When historians seek to uncover the past, they typically turn to written municipal archives. Yet, in Jamaica Plain, the landscape itself serves as a living, breathing historical text. Deep within the Arnold Arboretum, a towering white oak tree stands as a biological witness to the life and legacy of Simeon Giles, a nineteenth-century Black landowner whose family history spans three centuries of profound struggle and survival.
Simeon Giles (1780–1858) acquired four plots of land in the area, including a parcel on May Street that now forms part of Bussey Hill within the Arnold Arboretum. However, land ownership for free Black Americans was rarely a guaranteed anchor of generational wealth; it was often a fragile asset threatened by predatory lending and white-dominated financial structures. Simeon earned a precarious living through local farming and timber harvesting to support his family. His life was also marked by unimaginable tragedy; in 1833, his wife Hannah Robbins disappeared and was later found dead near Roxbury’s Muddy Pond, and two years later, his thirteen-year-old son died of typhus.
Despite these sorrows, the family endured. Simeon’s surviving daughter, Phoebe Giles, married Thomas Bancroft, a member of the Massachusett tribe, showcasing a vital intersection of Black and Indigenous histories in early Boston. When the Arnold Arboretum officially opened in 1872, its rapidly expanding footprint eventually swallowed the plots that had once been cultivated by the Giles family. Today, a 160-year-old white oak in the Arboretum’s Central Woodland stands as a biological marker, having taken root around the exact year of Simeon’s death in 1858.
Information from the volunteer organization Hidden Jamaica Plain and the Arnold Arboretum was used in compiling this story.