Richard Potter

Richard Potter's own ballroom broadside, Masonic emblem and all. Photo: Travalanche (Trav S.D.)

Go back far enough in the story of American ventriloquism and the road runs out at one man, working a Boston ballroom in 1811, doing bird calls, card tricks, and voice throwing in the same single hour. His name was Richard Potter, and the old trade paper The Oracle called him, back in 1951, probably the first American ventriloquist on record.^[1] Modern biographers go further. They call him the first American-born magician to make his name in his own country, and by their reckoning, the first Black celebrity this nation ever produced.^[2] Pull up a chair, because this story goes back further than any other one in this whole archive.

A boy nobody could quite place

Potter was born around 1783, most likely in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.^[3] The story handed down inside this trade for generations says he was the son of a colonial collector of the Port of Boston named Sir Charles Henry Frankland, and Dinah, an enslaved woman in the Frankland household, born right in Frankland's own house.^[3] It is a dramatic story, and this archive's own record already flags the problem with it: Frankland died in 1768, fifteen years before Potter was even born.^[4] Modern biographers point instead to a different father, and admit they are not sure either.^[2] Potter never once cleared it up himself. A man who spent his whole career making an audience doubt what its own eyes and ears told it seems to have been just as comfortable leaving his own beginning a mystery.

Sometime around 1795, still a boy, he went to sea as a cabin boy.^[3] Overseas he fell in with a circus, worked the Continent, and became the servant and pupil of a Scottish magician and ventriloquist billed in Boston in 1801 as "the European ventriloquist."^[3] Here is a detail I love: this archive's own 1953 profile names that teacher John Rannie. Other records name him James. Even the ventriloquists writing in 1953 admitted there were two Rannie brothers working the same trade and that people confused them constantly.^[5] I am not going to pretend I can solve a two-hundred-year-old case of mistaken identity that stumped the man's own contemporaries. What holds up across every account is that Potter toured the South and the West Indies at his teacher's side, made a New York appearance in 1804, and stayed with him until the man retired to Scotland in 1810.^[3]

The Eclipse of All the Conjurors

In 1811, on his own for the first time, Potter gave his first independent performance about the great fireplace in the Daniel Oliver home in Boston, where he had been working as a servant between tours.^[3] He billed the show "An Evening's Brush to Sweep Dull Care Away," and it stuck. For years he was the chief attraction of his kind in Boston, imitating birds, beasts, and children so well that audiences could not tell his voice from the real thing.^[3] A rival named Day Francis billed himself "Emperor of all the Conjurors." Potter answered right back in print, billing himself "the Eclipse of all the Conjurors."^[3] That is not a shy man.

His 1819 appearance at Washington Hall in New York sealed a national reputation, and from there he worked from Quebec to New Orleans and the West Indies.^[3] He was especially proud of one detail: he had traveled, early on, with the very first circus to tour this country.^[3] In the last four years of his life he dropped the magic entirely and worked as a ventriloquist alone, as if he had decided which half of the bill was really his.^[3]

A hundred curious experiments

One of Potter's own broadsides survives in the Milbourne Christopher collection, and it tells you everything about how the show actually worked.^[3] "He throws his voice into many different parts of the room, and into gentlemen's hats" is the line the bill uses for the ventriloquism itself.^[3] The same bill promised upwards of one hundred tricks with cards, eggs, and money, a song sung by Mr. Potter, and a closing recitation and song in the character of Timothy Norpost. Children got in at half price, and the performance began, in the bill's own words, "at early candle-light."^[3]

A second surviving broadside, pictured above, shows a different engagement entirely, and it is a family act: Sally Potter on the bill right alongside her husband, playing named parts in an afterpiece called The Wag of Windsor while Potter closed the night doing comic scenes as a clown.^[4] She was not just the ventriloquist's wife. She worked the stage too.

Potter Place

By 1811 Potter had also joined African Lodge No. 459 in Boston, the Prince Hall lodge, and stayed active enough in it that he was later named as one of three Royal Arch Masons entrusted with delivering the lodge's 1827 "Declaration of Independence," the document that formally established Prince Hall Masonry as its own governing body.^[6] Look at the hero broadside again. That emblem between "Mr." and "Potter" is a square and compass. He put his own lodge on his advertising.

