Portland Maines elegant Victoria Mansion is confronting its ugly past.

According to the Portland Press Herald, the Museum has begun a new program called “Unwilling Architects”, aiming at uncovering the truth behind who actually funded the construction of this lavish landmark. Victoria Mansion says that Ruggles Morse, a Maine born businessman who ran hotels down in New Orleans during the antebellum period, and commissioned the mansion’s construction for his summer home, relied on slave labor for money.

Morse’s connection and respect to the state of Louisiana and the south as a whole have never been a secret. The seal of Louisiana hangs right next to the state of Maine right above the stairway. A portrait of Confederate general Robert E. Lee hung in the mansion’s library, and Morse even helped fundraise a statue of Lee in New Orleans in 1870.

So, it was never a secret to the mansion that slavery was involved in Morse’s business. “Everything in New Orleans at that time prior to the war was tied up in the slave economy,” said Staci Hanscom, director of education and public programs at Victoria Mansion. “There really is no way to divorce where he made his money.”

But the full extent of Morse’s connection to slavery was never fully understood by the mansion due to the lack of journals from morse or his wife. For the longest time, the museum’s staff could only put together bits and pieces of his life and connection to the slave trade via newspaper scraps from the era.

But after COVID 19 hit and shut down the museum temporarily, staff were able to put more time into the research and found out that morse owned at least 27 slaves by 1860. Staff at the mansion such as Brittany Cook, development and communications coordinator at the museum, have managed to even start finding the names of some of the people enslaved by Morse.

For example, Flora, a 36-year-old mother of 3 brought down to New Orleans from a Georgia plantation, finally had the names of her 3 children, Alonzo, Henry and Hailly, discovered by Cook and Hanscom in a newspaper advertisement. “While the event itself – the selling of a mother and her children at auction along with material goods – is a tragic act, the advertisement does provide information that allows us to know more about Flora and her children,” Cook and Hanscom wrote. “It is because of this advertisement that we now know the names of Alonzo, Henry and Hailly, and can restore their identities to the space they occupied in history.”

This effort is part of a much bigger push to realize the extent of slavery in New England. While most residents of northeastern states tend to disassociate themselves and the region around them with slavery, it was just as much a factor up here as it was below the Mason-Dixon line, even for Maine, a state created for balancing out the number of free states to slave states during the Missouri Compromise.

Scarlett Hoey, director of membership and development at the New England Museum Association, said “More institutions are recognizing that their sites have a responsibility to uplift the Black history stories of both enslavement and freedom at their sites. It’s important to confront these histories and confront this perspective of nostalgia and history. … We learn about the present through understanding the past, and when you only tell one narrative or one history, that’s not the whole truth.”

The museum is currently closed for the season but will reopen for school tours later this winter and for public tours in May, with updated materials on who really built this stunning building.

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