Tina Lewis Hill
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This person of African descent has 2 related events in the database, listed at the bottom of this page.
- Identifier
- NJS-PER-05575
- Given Name
- Tina
- Family Name
- Hill
- Alternate Name
- Lewis
- Tenah
- Sex
- Female
- Biographical Description
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Tina Lewis was a free Black woman who lived in Burlington, Burlington County, New Jersey, at the turn of the 19th century. In the early 1790s, she received schooling, learning to read and write, through the educational efforts of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Burlington.
She married Peter Hill, a formerly enslaved man, in 1795, shortly after Peter was manumitted. Tina's husband established a clockmaking business and is known as the first African American clockmaker in the country. Around 1797 or 1798, a report of Black people in Burlington, compiled by the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, noted that Peter Hill's household included a daughter. The family eventually moved to Mount Holly in the late 1810s.
How long Tina lived is unknown. Peter Hill died in 1820, and Tina was not mentioned in any of the documents pertaining to his estate or any other records after 1820, leading Peter Hill's biographer Silvio Bedini to suggest that Tina may have died shortly before (or at the same time as) Peter Hill. - Keywords
- African descent person
- Spouse of
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Peter Hill (1767-1820)
- References
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“Hill, Peter (1767-1820),” in Dictionary of American Negro Biography, by Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston (Norton, 1982), http://archive.org/details/dictionaryofamer00loga, pages 310-311.
Silvio A. Bedini, “Peter Hill, the First African American Clockmaker,” in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity, ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 252–73.
- Record Contributor
- Jesse Bayker
- Linked Events
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Primary Participant in:
- 1795-09-09 Marriage: Peter Hill, Tina Lewis Hill (Role: Spouse)
- 1797 Registration: free Black people in Burlington (Role: Registered Person)