Enslavement and Abolitionism at Christ Church:

A Virtual Tour

Welcome to our guided virtual tour of Christ Church Cambridge, viewed through the lens of our historical involvement in slavery and abolition. The tour takes about 20 minutes, and each section is narrated by a Christ Church parishioner or clergyperson.

The work of examining Christ Church's full history is ongoing. As more information about our church's connections to slavery is determined, this page will be updated accordingly.

  • Each section of the tour includes an audio narration. To listen, please click/tap the play button (triangle) below. You can click/tap anywhere on this bar to replay sections of audio.

  • You can also view the text by clicking the down-arrow in the TEXT bar underneath.

1. Introduction

  • Christ Church Cambridge is the Episcopal Church in Harvard Square, established as a small mission of the Church of England in 1759. This building has stood here since 1761 and is the oldest house of worship in the city. For generations, it has been a symbol of Cambridge’s colonial and revolutionary history. The congregation has long commemorated its ties to great American authors and U.S. presidents, especially George Washington. In 1966, the National Park Service added the church to the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of its architectural significance. 

    In 2022, Harvard graduate student Nicole Piepenbrink upended traditional tellings of our parish history. In her thesis, she observed that while Christ Church’s historical signage and publications celebrated our Georgian architecture and presidential visits, we made no mention of something central to the church’s institutional and physical foundations: the legacy of slavery, which was once central to New England’s economy. Christ Church’s founders and funders were largely Tory merchants whose wealth came from Black people’s forced labor. Yet, in the crypt beneath the church lies a once-enslaved man named Darby Vassall. Darby was born in Cambridge, enslaved by one of Christ Church’s founding families. He gained freedom as a child and died after decades of advocacy for abolition and civil rights. 

    This project is part of our response to calls, by Darby Vassall’s descendants, by Piepenbrink, and by church members, to make the history of slavery at Christ Church more visible. Our goal here is to offer a guided tour of the church through the lens of enslavement and abolitionism, and especially to share the experience of visiting the Vassall tomb. Along the way, we will name some individuals from our church’s past who participated in or benefited from the slave trade, as well as those who sought abolition and equality.  We believe that in Jesus Christ, we are one body with those who came before us. We consider it our duty to learn the truth, and to share the truth, about how our church benefited from the sin of slavery. We invite you to join our truth-seeking journey.

Each of the following sections contains a high resolution, 360-degree ‘spin’ photo that you can control.

  • On a computer, you can ‘look around’ by positioning your mouse pointer over an image, holding down the left mouse button, and dragging in any direction.   

  • You can zoom in and out by rolling the middle mouse button (if you have one) or by clicking the ‘+’ or ‘-’ buttons on the bottom right of the image.

  • On a mobile or touch-screen device, you can simply use one or two fingers to manipulate your view.

  • For each of the sections that follow, we suggest that you start the narration, then click the box in the upper-right corner of the interactive image to expand it to full-screen. When the narration concludes, click the box again to return to the tour. Unfortunately, this may not be possible on some mobile phones.

2. Outside Christ Church Cambridge

  • We are standing at the front doors of Christ Church on a warm summer day. Turn to the left to see Cambridge’s Old Burying Ground. In this graveyard, one may find the resting places of prominent colonists and early Harvard College leaders, including relatives of Christ Church’s founding families. Among them lie generations of the enslaved. Most of their graves are unmarked. Turn even further left and you will see Cambridge Common, where General George Washington assumed command of the Continental Army in 1775. 


    Turn back to face the church. To the right of the front door, there is a small blue oval plaque. This is a preservation award honoring how the church has kept up its Georgian appearance. On either side of the door, there are two white signs outlining the site’s historical significance. These signs describe Christ Church’s colonial history and connections to famous individuals like George Washington, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Theodore Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. Until 2025, Dr. King was the only Black person mentioned on these signs. That year, we took new steps to make visible the legacy of slavery at Christ Church. On the left-hand sign, you will find a new paragraph acknowledging that our church benefited substantially from the proceeds of enslaved people’s labor. Another paragraph names Darby Vassall. I invite you to zoom in and read these signs or view the still photos of them on the web page. When you are ready, please step inside. 

Historical markers (click images to expand them)

3. Entering the Sanctuary

  • We have entered the sanctuary of Christ Church. Originally, this space was filled with box pews, square enclosures that well-off families owned as real estate. Churches in eighteenth-century New England made most of their revenue by selling pews and levying annual taxes on them. Owning and worshiping in a prominent pew every week was a status symbol. Merchants, at the top of colonial New England’s economic hierarchy, were important contributors to both Anglican and Congregational churches. Their incomes often came from some combination of selling enslaved Africans, dealing goods produced by forced labor, and absentee plantation ownership. This was true of Christ Church’s so-called Tory proprietors.

