Three-quarter length vignetted albumen CDV studio portrait of William Piper. New Bedford, Massachusetts: George F. Parlow, [1867]. Photographer’s imprint & copyright printed to mount verso. Period pencil identification dated 1867 to mount verso. 

William Piper (1786 - 1870) was a prominent leader within New Bedford’s African American community whose household became a recognized center of religious life, civic activity, and antislavery work. Born in slavery, probably in the Alexandria / Washington, D.C. area, Piper’s early status is difficult to document. No manumission or freedom certificate has been located, and historians have suggested that he may have arrived in Massachusetts as a fugitive. By the late 1820s, he was established in New Bedford, employed by the Quaker whaling merchant William Rotch Rodman. In the 1830s, Rodman sold him land on Bedford Street, where the Piper family home stood for decades, later remembered as a stop on the city’s abolitionist walking tours.

Together with his wife, Amelia J. Piper, William helped to anchor both the religious and reform life of the city. The couple were founding members of Second Baptist (Colored), where William would eventually serve as deacon and his son, Robert, as clerk. Amelia and their daughter, Sarah Ann Roshier, took leadership roles in the New Bedford Female Union Society, a women’s organization that sponsored antislavery fairs to raise funds for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Notices in The Liberator directed supporters to deliver contributions to Piper’s home, a sign of the family’s integration into regional abolitionist networks. Through these efforts, the Pipers contributed not only to the circulation of antislavery literature and lectures, but also to the building of independent Black institutions in the city.

The Piper household furthermore extended direct aid to freedom seekers arriving in New Bedford. John S. Jacobs, brother of Harriet Jacobs, recorded assistance from a “William P—” after his escape in 1850, a figure generally identified as William Piper. His home offered shelter and resources to men and women in flight from slavery, linking New Bedford to the wider operations of the Underground Railroad.

Remembered as a deacon, property holder, and abolitionist, William Piper exemplified the ways in which free Black families sustained antislavery activism and reshaped the civic culture of nineteenth-century New England.

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