Paul Revere and a slave named Mark haunt the Holiday Inn in Somerville

Monday and Tuesday of this week I attended a conference that took place at the Holiday Inn in Somerville.  I knew I had to come up with a blog post for this week's class, but still didn't have an idea of what it would be.  As I was walking out to my car after the first day of the conference I saw what looked like a grave stone.  It was a stone commemorating an event that took place during Paul Revere's famous ride.  It is inscribed:
 "Paul Revere on his famous ride April 18, 1776 was intercepted near here by British Officers and escaped". 

I decided to snap a photo of it and then to see what I could find out about the event.

First I googled "Paul Revere and The Holiday Inn in Somerville".  I found lots of references, blogs and newspaper articles about the site.  The site was easy to locate because of a letter that Paul Revere wrote to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1798 describing the events of his ride.  This is what he wrote about this site:

"I set off upon a very good Horse; it was then about 11 o'Clock, & very pleasant. After I
had passed Charlestown Neck, & got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on Horse back, under a Tree. When I got near them, I discovered they were British officer. One tryed to git a head of Me, & the other to take me. I turned my Horse very quick, & Galloped towards Charlestown neck, and then pushed for the Medford Road. The one who chased me, endeavoring to Cut me off, got into a Clay pond, near where the new Tavern is now built. I got clear of him, and went thro Medford, over the Bridge, & up to Menotomy".  See the letter here.

It gets more interesting because he refers to the place as the place "where Mark was hung in chains".  What did that mean, I wondered.  I decided to search on "where Mark was hung in chains". There I discovered that Mark was a slave who, along with two other slaves, killed his master John Codman by poisoning him with arsenic. His punishment was to be hanged, then they tarred his body, which preserved it, and then gibbeted it near the spot by the Holiday Inn.  The body had been hanging there for over 20 years when Paul Revere encountered the two British Officers.  Why?  It was used as a warning to let other slaves know what could happen to them if they rebelled. Here are some links to blogs and websites that tell more about Mark and the other two slaves.  

 

//paulreveresriderevisited.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/the-gruesome-landmark/

http://www.thefreedomtrail.org/educational-resources/article-codman.shtml

https://archive.org/details/trialexecutionfo00good

It's important to note the punishment of Mark and the other two slaves took place in Boston, not Virginia or South Carolina.  Slavery was  a scourge no matter where it took place and this story really illustrates that.  The cruelty and macabre ways of punishment that were practiced during those times is hard for us to believe in this day and age.  It was not enough to hang Mark, they also "gibbeted" him. When they gibbeted people it meant that they would hang the body in a cage.  Sometimes they put people in the cage alive, and let them die slowly.  Here is a picture of what a gibbeted body/skeleton looked like:

I set out to learn the story of Paul Revere in Somerville on the night of April 18, 1776.  By delving into that story, I found a more interesting story about what happened to Mark the slave in 1755. If Paul Revere had not mentioned Mark in his letter, would the horrific execution of the three slaves of John Codman be lost in history?  Would I have still been haunted at the Holiday Inn if it was only Paul Revere that I found in the parking lot?