America 250 In Color: The Luke Family of New Haven, Connecticut
What if I told you that enslaved and free Black men helped build one of America’s oldest institutions, Yale University? Long before plaques and portraits lined its walls, men like Jethro Luke and his son Gad mixed the mortar that still holds Connecticut Hall together. In 2024, I was hired to perform genealogical research for the Yale and Slavery Research Project. As a Connecticut native, it was an honor to study Jethro Luke and his relatives.
At first glance, the Luke family of New Haven might seem like a local story, but it reaches into the households of Yale’s founders, into the chaos of the American Revolution, into westward expansion after the Civil War, across the border into Mexico, and ultimately into the story of the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. Preserved in deed books, church registers, account ledgers, war depositions, probate files, and census schedules, the Luke family’s story reveals how one lineage moved from enslavement to landownership, from forced labor to federal appointment, and from the margins of the archive to the center of American history.
Connecticut Hall
Jethro Luke was enslaved by Mary Hooker Pierpont, granddaughter of Connecticut’s founder Thomas Hooker. She was also the widow of James Pierpont, minister of the First Congregational Church in New Haven and a founding trustee of the Collegiate School, later known as Yale. On 19 May 1728, Jethro was baptized at First Congregational Church. It is believed that he was born around 1700. After Mary Hooker Pierpont’s death in 1740, Jethro and his wife Ruth were deeded their freedom by her heirs. Unfortunately, Jethro and Ruth had several children still in bondage. One of them was their son Gad, who Mary Pierpont deeded to her son Hezekiah three years earlier.
By 1745, Jethro had acquired land of his own. The earliest surviving map of New Haven, drawn in 1748 by Yale student James Wadsworth, labels a parcel at the intersection of today’s Grove, Ashmun, and York Streets as “Jethro a blackman farmer.” The property, later known as “Jethro’s Corner,” sat directly adjacent to Yale’s campus and near what would become Grove Street Cemetery.
On 17 April 1750, the first stone was laid for Connecticut Hall, now the oldest surviving building in New Haven and the first brick building in the state. Yale’s first president, Thomas Clap, kept meticulous account books detailing the labor, materials, and costs associated with the project. Those records reveal that Black laborers played an essential role in constructing the building between 1750 and 1753.
Jethro Luke and his son Gad were among them. Clap recorded that “Jethro & Gad,” worked 161½ days on the building. According to Yale and Slavery: A History, by David Blight, they specialized in mixing mortar: carefully combining lime, sand, water, and sometimes crushed oyster shells into the substance that bound the bricks together. Other Black laborers: Jack, Dick, Mingo, and an unnamed man enslaved by Clap himself, contributed hundreds of days of work. Together, Black laborers accounted for at least 672 days of work on the building.
The day after laying Connecticut Hall’s first brick, Jethro began purchasing his children from the Pierpont family. On 18 April 1750 he purchased half of his son Gad for £175 from Theophilus Morgan, the guardian of one of Hezekiah Pierpont’s sons. On November 22nd, he was able to purchase the other half from James Pierpont II, guardian of Hezekiah’s other son. In 1752, Jethro purchased his daughter Ruth, age 22, from James Pierpont II for £450. In 1753, he purchased Ruth’s husband, Charles Roberts, from Harding Jones. In 1756, he purchased another son, Luke, age 35. These transactions, recorded in New Haven deed books, document a free Black father navigating colonial law to reunite and protect his family. Jethro spent at least £1,417 purchasing his family members. In comparison, those who built Connecticut Hall (or their enslavers) were paid about a pound per day. I also found later deeds showing that he manumitted Charles and Ruth Roberts in 1758 and 1760, respectively.
Jethro’s efforts in the last 20 years of his life completely changed the trajectory of his family story. Jethro died in 1761 and was likely buried in the town burial ground behind the First Church. His wife Ruth predeceased him, and he was survived by a second wife named Mindwell, and their children Dan and Jethro Roberts Luke. The youngest was likely the same Jethro Luke who served in the 8th Connecticut Regiment under Captain Theophilus Munson and Colonel John Chandler during the Revolutionary War.
Gad Luke, born around 1725, married another free person of color named Rose and established a large household in New Haven. Church records show the names of eight of their children: Amy, Jethro, Ruth, Rachel, Gad, Martha, Esther, and Sarah.
