Burr, Lemuel , 1814 - 1900

Lemuel Burr was the son of Sally Burr (Laughing Flood) and the grandson of Seymour Burr of Canton, Massachusetts.  His obituary indicates that his father was mixed-race, Native.  He married Mary Davis and had several children: Annie E., Lemuel D., Mary, and Sarah.  The family lived in Boston, where Burr opened a hairdressing and shaving room on Court Street.  He also worked as a carpet layer.

At the same time, he gained a reputation for community activism.  From 1837 to 1861, Burr's name appears on fifteen petitions to the Massachusetts General Court. In 1837 he was among those arguing for the right to petition and protest slavery in Washington, D.C.  In 1849 he was on a committee of a meeting of Boston's West End Colored Citizens that pressed for the Smith School to be run as a separate facility for the instruction of Colored Youth.  In 1851, Burr with several other abolitionists unsuccessfully petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to raise funds for a monument to Crispus Attucks.  In that year he was also among those asking the Legislature to form a military company called the "Boston Massasoit Guards."  Two years later his name appears on a petition requesting the right to have the names of Colored citizens of Massachusetts enrolled in the national militia.  In 1855, he joins a long list of petitioners, including notable figures like William C. Nell, William Lloyd Garrison, and Louisa May Alcott, in protesting discrimination in Boston schools. By 1860 he had removed to Cambridge, where he remained active in politics and hairdressing. In his later years, because of advanced age, he retired and required assistance from the Commonwealth. Lemuel Burr died at age 91 at his home on 46 Hampshire Street, Cambridge on August 17, 1900.  

Petition of Perez Gill (1837), Digital Archives of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions. Federal Enumeration of Boston, Massachusetts (1850), Ancestry. Meeting of Colored Citizens, The Liberator, August 10, 1849, 127.  William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston, MA: Robert T. Wollcut, 1855), 107-110.  Petition of John P. Coburn (1851).  Digital Archives of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions. Petition of William C. Nell (1855). Digital Archives of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions.  Federal Enumeration of Cambridge, Massachusetts (1860-1880), Ancestry.  Massachusetts, Death Records, 1841-1915 (Cambridge), Ancestry.   Obituary of Lemuel Burr, Boston Daily Advertiser, August 18, 1900, p. 2.  Advertisement from the Boston American Traveller, January 15, 1841, 3.  Image of Burr from the Boston Herald, August 17, 1900, p. 2.