Bars Fight

Lore & Background

The poem recounts an attack on August 21, 1746, in Deerfield, Massachusetts. The text from Holland's 1855 book lists the victims: Samuel Allen, Eleazer Hawks, Oliver Amsden, Simeon Amsden, Adonijah Gillett, John Sadler (who escaped), Eunice Allen (who was tomahawked), and young Samuel Allen (taken to Canada). An alternate oral transmission offers an accurate location and body count: "Twas nigh unto Sam Dickson's mill / The Indians there five men did kill."

Reader's Guide

After its 1855 publication, the poem was undiscovered until 1942, when it was published in Lorenzo Greene's The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776. This youthful occasional poem is the only surviving work by Terry, who was said to have been a prolific poet. The likelihood is corroborated by Prince’s receipts for writing paper purchased in the 1750s, making it "impossible to believe that she didn’t write other poems." In 2024, Walker Mimms identified two newly surfaced excerpts from the 8 December 1818 issue of the Hampshire Gazette and Public Advertiser that shed significant new light on the circumstances of Prince’s composition, arguing "that Prince was published long before Holland’s book, indeed in her own lifetime." Prior scholarship has instead drawn attention to how Terry evokes her participation in the local community by recounting the names of the men and women who fought alongside her, and how the town responded by preserving the poem and her name in their oral histories.

Did You Know?

• The poem was preserved orally for over a century before its first publication in 1854.
• Lucy Terry is believed to be the first African American poet, though "Bars Fight" is her only known work.
• The attack occurred at a meadow called "The Bars," a colonial term for a meadow.

The Ballad and the 1746 Attack

Bars Fight is a ballad poem composed by Lucy Terry that recounts a violent encounter on August 21, 1746, in which Native Americans attacked two white families in a stretch of Deerfield, Massachusetts, locally known as "The Bars." The term "bars" was a colonial designation for a meadow, anchoring the poem in a specific, recognizable landscape of the New England frontier. The work captures the chaos and immediacy of the assault, and an alternate version passed down through oral tradition adds a precise geographic marker—nigh unto Sam Dickson's mill—along with a specific toll: five men killed. This detail suggests the poem functioned not merely as a literary exercise but as a community record, preserving names, places, and losses that might otherwise have faded from memory. As a ballad, it carries the rhythmic, narrative quality of oral storytelling, designed to be heard and remembered rather than simply read on a page.

Oral Life and Late Publication

For nearly a century after its composition, "Bars Fight" existed entirely in the spoken tradition. The poem was passed from mouth to mouth within the Deerfield community, surviving without any printed record. It was not until November 20, 1854, that an excerpt appeared in The Springfield Daily Republican, and the following year it was formally included in Josiah Gilbert Holland's History of Western Massachusetts, a volume Holland co-authored in his capacity as the paper's associate editor. This gap between composition and print is remarkable: a work now regarded as a landmark of American letters spent roughly 108 years as a living, evolving oral artifact. The very fact that an alternate transmission preserved a more precise location and casualty count than the printed text suggests the poem continued to be shaped by its tellers long after Terry set down her original lines. The community's act of keeping the poem alive in collective memory was, in effect, the primary mode of its preservation.

Rediscovery and the 2024 Excerpts

After Holland's 1855 volume, "Bars Fight" effectively vanished from scholarly attention for nearly nine decades. It resurfaced in 1942 through Lorenzo Greene's The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776, which reintroduced the poem to a broader academic audience. Yet the most recent development came in 2024, when Walker Mimms identified two previously overlooked excerpts in the December 8, 1818 issue of the Hampshire Gazette and Public Advertiser. Mimms argues these fragments indicate the poem was circulating in print well before Holland's book—potentially during Terry's own lifetime—reshaping the timeline of its dissemination. Separately, receipts showing that Terry purchased writing paper in the 1750s have led scholars to conclude it is "impossible to believe that she didn't write other poems," pointing to a lost body of work. The ballad, then, may represent only a small fragment of a once-vibrant poetic practice.

Significance and Community Memory

"Bars Fight" holds a singular place in the literary canon: it is widely regarded as the oldest known work of literature authored by an African American, and it remains the only extant piece by Lucy Terry. That a single ballad carries such weight speaks to how little of early Black literary production has survived. Yet the poem's significance extends well beyond its authorial identity. Scholars have noted how Terry anchors the narrative in her immediate community by naming the men and women who fought alongside her, weaving individual lives into the broader event. The town of Deerfield, in turn, preserved both the poem and Terry's name within its oral histories, ensuring that her voice remained part of the local story even as the wider literary world forgot her. This mutual act of remembering—Terry recording her neighbors, her neighbors recording her—gives the ballad a communal dimension that elevates it beyond a solitary authorial statement.