On 5 July 1779, as British troops entered New Haven, Rose Luke found herself trapped in the chaos. In a sworn deposition dated July 27th and later forwarded through military channels to George Washington, she testified that she was in town when the enemy arrived and tried to make her way home. A soldier stopped her, searched her pockets, and took everything he could find. When she finally reached her house with her husband, she discovered four British soldiers already inside. Attempting to avoid them, she opened a door to another room, only to be seized. She struggled until both she and the soldier fell to the floor. She broke free briefly, clutching the door latch with both hands while he tried violently to pull her loose, until her husband rushed in and rescued her. Even after a colonel briefly entered and left the house, the soldiers returned, continuing to damage property and threaten the family.
The violence escalated when one soldier forced Rose to go to a neighboring house to retrieve a harness. Cursing her and striking her with a cane, he drove her across the yard. Inside, he ordered her upstairs and when she refused, he threatened to kill her instantly. He forced Rose up two flights of stairs, carried her into a chamber, and attempted to sexually assault her. She resisted with what she described as “all Possible Resistance” through struggling and crying out until another man intervened and stopped the attack. Rose fled to a neighboring house where officers were gathered, only to face further insults. When she asked if they were not ashamed to treat “an old Woman who had had Ten Children” in such a way, they mocked her, replying that it was “so much the better.” Her testimony stands as a stark, firsthand account of the brutality inflicted on civilians, and particularly on Black women, during the Revolutionary War.
When Rose died in 1805, her probate records named two surviving daughters, Amy and Sarah, and a grandson through her deceased daughter Esther. Through these daughters, the Luke line continued into the nineteenth century. Amy Luke married Belfast Fowler in 1768. Baptismal records and her 1832 estate division document her children and grandchildren, allowing the family to be traced through probate files.
Sarah Luke first married Minzey Way. After his death, she married Jacob Oson. Jacob Oson was an important member of New Haven’s early nineteenth-century Black community. References to him appear in church and diary records, placing him within the religious life of the city and in conversation with clergy such as Rev. Harry Croswell of Trinity Church. Jacob died in 1828, and Sarah later drafted her will in January 1843, naming her children Abigail Way Robinson and Jefferson L. Way, along with her granddaughter Adeline Way Scott. Sarah died in 1844, and through Adeline the Luke family passed into the Scott line.
Adeline Way Scott appears in the 1850 federal census living with her husband Henry E. Scott and their children Charles, Rudolph, and Amos. After her death in 1852, the Scott children continued forward into a rapidly changing America.
Among them was Rudolph Bowman Scott, born in New Haven in 1846. His life marked a dramatic geographic and social expansion of the Luke family story. As a teenager during the Civil War, he enlisted in the Union Navy and served aboard the USS Chicopee. He later volunteered in the daring raid that destroyed the Confederate ram Albemarle and was severely wounded in combat.
After the war, Rudolph moved west, eventually settling in Spokane, Washington, in 1883. There he founded a fire and life insurance company that became widely respected, particularly after paying all claims following the Great Spokane Fire of 1889. He became active in politics, veterans’ organizations, and fraternal societies. In 1902, he was appointed United States Chinese Inspector, becoming the first Black man to hold a federal position in the Pacific Northwest. He died in 1909, having moved the Luke-Scott family story from colonial New Haven to the expanding American West. The family’s reach extended even further. Rudolph’s son Henry Wagner Scott lived in Mexico, reflecting a transnational dimension to the family’s history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Henry, or Enrique, worked as a civil engineer.
Rudolph’s oldest brother, Charles Henry Scott, married Betsy Strong, one of my own relatives from the Hartford region. After Charles died, Betsy moved her family to Franklin County, Massachusetts, where there is still a large base of Scotts. Ironically, my nonprofit is also in Franklin County, and at one point, my office featured a tribute to the Scott family as early Black settlers of Greenfield. At that time, I had no idea I was connected to them.
The lineage also connects to one of the most celebrated chapters in twentieth-century American history. A descendant of the Scott line, Agatha Jo Scott, married Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the commander of the Tuskegee Airmen. During World War II, the Tuskegee Airmen broke racial barriers in the United States military, demonstrating the skill and courage of Black aviators at a time when segregation still defined American law and custom.
Chronologically traced, the Luke family story stretches across more than three centuries. It begins with Jethro and Ruth Luke’s enslavement in the Pierpont household and their manumission in 1740. It continues through Jethro’s landownership and his and Gad’s documented labor building Connecticut Hall at Yale. It moves through Rose Luke’s survival of wartime violence in 1779, through Sarah Luke and Jacob Oson in the early nineteenth century, into the westward migration and civic prominence of Rudolph Bowman Scott after the Civil War, and finally into the twentieth century with descendants who crossed national borders and helped redefine the American military. My time working on this project has passed, but these people and their stories will stay with me forever.
Special thanks to everyone at the Beinecke Library. You can view some of their research here: The Yale and Slavery Research Project.
