Burr, Delia
Delia Adelaide Burr
Keene, NH
In 1850, a twelve-year-old Black girl named Delia Burr was living in Keene, New Hampshire, in the household of Charles Bridgman, a thirty-three-year-old white merchant, and his wife. The census taker recorded that she had been born in Massachusetts and had attended school within the past year. She was not, however, living with her own family: that same year, her parents, Eli and Saloma (Brown) Burr, were enumerated forty miles away in Belchertown, Massachusetts, with five of their other children and Delia's name appears nowhere in their household. This is the only documented point at which Delia Burr's life intersects directly with Cheshire County, but it is a significant one, placing her as a young Black girl living inside a white merchant family's home in Keene rather than her own. The relationship between the Bridgman family and the Burr family is unknown, nor is Delia’s status within the Bridgman household.
1850 US Federal Census
Delia Burr was born around 1838–1840 in Ludlow, Massachusetts, to Eli Burr and Saloma Brown, who had married there in 1831. Documentation shows that the family was struggling economically. In November 1843, when Delia would have been a small child of about four years of age, the town of Ludlow listed Eli Burr and his children as paupers for twenty-five to twenty-six days.
The socio-economic background of the Burr family and the reality of raising a large family plays into how and why Delia lived in Keene, NH, in a white household seven years later. This situation is not uncommon in antebellum New England. Children from poor families, and especially children of color, were routinely "bound out" or placed as household servants or wards in more prosperous families, sometimes formally through overseers of the poor, sometimes informally through private arrangement. It is plausible that Delia was placed with the Bridgmans in this way, likely in exchange for her labor and keep, with schooling as at least a nominal condition of that arrangement. However, no documentation exists to date to verify this arrangement.
1843 pauper records in Ludlow, MA— lists Burr family members, ages, place of birth, and days in need of assistance
By 1855, at the age of 17, Delia Burr had relocated to Springfield, MA, and was boarding with many other employees alongside her older sister Mary at an unknown establishment kept by Almira Black.
On January 29, 1862, 22-year old Delia Adelaide Burr married Lovelis/Lovelace Wallace, a 51-year old farmer from Agawam, MA. At the time, this was his third marriage and a 29 year age gap with his bride.
In 2022, Cliff McCarthy wrote an article for the Historical Journal of Massachusetts entitled “Who Were the Members of Springfield’s League of Gildeadites.” The League was founded by famed abolitionist John Brown in January 1851, just eight years prior to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, VA. Members of the League were committed to protecting runaway enslaved men and women from slave catchers after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.
In his article, McCarthy cites Delia’s husband Lovelis Wallace as a member of the League of Gildeadites. Wallace, originally from Maryland, had relocated to Springfield, MA, as a widower by 1850 where he was living with a couple who were also members of the league, Alexander and Jane Weeks. Also in the household was 15-year old Ellen Jane Wallems/Wallace, possibly Lovelis’ daughter.
After a short marriage to Harriet Lee, a female lecturer and preacher of color, Wallace moved to Agawam, MA. He then married 22-year old Delia Burr in 1862.
The couple settled in Agawam, where they remained for at least the next eight years. By 1870, they held a modest but real estate of $5,000 and personal property of $1,000, and the census records show that there were no children in the household. Delia appears to have remained childless across the roughly three decades of their marriage.
By 1890, widow Delia Wallace was again living in Springfield with her aging parents at 46 East William Street. On January 22, 1891, she married again to Louis Daily, a 67-year old Springfield "jobber" and fellow widower (twice over), for whom this was a third marriage and for her a second. This marriage lasted less than a decade as Louis does not appear in documentation connected to Delia again.
In the 1900 census, Delia Daily was recorded living at 17 Lumbard Street in Springfield with her 92-year old father, Eli, and her divorced sister Agnes (Samantha) Talbot. The household was listed as white by the census taker, a shift from the "mulatto" designation applied to the family in earlier census years, and from the "American Indian" classification recorded for Eli and Saloma Burr in 1880.
No death record for Delia Burr Wallace Daily appears among the sources reviewed, so the end of her life remains undocumented in this material.
GENEALOGY
DELIA ADALAIDE BURR was born around 1840 to ELI BURR and SALOMA BROWN in Ludlow, MA. She married 1. LOVELIS WILLIAMS in Springfield, MA, on January 29, 1862. Delia married 2. LOUIS DAILY in Springfield, MA, on January 22, 1891.
SOURCE MATERIALS
Massachusetts Vital Records. Births, 1851– ancestry.com
Massachusetts Vital Records. Deaths, 1866, 1882, 1893, 1900– ancestry.com
Massachusetts Vital Records. Marriages, 1850, 1862, 1866, 1868, 1891, 1906– ancestry.com
Massachusetts, Church Records. Ludlow, Massachusetts, 1831– ancestry.com
Massachusetts State Census, 1855, 1865– ancestry.com
McCarthy, Cliff. “Who Were the Members of Springfield’s League of Gildeadites.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Summer 2022, page 175.
Noon, Alfred. The History of Ludlow, Massachusetts, with Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens, Reminiscences, Genealogies, Farm Histories, and an Account of the Centennial Celebration, June 17, 1874. Springfield Printing and Binding Company: Springfield, MA. 1912.
Springfield Republican. Springfield, MA, June 14, 1890, page 7– ancestry.com
Springfield City Directory. Springfield, MA, 1883, 1900– newspapers.com
Town of Ludlow, Massachusetts.Pauper Records, 1843– ancestry.com
Town Records, Wales, Massachusetts, 1850– ancestry.com
U.S. Federal Census, 1830, 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900– ancestry.com