    The chart of the roughly 25 pew owners circa 1770 might as well be a catalog of slave trade profiteers. One was Isaac Royall, a Massachusetts-based owner of an Antiguan plantation whose sister Penelope married another parishioner and enslaver, Henry Vassall. Another pew belonged to the Faneuils. Mary Faneuil was a founding member of the church. Her brother Peter used proceeds from his Caribbean trade to build Faneuil Hall in Boston, where slaves were sold. Several other pew owners and major donors were also enslavers with Caribbean ties, including George Ruggles and Richard Lechmere. Jared Hardesty, a historian of slavery in New England, has described slave traffickers’ contributions to Boston-area churches as reputation laundering: a way to buy a positive public image.

“The Tory Proprietors” (click to expand)

4. Memorial Plaques

  • On the pillar next to us, there is a plaque commemorating a special prayer service held here in December 1775. George and Martha Washington sat in a front left pew. New England militiamen had severely damaged Christ Church and used it mainly as a barracks, but the church has celebrated its revolutionary connection for centuries. Washington was one of the richest early Americans. When he died, 317 enslaved people worked at his large Virginia plantation. He voiced private objections to slavery, but he participated in it for the sake of wealth.

    Looking forward and around, you will see other memorial plaques placed in the church. They celebrate parishioners from many families over many decades. All were affluent white people. When this image was taken in the summer of 2025, there was no visible commemoration of any Black person in the sanctuary. By the time this tour went online in November 2025, the parish had commissioned a memorial plaque to honor Darby Vassall. It will be installed on the pews across the main aisle to your right, directly above the Vassall tomb.

5. Christ Church Before the Civil War

  • We are now standing in an 1857 addition to Christ Church. To accommodate a swelling congregation, the parish lengthened the sanctuary by the two window bays on either side of this column. Zoom in and you will see a memorial plaque dedicated to Nicholas Hoppin, who led Christ Church from 1839 to 1874. His tenure included the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the United States. Although slavery ended in Massachusetts in the 1780s, the Boston area became a hub of abolitionist activism. Across the Charles River from Christ Church, Frederick Douglass preached, William Lloyd Garrison printed The Liberator, and Maria Weston Chapman ran fundraisers for abolitionist groups. Churches were key venues for spreading the anti-slavery message and rallying supporters.


    Christ Church was not a prominent activist church under Hoppin’s rectorship, but one of its best known members was an important abolitionist. Richard Henry Dana Jr. was a famous lawyer, author, and advocate for sailors’ and freedmen’s rights. He belonged to the Boston Vigilance Committee, which protected people who had fled enslavement, and he suffered violence for representing self-emancipated Black people in court. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required that slaves who fled captivity be returned to their enslavers even if they had moved to free states. In practice, this federal law enabled armed men to kidnap free Black people to be forced into slavery in the South. Hoppin preached against the act in 1851.

The interactive images in the sections that follow are connected spins. In addition to “looking around,” you can “walk around” by clicking/tapping on the ‘<‘ and ‘>’ arrow icons in the image.

6. Timeline of Parish History

  • We have left the church itself and entered the adjoining parish house. Down a half-flight of stairs and outside the church offices is this historical timeline built to commemorate Christ Church’s 250th anniversary. On the far left of the timeline, beginning in 1759, notice the silhouette portrait of East Apthorp. He was Christ Church’s first rector, or pastor. His father, Charles Apthorp, was a prominent merchant considered the richest slave trafficker in Boston. Much of the Apthorp family fortune came from buying and selling kidnapped Africans—and helping other enslavers recapture victims who fled captivity. One may assume that this wealth funded East’s education. 

    Though Charles Apthorp died the year before the Tory proprietors founded Christ Church, his heirs donated 158 pounds sterling to the new congregation. This was worth about a year’s wages for a heavy laborer and amounted to nearly 15% of the church’s initial funding. Apthorp’s widow, Grizzell, gave a silver christening bowl that the church still uses today. One of their daughters, also named Grizzell, married one of the family’s business associates, with whom she went on to enslave over 500 people on Caribbean plantations.

    In the early 2020s, when we began to study our parish’s history of racism, we recognized that this historical timeline was not transparent about the legacies of slavery. The labels mounted on cotton hoops are a new addition meant to acknowledge these stories. Some of them suggest future steps for research, contemplation, and reparative action. I invite you to zoom in and read some. The use of cotton represents the ways New England industrialists continued to profit from slavery after its abolition in the north. Textile mills in Massachusetts turned cotton produced by enslaved plantation workers into consumer goods and profits for factory owners.

