Nicholas Monroe

Research Subject
Written By John Mills

While researching Prince Mortimer, a fellow historian (Frank Winiarski) told me about an individual who was imprisoned at Wethersfield Prison and buried at the former location of the prison. His name was Nicholas Monroe.

The youngest of 7 kids, Nicholas was born in Maryland in 1843; a mulatto child, possibly the product of his Mother and her enslaver. Listed as having mental limitations, he would leave home for New York in 1864 to join the Union’s 31st Colored Infantry Regiment; a regiment that fought at the Battle of Petersburg which is the battle that forced General Robert E. Lee to surrender which essentially ended the Civil War.

Discharged on November 7th, 1865, Nicholas would move to Hartford, CT. In the 1880 census, he’s listed as married to a white woman. He would go on to be convicted of burglary on 3 separate occasions:

  1. March 7, 1879: Sentenced to 6 months at Wethersfield Prison.

  2. December 9th, 1880: Sentenced to 18 months at Wethersfield Prison.

  3. March 3rd, 1885: Sentenced to 7 years at Wethersfield Prison.

Nicholas Monroe would die while in prison on June 12th, 1885 at age 42. The warden would provide him with full military honors for his interment ceremony at the prison cemetery.

Frank Winiarski has been working for over 2 decades to get a marker placed at the former Wethersfield prison cemetery listing all individuals interred there. In collaboration, we intend to support his efforts by digging deeper in to the genealogy and life of Nicholas Monroe. I’ve already contacted his family. More to come.

John Mills

Originally from San Diego, John Mills is a technologist by trade, but an equity advocate and independent scholar by passion. The descendant of both southern and northern enslaved, John focuses on unearthing little known people and stories of this country’s history in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. John presents research through the lens and perspective of a descendant, with intent to inspire understanding and empathy, a means to inspire good, God fearing people, now armed with information, to look into whether they may be unwittingly aligning to biases resulting from the reverberating effects of a past time. John is a member of the Connecticut Freedom Trail and a member of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum Council. John is also working with an international team funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in an effort to deliver transformational impact on digital methods in cultural institutions...a means to decolonize museums. Finally, John is working with the state of Connecticut, business leaders and scholars in Middletown, CT to honor and memorialize a former enslaved individual by the name of Prince Mortimer.

https://alexbreanne.org
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