> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.whenwewereapart.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Ordinary People, Extraordinary Acts - URL: https://www.whenwewereapart.com/field-notes/ordinary-people-extraordinary-acts/ - Published: 2026-07-13T15:29:06.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-13T15:41:27.000Z - Author: Lara Catledge Reedick - Tags: Field Notes, When We Were Apart, Charles H. L. Pierre, American Missionary Association, New Orleans, Reconstruction, Abolition, Historical Research, #photograph, #secondary-source, #research-complete ### Charles H. L. Pierre (1814 – after 1886) Historical research is full of people who refuse to remain in the margins. You begin by looking for one person, one school, one church register, one family in a census. Then another figure appears at the edge of the record — someone who was never supposed to become part of the story — and suddenly you are following him from Portland, Maine, to New Orleans, trying to understand how a man who once helped another human being escape slavery ended his life helping Black people find work during Reconstruction. That is how I met Charles H. L. Pierre. I found him because of two boys. While tracing one branch of my family’s story in the 1880 census of New Orleans, I stopped at the household of Charles H. L. Pierre, a sixty-six-year-old labor agent living with his wife, Lucretia. Also in the home were a young woman named Jennie Page and two schoolboys named Stewart. The census identified the boys as Charles’s nephews. One of them was named Dewitt. That was enough to send me looking. Charles Pierre ultimately won’t appear in *When We Were Apart*. The chronology and family relationships don’t fit cleanly enough, and I’m unwilling to bend the life of a real person simply because his story brushes against the fictional one I’m writing. But he deserves to be remembered anyway. --- Charles H. L. Pierre was born in Portland, Maine, on February 16, 1814, the son of Peter Pierre, an immigrant from Martinique, and Elizabeth Shepherd Pierre. By 1850, the Pierre family owned property in Portland — a remarkable achievement for a Black family in antebellum America — and Charles had begun acquiring property of his own. His world was centered on Portland’s Black community, and more specifically on the **Abyssinian Meeting House**. Today the building is recognized as Maine’s oldest surviving African American church. During Charles’s lifetime, it was a church, a school, a lecture hall, a mutual aid society, and a political meeting place — one of the centers of Black abolitionism in northern New England. It was where free Black Portland organized itself. Charles’s family stood near the center of that world. His sister Jannette married **Reuben Ruby**, one of Maine’s most important Black abolitionists — a businessman, hack driver, church founder, Underground Railroad conductor, and political organizer who helped establish the Abyssinian congregation and spent decades building institutions that let Portland’s Black community not merely survive but flourish. Charles doesn’t appear in the record giving speeches. Like Ruby, he worked in occupations built around movement. He was a mariner. He operated a hack stand. He knew the waterfront, the streets, the ships, and the people who arrived with nowhere to go. Sometimes history remembers generals and governors. Sometimes it depends on the people who know which ship leaves before sunrise. --- In the autumn of 1857, a British brig named *Albion Cooper*sailed into Portland Harbor after departing Savannah. Hidden aboard was an enslaved man. When he was discovered, local abolitionists faced a choice. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, helping him escape was a federal crime. They chose to help anyway. Historical accounts identify Charles H. L. Pierre among the men who organized the nighttime rescue — his name still stands today on Portland’s Freedom Trail marker. Under cover of darkness they boarded the vessel, removed the fugitive, concealed him until morning, and helped send him safely to Canada. The man’s name has been lost. Charles Pierre’s almost was. Today, a small historical marker stands near the site of his former hack stand. It is easy to walk past. History is full of people like that. --- Charles married Lucretia H. Brackett in 1852\. Lucretia belonged to Portland’s Black educational community, teaching sewing to girls at the segregated public school associated with the Abyssinian congregation. Together they built what appears to have been an ordinary life. That word — *ordinary*— deserves more respect than it usually gets. Ordinary people are the ones who make extraordinary moments possible. --- Then the records go quiet. There is a probable appearance in Saint John, New Brunswick, where a man with Charles’s distinctive initials operated the Excelsior Dining Rooms during the Civil War years. And then — New Orleans. No diary survives. No letter says goodbye to Portland. No newspaper announces his arrival in Louisiana. One