In response to a community effort, the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and the Boston Parks and Recreation Department have petitioned the Public Improvement Commission (PIC) of Boston to change the name of Bussey Street to Flora Way in honor of an enslaved woman who lived nearby. The petition will come before the PIC at its September 26 meeting, with a follow-up hearing expected in early October.
The name change effort arose through an engaged community process led by residents and civic leaders of Jamaica Plain and Roslindale—the two Boston neighborhoods that share the street along their borders. The community was asked to vote on five names selected by the Bussey Street Renaming Initiative Committee, including three names chosen to honor individuals who had been enslaved locally. Among these, Flora was the clear choice of the 378 residents who participated in the poll, as well as some 120 citywide and statewide respondents who submitted their input.
Throughout the process, officials from the Arboretum and the Parks Department have expressed support for the community effort to explore a name change for Bussey Street while remaining neutral in the selection process. In petitioning PIC to formally adopt the change, the Arboretum and the Parks Department support the voice of the local community and its city council representatives, Enrique Pepén and Ben Weber, in recommending Flora Way as the new name for the street.
Flora worked on a farm on Walter Street in the direction of South and Centre Streets—approximately a quarter mile from what became the Arnold Arboretum—and was enslaved by Colonel William Dudley. When Dudley died in 1743, his various properties, including four enslaved people, were listed in the inventory of his estate. Flora is not known to have been freed from enslavement, and she was likely passed on to an heir or sold when the estate was settled. According to probate records and research by the Roslindale Historical Society, she was still enslaved at the farm in 1751-52, as shoes, aprons, and gowns were purchased for her.
In their press release, the Bussey Street Renaming Initiative Committee notes that Flora was chosen because “renaming Bussey Street for Flora would elevate a person from the most marginalized community in our past of enslaved people, who did not even have last names . . . [The renaming] would redress, in a symbolic and public way, the wrongs of slavery perpetrated and profited from by so many, including not just the Dudleys but Benjamin Bussey, as well. Written history has lauded and recorded the good deeds of Bussey and his peers, but we know nothing of the character and suppressed potential of Flora and enslaved people like her throughout the region.”
Bussey Street is a vehicular street that bisects the Arnold Arboretum and was named after Benjamin Bussey, a Boston merchant whose wealth was derived from trade in goods produced by enslaved people in the American South and the Caribbean, according to the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. A large portion of the Arnold Arboretum—land now owned by the City of Boston and leased to Harvard University to operate the Arboretum as a research museum and public park—was donated by Bussey, whose historical association to the property is acknowledged by the names of Bussey Hill, Bussey Brook, and Bussey Brook Meadow within the Arboretum landscape.