Location: 110 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, Connecticut
The “Negro youth called Warrick” who appears in John Noyes’s estate inventory in 1733 was a boy of 10 when he became the property of “ye widow Mary Noyes.” The inventory valued Warrick, together with a “negro Girl calld Grace,” at 200 pounds.
Mary Noyes’s second husband William Ely, in his will written in 1758, left her his “two Slaves (viz) Warrick and Teazor [Caser] to be at her own Disposall forever.” A gravestone in Lyme’s Ely family cemetery commemorating William Ely states incorrectly that: “He was among the first who gave Freedom to his slaves, thereby doing as he would be done by.” Warrick was not freed by William Ely but by a stipulation in Mary Noyes Ely’s will in 1769. By then her “Negro man Named Warrick” was 46.
Mary Noyes Ely specified that: “my Negro man Named Warrick Should be free after my Decease and I hereby Manumitt / Sett my Said Man Warrick after my Decease free to be his own man to all interests & purposes whatsoever.” Her will left to Warwick “one Cow & Calf to be his own Estate forever,” which he had “heretofore claimed,” and also “one Sow and two small Shoats to be his own Estate for ever.”
Warrick is thought to have resided, after Mary Ely’s death, in the household of her son Elisha Ely. Lyme church records state that “Warick Negro,” age 70, was buried on February 3, 1793.