7. Route to the Crypt (Part 1)

  • We have continued down the stairs to the left of the historical timeline. This hallway leads past the parish archives and utility rooms on the way to the crypt beneath the sanctuary. The walls are lined with historical images. Some are old photos of the church. Some are seemingly unrelated artwork, like romantic nautical scenes. As you explore, you will see several portraits of early church leaders, including a few from the early republic. Oddly absent is Elbridge Gerry, who was perhaps the church’s most notable warden in this period. Gerry was a Founding Father and James Madison’s vice president. Though best known as the creator of gerrymandering, he was also an abolitionist. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he opposed the Three-Fifths Compromise on the grounds that it would give slavery legal sanction in the U.S. Constitution.

Elbridge Gerry

7. Route to the Crypt (Part 2)

  • We are standing in front of the portrait of a very different man. This is Thomas Oliver, a warden, or senior lay leader, in the church’s Tory era. He was born in a wealthy plantation-owning family on Antigua and married into the Vassalls, who also held land and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Oliver was King George III’s last lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Like Christ Church’s other Loyalists, he fled New England during the American Revolution. His large home, Elmwood, still stands in Cambridge. It is the official residence of Harvard University’s president.

8. The Crypt

  • Finally, we have reached the end of the basement corridor and opened a heavy metal door. We are in the church’s crypt or undercroft. The air is thick and still. We are beneath the sanctuary. The granite walls around us, the church’s original foundation, were once ballast stones. They sat in the bilges of sailing ships, keeping them stable as they plied the Atlantic. Ships that frequented Boston Harbor hauled everyday consumer goods from Britain and luxuries from Asia: cotton textiles, tea, and china. They also brought in sugar and rum from the Caribbean, manufactured by enslaved workers in a notoriously grueling plantation system. They shipped wood and food to those islands that had been converted wholesale to canefields. And some of them transported people abducted from West Africa. Did the ships that carried these stones also carry human cargo or sugar made by forced labor?

9. The Vassal Tomb

  • After bending under utility ducts and treading through dust, we have reached the only tomb on Christ Church grounds. One Tory proprietor, Henry Vassall, commissioned it for his family. Together, Henry and his nephew John Vassall contributed about a fifth of Christ Church’s founding money, 210 pounds sterling. Their families enslaved hundreds of people on sugar plantations in Jamaica. Sugar was one of the most common lines of business for the church’s founders. Henry Vassall’s coffin is one of the ten stacked inside the brick tomb. He is buried with his wife, Penelope Royall Vassall; their adult daughter, Elizabeth Vassall Russell; four infants or young children; and likely a British army officer who died as a prisoner of war during the Revolution. In 1861, there was one last burial before the tomb was sealed forever: that of Darby Vassall.


    Darby was born in Cambridge in May 1769, months after Henry Vassall died. Darby’s parents were Cuba and Tony, who had survived being trafficked through the Caribbean and worked for many years in Henry’s household. Tony remained with Penelope Vassall. Cuba was sold to John, who gave the infant Darby away to George Reed, a sometime parishioner of Christ Church. When the Tories fled greater Boston at the beginning of the revolution, Cuba and Tony faced uncertainty about their freedom. Despite their ambiguous status, they decided to reunite their family spread across several estates. After Reed died in 1775, they brought Darby home. They continued to work part of John Vassall’s abandoned land for themselves. 


    As an adult, Darby and his brother Cyrus owned property in Boston’s Black community on Beacon Hill. Darby worked as a caterer, worshiped in Congregationalist churches like the Brattle Street Church, and became involved in Beacon Hill’s activist scene. He was a founding member of Boston’s charitable African Society and a long-time member of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. His advocacy helped lead to the formation of the Abiel Smith School, the first public school for Black children. He signed petitions for protection against the Fugitive Slave Act. He associated with noted abolitionists and made public toasts to the Haitian Revolution. In October 1861, he died aged 92. His funeral coincided with Christ Church’s centennial celebrations and the beginning of the U.S. Civil War. At his request and with the permission of Henry Vassall’s daughter Elizabeth, he was buried in the Vassall tomb. We will never know why he chose this.


    Here in the crypt, we see that Christ Church is built on both its physical foundation and on the legacy of its founders. Here lies Henry Vassall, who gave abundantly to help establish this house of worship, entombed with his family. And here lies Darby Vassall, whose presence testifies that these proprietors who built the church did so through the sin of slavery.


    Today, Christ Church’s members are actively examining our complicity in slavery and racism with the aim of repairing the harm inflicted by members of our congregation throughout its history. We know that learning and telling the truth are just the first steps. Thank you for joining us as we begin.

Thank you for taking our virtual tour! We welcome you to visit Christ Church Cambridge in person if you have the occasion to do so. You can find details of our regular programs and services by clicking here.

Virtual Tour photography was provided by Panospin360 Inc. (www.Panospin360.com)