He married Sally Harris of Roxbury in 1808. He always said she was Penobscot.^[4] By 1814 the shows had made him wealthy enough to buy 175 acres in Andover, New Hampshire, where he built a house grand enough that the village that grew up around it took his name and kept it, Potter Place, a stop on the map because a rail line needed one there.^[4][3]

The family paid a price for that success too. One son was killed in 1816, run over by a wagon hauling a load of corn.^[2] A daughter died young.^[2] Only one child outlived them both, a son also named Richard, who took over his father's estate and, for a time, his father's act, billed as "Little Potter."^[4][2]

A respectable colored man

Let's not soften this, because Potter never did. He performed constantly in front of white audiences while being, and being known as, a Black man in an America still built on slavery.^[2] In New Haven, a hotel refused to seat him in its dining room. Potter's answer was to throw his voice into the kitchen's roasting pig and make it squeal on command, in front of the same room that had just turned him away.^[7] That is not a story about enduring an insult. That is a story about a man using the one skill nobody else in the room could match to answer it anyway.

His biographer John Hodgson put the plainest version of it this way: people just weren't going to make an issue about his race.^[7] That is a careful sentence, and it should stay careful. It does not mean the country had solved anything. It means Potter was good enough, famous enough, and in command of the room enough that a lot of people who might otherwise have made an issue of it chose not to.

Here is the plainest evidence this archive holds. When Potter died in 1835, a Providence, Rhode Island newspaper ran his death notice in its ordinary deaths column, no separate heading, no editorial comment, right between an ex-governor of Tennessee and a man who had died in New Orleans: "well known as a Ventriloquist and Necromancer. He was a respectable colored man, and the funeral was attended by a large concourse of people. He is favorably remembered in this city."^[8] Read that word order again. Ventriloquist first. In 1835, in print, in a New England daily, his trade came before his race. That is the standing the man built for himself, one show at a time.

The circle

The grave six feet from the tracks

Potter died September 20, 1835, at Potter Place.^[3][9] His gravestone gives his age as 52, though the family always said he was considerably older than that.^[3] Three New England papers covered the death within two weeks of each other, and they do not agree on the town: two say Potter Place, New Hampshire; a Providence paper says Andover, Massachusetts, almost certainly because a compositor two states away swapped the New Hampshire village named for Potter for the famous Massachusetts town of the same name.^[10][8] Even his own death could not get printed the same way twice, which feels about right for a man who spent his career making people question what they thought they knew. Sally died the following year and is buried beside him.^[3]

Potter picked that burial ground specifically so it would never be disturbed. Fifty-three years later, a Concord newspaper reported the irony New Hampshire had noticed by then: the Northern Railroad ran its track within six feet of his grave.^[11]

In 1953, the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists entered Potter's name into its official necrology alongside Charles Mathews and Monsieur Alexandre, two towering names in the trade's early history, an act of memory nobody made him wait a century for.^[9] That same year, The Oracle ran the profile you have been reading throughout this page, and then closed it with the harder truth quoted above: his own name was hardly known, even inside his own trade.^[3] One performer keeps the actual act alive. Bob Olson performs a Richard Potter tribute show in the exact style of the original, and has done so for decades at Old Sturbridge Village Museum.^[5][2]

Two hundred years on, most of what survives of Richard Potter is paper: a couple of broadsides, three newspaper notices of his death that cannot even agree on the town, a gravestone, and one 1953 magazine profile that tried to bring him back before it was too late. It nearly was too late anyway. But paper this specific does not lie about the size of a life. A man who worked from Quebec to New Orleans and the West Indies, who put his own Masonic lodge on his advertising, who made a room that had just refused to serve him dinner sit and listen to a pig talk on command, who built a house and gave a New Hampshire village its name in the process. That is not a footnote to magic history. That is the whole show.

Two Rannie brothers, one confused trade paper, and here I am two centuries later still not sure which Scotsman gets the blame for teaching Potter the trick. Meanwhile the man himself never bothered clearing up his own birth story, which tells you exactly how much patience he had for people needing him explained.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy