Joshua B. Holman

Quick Facts

Significance:

Merchant, clergyman, 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee member

Place of Birth:

Hopkinton, New Hampshire

Date of Birth:

October 13, 1813

Place of Death:

Concord, New Hampshire

Date of Death:

March 10, 1897

A merchant and clergyman, Joshua Bailey Holman also served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in 1813, Joshua B. Holman spent his youth in New Hampshire. By the mid-1830s, he moved to Boston where he worked as a merchant. In 1847, he took over the brand Nature's Grand Restorative, a vegetable-based medicine that had been established and sold by his father and uncle. He sold this and other medicines throughout Boston and the surrounding area. A devout Christian and associated with the North Russell Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Holman became an ordained minister and local preacher in and around the city. In 1848, he married Sarah Dudley and soon began a family with her.¹

Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Holman joined the Boston Vigilance Committee. This organization assisted freedom seekers coming to and through Boston on the Underground Railroad. Other than his name and address appearing on the official broadside listing members of the group, Holman’s contributions to the committee or larger Underground Railroad network remain unknown.²

In 1856, Holman returned to New Hampshire where he continued to minister both there and in Massachusetts until his death in 1897.³

If you are a researcher or descendant of Joshua B. Holman and can provide any further details of his work on the Vigilance Committee, or larger abolition movement, please e-mail us.

Footnotes

1. "J.B. Holman, Prop., Holman’s Natures Grand Restorative, Boston Mass," Virtual Museum of Historical Bottles and Glass, accessed December 2024; Dexter S. King, History of the North Russell Street M. E. Church and Sabbath School, (Boston: J.P.McGee, 1861), 81; "Marriages," Boston Evening Transcript, February 10, 1848, 2; George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 196; "Married," New England Farmer, February 19, 1848, 3.
2. The following broadside identifies Holman's work address as 54 Cornhill Street. Cornhill Street no longer exists, but NPS maps geolocate Holman at the approximate location of his work. "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society; Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 4.
3. "J.B. Holman, Prop., Holman’s Natures Grand Restorative, Boston Mass," Virtual Museum of Historical Bottles and Glass, accessed December 2024; Ancestry.com. New Hampshire, U.S., Death and Burial Records Index, 1654-1949 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011. Original data: "New Hampshire Death Records, 1654–1947." Index. FamilySearch, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2010. New Hampshire Bureau of Vital Records. "Death Records, 1654–1947." Bureau of Vital Records, Concord, New Hampshire.