decade Charles is standing on the docks of Maine. The next he is keeping furnished rooms in New Orleans, before becoming a labor agent during Reconstruction. The records tell us that he went. They never tell us why. Perhaps work. Perhaps family. Perhaps the same sense of calling that had put him on the deck of the *Albion Cooper*years before. Sometimes the most honest sentence a historian can write is: we do not know. --- By 1880, Charles and Lucretia were living in New Orleans with two schoolboys the census called his nephews. A man who had spent his youth moving people — as a mariner, as a hack driver, as an accomplice to an escape — spent his later years moving people into work, into housing, into whatever came next for a city still trying to rebuild itself. Whether he ever thought of those two chapters as the same work, the record doesn’t say. --- Charles Pierre is exactly the kind of person my research keeps uncovering. He isn’t famous enough to have a biography, yet he stood at the intersection of some of the most important currents of nineteenth-century America — the Black community of Portland, the Caribbean diaspora, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Black education, labor migration — never quite at the center of any of them, never far from where history was being made. Until now, no one seems to have tried to tell the story of his whole life. --- That has become one of the unexpected gifts of writing *When We Were Apart*. I set out to recover my own family’s history. Instead, I keep meeting other families — people who appear for only a page in a census, a city directory, a marriage record, a faded historical marker. Most will never have biographies written about them. Most will never have novels written about them. But they lived lives as rich, complicated, hopeful, and heartbreaking as our own. They fell in love. Raised children. Buried parents. Made impossible decisions. Wondered whether what they were doing mattered. And occasionally, when history demanded it, they did something extraordinary — not because they expected to be remembered, but because someone needed them. Charles Pierre helped rescue a man from slavery because there was a man on a ship who needed rescuing. Years later, he helped people find work in New Orleans because there were people who needed work. Perhaps he never thought of those two things as connected. Perhaps he simply kept doing the next good thing in front of him. I find something hopeful in that. We imagine history as the work of great leaders and famous names. But it has always depended just as much on the people who opened their homes, taught children, drove wagons, carried letters, kept records — people who quietly decided that another person’s humanity mattered more than their own comfort. The archive has preserved only fragments of Charles Pierre’s story. Perhaps that is enough — enough to remember that the past was not populated by heroes. It was populated by people, living through extraordinary times, who did what good they could when the moment came. As Rabbi Tarfon taught, nearly two thousand years ago: > It is not for thee to finish the work, nor art thou free to desist therefrom. — Rabbi Tarfon, Pirkei Avot 2:16 Charles Pierre never completed the work. Neither did Reuben Ruby. Neither will we. Perhaps that’s what the archive is asking of us, too — to remember their names, and then continue the work. Further Reading & Sources This field note draws on Lara Reedick’s original genealogical research (Research Log: Charles H. L. Pierre, 1814 – after 1886), built from Portland and New Orleans city directories, federal census records, Maine vital records, and the Freedman’s Savings & Trust Company ledgers, alongside the following public sources: - [“Abyssinian Meeting House.”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abyssinian%5FMeeting%5FHouse?ref=whenwewereapart.com) *Wikipedia.* - [“Reuben Ruby.”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuben%5FRuby?ref=whenwewereapart.com) *Wikipedia.* - [“Reuben Ruby: Hackman, Activist.”](https://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/875/display?ref=whenwewereapart.com) *Maine Memory Network*, Maine Historical Society. - [“Hack Stand of Charles H.L. Pierre” historical marker.](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=259750&ref=whenwewereapart.com) *Historical Marker Database.* - [“Exploring Black History on Portland’s Freedom Trail.”](https://www.amjamboafrica.com/exploring-black-history-on-portlands-freedom-trail/?ref=whenwewereapart.com) *Amjambo Africa.* - [“The Abyssinian Meeting House: Maine’s Untold African American Heritage.”](https://savingplaces.org/stories/the-abyssinian-meeting-house-maines-untold-african-american-heritage?ref=whenwewereapart.com) *National Trust for Historic Preservation.* - Rabbi Tarfon. *Pirkei Avot*2:16 (also numbered 2:19–20 in some editions). Translation from Taylor, Charles. [ *Sayings of the Jewish Fathers (Pirqe Aboth)*. ](https://sacred-texts.com/jud/sjf/index.htm?ref=whenwewereapart.com)Cambridge: 1877\.