Here, Alan Rice offers examples of a black presence in Lancaster, the fourth largest slave port in England. These findings, often in the form of archival fragments, expose a hidden history and puncture the narrative of the city’s success based on myths of mercantile glory. Examples include a rediscovered pamphlet by ex-slave James Johnson recounting his wanderings throughout the region in search of employment during the Cotton Famine; the memorialization of Sambo, a young slave who died during a brief visit; the day-book of merchant Henry Tindall noting the arrival of a slave chaperoning two young white boys; unearthed baptismal records and runaway slave ads; and a macabre family heirloom—the mummified hand of a favored slave—eventually buried by a descendant of the slave-owning merchant family. Finally, Rice offers the finances of three prosperous Lancashire merchants (Thomas Hodgson, James Sawrey and Thomas Hinde)—all prominent in the slave trade—to show how the money they invested in the region’s economy which helped drive the industrial revolution, were funded by profits of the slave trade. Rice suggests that these evidentiary snippets of a black presence in Lancaster can be a pathway to uncovering even more and serve to illuminate the connection between the city’s development and the forced labor of enslaved people.