III. SOME KEY CONCORD ABOLITIONISTS
III.H. Josiah Bartlett:
Dr. Josiah Bartlett—physician for almost fifty-eight years to the families of Concord, the town's leading temperance reformer, and an abolitionist as well—lived with his wife Martha Tilden Bradford Bartlett (sister of the learned Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley) and their large family of children on Lowell Road (the present 35 Lowell) from the 1830s.
Grindall Reynolds wrote of Dr. Bartlett's antislavery for the second series of Social Circle memoirs: "As a matter of course, when the anti-slavery agitation arose, the doctor was on the side of freedom, and his trumpet gave no uncertain sound. According to his means he contributed as much to the furtherance of the cause as any man in town. He at once became a stockholder in the Underground Railroad, paying but little regard to his constitutional duty to return those bound to service t is true that on many occasions he bore fugitives in his old chaise one stage on their journey, once, at any rate, riding at headlong speed as far as Fitchburg."
Josiah Bartlett—like Mary Merrick Brooks, a trusted friend of William Lloyd Garrison—served as treasurer of the Middlesex County Antislavery Society. The 1869 letter from Garrison displayed on this page demonstrates the endurance of his relationship with Bartlett beyond the Civil War.
50. Alfred Munroe. Cabinet card portrait photograph of Dr. Josiah Bartlett. CFPL Photofile.
51. William Lloyd Garrison. Letter to Josiah Bartlett, June 1, 1869. From Bartlett Family Papers, CFPL Vault Collection.
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