William H. Holmes

Quick Facts

Significance:

Saddler, Abolitionist, 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee

Place of Birth:

Devonshire, England

Date of Birth:

June 9, 1811

Place of Death:

Randolph, Vermont

Date of Death:

February 3, 1909

Place of Burial:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cemetery Name:

Mount Auburn Cemetery

Boston saddler and abolitionist William H. Holmes served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in 1811, William H. Holmes grew up in Devonshire, England. He married his wife Betsey and began a family before relocating to Prince Edward Island in Canada in the early 1830s. They moved to Boston in 1836 where Holmes worked in the saddle and harness business. While in Boston, Holmes also became involved in the local abolitionist movement. As one obituary stated, "Always deeply interested in the anti-slavery cause, Mr. Holmes became associated with Wendell Phillips and Williams Lloyd Garrison in their work in behalf of the Negro."¹

Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, Holmes joined the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers coming to and through Boston on the Underground Railroad. Though his name and address appeared on the official list of members published by the Vigilance Committee, his specific contributions to the group remain unknown. However, several of his obituaries claimed that "Mr. Holmes's house became a 'station' for slaves who reached Boston to be sent by the 'underground railroad' to Canada."²

Following the death of his wife and his retirement, Holmes moved to Randolph, Vermont, where he lived until his death in 1909. Referring to his abolitionist past, one posthumous account stated:

Mr. Holmes lived to see his principles triumph and be recognized legally as well as morally, and it must have been one of the happiest thoughts of his life that he should have been even in a slight degree responsible for the great change in the public conscience of his adopted country.³

His remains are interred in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts alongside those of his wife.⁴

Footnotes

1. The National Archives in Washington, DC; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census; Record Group Number: 29; Series Number: M432; Residence Date: 1850; Home in 1850: Boston Ward 10, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: 337; Page: 335a; "Lived Almost A Century," Boston Evening Transcript, February 4, 1909, 5; George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 192.
2. NPS maps geolocate Holmes at the approximate site of Tremont Row in 1850, the address for Holmes as provided in the following broadside. "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society; Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 4; "Lived Almost A Century," Boston Evening Transcript, February 4, 1909, 5.
3. "Lived Almost A Century," Boston Evening Transcript, February 4, 1909, 5; "The Late William Holmes," Herald and News, February 11, 1909, 7.
4. "William Henry Holmes," Find a Grave Memorial, accessed December 2024.