Ever since I moved to Buckland eight years ago, I have been trying to track down the historic and abandoned cemeteries that can tell us so much about life and death in the previous centuries of European occupation in these hills. One that has eluded me is the northwest cemetery that lies below the outlook in Apple Valley.

A couple of my previous attempts ended in confusion and sore knees. But based on information provided by a local farmer, there is an abandoned road to this land of the dead.

I was a beautiful golden October afternoon when I started out for another try. I crossed a bridge and then made a sharp right turn up to the bracken-cloaked road that led into the woods. Up, up, up I climbed unto I came to a clearing. Could I be in a graveyard now with the headstones hidden by the bracken?

I turned to my left and there it was, an old stone wall that encircled the resting place of ancestors. There were a couple of prominent memorials with other gravestones scattered across the enclosed space.

I walked over to the largest memorial that listed all the names of all the people buried in this forgotten plot, mostly Taylors and Vincents and Howes.

But toward the bottom, enscribed there was the story of one Peter Wells.

Died July, 1829. Aged 95 Years. Colored man brought from Africa and held a slave until the Royal Government ended.

Peter, or whatever his real name was, came to Massachusetts as a slave. He remained a slave until the end of the Revolutionary period, sometime after 1783.

We do not know exactly when he arrived on these shores. Assuming he was a captured as a young boy (age 12?) and survived the horrors of the Middle Passage to a slave port like Newport, Rhode Island, Peter spent 50 years in bondage to one of the families buried with him.

In the 1780s, two extraordinary legal cases that freed previously enslaved persons in Massachusetts provided the basis for the abolition of slavery in this state. In 1807, the United States and Great Britain abolished the Atlantic slave trade. Peter then spent the last 40-odd years of his life as a free man.

I do not know what Peter did with his freedom. He remained in the locale where he was enslaved, he worked for or farmed alongside his former enslavers. He died decades before the Emancipation Proclamation. Whether he retained any part of his life across the sea in Africa, we can only speculate.

But he lived here as both a slave and a free man. Slavery was common in the northern colonies, although it never reached the industrial scale as was the case on the plantations in the South. But if we decide to acknowledge our own part in the history of slavery in this country, we cannot turn away from the evidence that the crime of slavery touched all parts of this land.

David Parrella lives in Buckland.