By Jesse Williams on Zip06.com on June 15, 2021
MADISON — More than 200 years ago, here on the same beaches where Madison residents are currently laid out on the sand catching some sun, a shipwreck washed ashore. From that ship, a handful of people emerged, people who mostly would be spending the rest of their lives working, living, praying, and raising families in what was then known as East Guilford.
Very little is known about these shipwreck survivors. For the most part, their lineages haven’t been traced; their descendants cannot look back on old letters or follow some long record of property ownership to a plot of land in Madison, as many others in town can.
That is because these people were enslaved by the Reverend John Todd of Madison First Congregational Church, having been forcibly removed from their families and homes likely in West Africa, enduring the long Middle Passage across the Atlantic to become unwilling, unsung early settlers on the Connecticut shoreline. Continue reading.