednesday, January 14, 2026 | 6:00 – 7:15 pm ET
Late one evening, near the end of August 1850, a young woman named Clara slipped quietly from a house on Middle Street in Bath, Maine. She stepped into a carriage that headed towards a farm in Brunswick while her enslavers slept unaware. With assistance from local Black residents, she evaded recapture and took a new name—Mary Heuston. Her self-emancipation offers an opportunity to explore, through a local lens, broader themes of Black freedom and oppression in the context of the wider Atlantic maritime world of the mid-19th century.
This presentation by Dr. Eben Miller will trace the local connections of Mary Heuston’s enslaver, Frederick Tupper, who amassed a fortune as an enslaver, merchant, and shipowner in Savannah, Georgia, as well as the over three hundred other Maine-born individuals who moved south and became enslavers. It will also shed light on data culled from nearly four hundred crew lists to depict the voyages of local Black sailors, and profile members of specific Black Bath-Brunswick families with representative maritime ties who aided Clara’s escape.
About the speaker
Eben Miller is professor of history at Southern Maine Community College, where he has taught since 2004. Specializing in African American and Maine history, he earned his Bachelor’s degree from Bates College and Ph.D. from Brandeis University. His Maine History articles received the James Phinney Baxter Award from the Maine Historical Society in 1998 and 2020. Eben is author of Born along the Color Line: The 1933 Amenia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement and has written for the New England Quarterly, Maine Sunday Telegram, Bangor Daily News, and Lewiston Sun Journal. He is currently researching a book on Mary Heuston and the struggle over Black freedom in Maine, and beyond.
Eben Miller will share his research in dialogue with Brunswick resident and community leader Linda Ashe-Ford.
Linda Ashe-Ford is a longtime Brunswick resident, an educator, and a storyteller who brings the history and folktales of people of color to life. She is an Ashely Bryant Fellow with the Maine Publishers and Writers Alliance. Linda believes that through story we can begin to deepen our understanding of one another.
