June 20, 2022

DORA JONES - A JUNETEENTH STORY ABOUT A SLAVE IN MAINE

 

As we celebrate Juneteenth for just the second time as a Federal Holiday I thought it was an appropriate day to post about Dora Jones and Sorrento.  Juneteenth is the one day that we can reflect not only on the labor enslaved Black Americans contributed to this nation but the history of racial injustice that has existed ever since.  Eighty years after emancipation the horrific story of a modern-day slave named Dora Jones made headlines around the country in 1947, however, her links to Sorrento were never reported.

Several years before he died, Sturge Haskins mentioned to me that a family in Sorrento had kept a slave in their home.  Needless to say, I wanted to try to learn a bit more about the history of this shocking anecdote, but Sturge passed away before I could ask him much more. While there was a brief mention of this in Catherine Herson's Sorrento history book, she provided no details other than the couple that owned Blueberry Lodge were infamous for keeping “…a slave girl.

In his book Torna A Sorrento, Larry Lewis references that another house in town was "...the former Slave Quarters."  Although I remember hearing others referring to the cottage as the Slave Quarters many years ago, I never really understood why.  In delving into the history of the house, I have pieced together some threads of a much more complex and difficult story, some of which ties to Sorrento.   That research also allowed me to connect it with Herson's reference to Blueberry Lodge and shed some light on why the other cottage was once called Slave Quarters.


My research led me to learn much more about the story of an African-American woman named Dora Jones and the white couple named the Ingalls accused of keeping her in involuntary servitude. Before tasting freedom, Dora endured decades of physical and psychological abuse, and countless other indignities at the hands of the Ingalls, former Summer residents of Sorrento.  In Part 2 of this entry, I'll provide a bit more about this remarkable American woman, a history of the Sorrento house where Dora may have slept, and some more of my thoughts on the time she spent in Sorrento.


Others before me have provided even more unimaginable details and threads about Dora's life.  An outline of Dora's story was examined by genealogist Polly FitzGerald Kimmitt in her 2013 blog post, The Miserable Life of Miss Dora L. Jones, Latter Day Slave.  She also provides some amazing genealogical research about the Ingalls.

I would also recommend reading the excellent 4-part series written by Robert Fikes, Jr. in The San Diego Reader in 2017. Mr. Fikes' reporting provides an even more comprehensive background on the Jones/Ingalls dysfunctional relationship as well as a better account of the couple's arrest, trial, and verdict.

Finally, as you walk past the cottage on Bean Point, I hope you reflect on Dora's history and celebrate the freedom she was eventually able to achieve thanks to the US Judicial System in the 1940s. 

My research on her connection to Sorrento continues in the Dora Jones Story Part 2.

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