About Granby's Juneteenth Celebration

 

Granby’s Juneteenth celebration is a wonderful opportunity for the Salmon Brook Historical Society to share stories and statistics relating to Granby’s Black History.

​

Juneteenth (Freedom Day) marks the end of slavery in 1865 in Texas, the last hold-out state. As of 2022, Juneteenth (June 19) has been designated a federal holiday.

​

Starting at least as far back as 1987, Carol Laun, Granby’s long-time archivist, began to collect information about Granby’s Black residents. Most of the information gathered for these six “signs” came from Laun’s files at the historical society.

​

For this project SBHS will have 6 temporary signs placed at the site of the celebration. Each sign will have a QR code that will direct people to the SBHS website for expanded information about our town’s past. After Juneteenth, the information can be easily accessed on the website.

​

Black families have been part of Granby’s life since before the American Revolution. Black men from Granby served in the French and Indian War. More served in the Revolutionary War and more than 11 with ties to Granby served in the Civil War. There is information about the Black Wallis family from 1753 and the Elkey family that lived in the Granby area from the first mention in 1794. There is the tale of the Black Percy family and their tangled relationship with their owners the Pettibones. And a bit later, there was Emily Clemons Pierson, a white abolitionist writer who grew up on what is now Lost Acres Orchard. She wrote a novel about a runaway slave that was published about 4 months before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s blockbuster novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.