As New Hampshire prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire is using the run-up to the milestone to tell a part of the founding story that often goes missing. Throughout June, the Portsmouth-based organization is hosting a series of events, from a Juneteenth freedom walk and a drumming circle to historic reenactments and a guided bus tour, all built around a simple and pointed message about who belongs in the American narrative. The lineup was detailed by New Hampshire Public Radio, and it reframes the semiquincentennial as an occasion to expand the story rather than simply repeat it.
“We want to show that Black people have been here, we still are here, and our history is American history,” said Dariya Steele, who is helping organize several of the events. That framing runs through the entire program, which treats Juneteenth and the 250th not as competing commemorations but as two threads of the same fabric.
A month of remembrance and reenactment
The series opens with a Juneteenth Freedom Walk on Friday, June 19, at 9:00 a.m., a community walk beginning at John Paul Jones Memorial Park in Portsmouth. An hour later, at 10:00 a.m., the trail hosts “The healing rhythm of the drums,” an African drumming gathering at the African Burying Ground, a site that itself stands as one of the most significant memorials to enslaved Africans in New England.
From there, the calendar moves through living history and public reflection. On Sunday, June 21, at 11:00 a.m., “Meet New Hampshire’s 5 to know” offers a living history interpretation in the M&T Bank parking lot at 325 State St. in Portsmouth. On Saturday, June 27, at noon, a statewide and free program titled “What to the slave is your Fourth of July: Frederick Douglass readings” invites participants to engage with Douglass’s searing 1852 address, a text that remains one of the most powerful interrogations of American freedom ever delivered.
The most event-filled day arrives Sunday, June 28. It begins at 10:00 a.m. with an Acton Minutemen Musket Salute at Langdon Park in Portsmouth, a free reenactment that grounds the day in the revolutionary era. The same morning, a guided bus tour titled “Reclaiming History, Declaring Dignity” runs from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at a cost of $55 per person, carrying participants through the landscapes where Black New Hampshirites lived, worked, and fought. The day closes at 1:00 p.m. with a free Interactive Living History and Exhibit at the American Independence Center in Exeter.
The patriots the textbooks skipped
At the center of the trail’s storytelling are figures whose service to the revolutionary cause has too often been left out of the standard account. The living history exhibits feature reenactors portraying Ona Judge, who was enslaved by Martha Washington and made a daring escape to New Hampshire, and Prince Whipple, a Revolutionary War veteran whose story embodies the painful contradiction at the heart of the founding.
Prince Whipple was enslaved by William Whipple, a New Hampshire delegate to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Prince served alongside William Whipple during the Revolutionary War, fighting for a country that did not recognize his own freedom. In 1779, he is best known for signing a petition for freedom presented to the early New Hampshire government, a document that was dismissed by the lawmakers who received it. That petition, and the men who signed it, represent an early and largely unheralded chapter in the long American struggle to make the promises of the Declaration real.
For Steele, that contradiction is exactly the point. “When we’re taught about the Revolutionary War, it often takes away from the Black soldiers who were fighting for liberty and freedom for this country while also being denied their own, but they fought for it anyways,” she said. “It’s such a big part of New Hampshire’s history that we really wanted to shed some light on it going into the 250th.”
Why this matters for the Granite State’s 250th
New Hampshire’s revolutionary identity is a source of deep civic pride, and the Black Heritage Trail’s programming does not diminish that pride so much as complete it. The Whipple family plaque on the trail, which commemorates Prince Whipple and his relatives, sits a short distance from sites that honor the white founders whose names fill the history books. Holding both in view at once is the work the trail has set out to do, and it dovetails with a wider statewide effort to tell the founding story in full as the 250th approaches.
That effort is visible across New Hampshire. It includes the push to bring Indigenous and Abenaki history into the state’s schools, the broader cultural reckoning on display in Dartmouth’s “Revolution Reconsidered” exhibit, and the more celebratory craftsmanship behind projects like Flag Works Over America’s semiquincentennial banners. Together, these projects suggest a state trying to mark 250 years not with a single story but with the many stories that actually built it.
The Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire’s June events are open to the public, with most offered free of charge and the guided bus tour requiring a $55 ticket. Details and registration for the Juneteenth and 250th programming are available through the organization’s website.
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