The Dorsey-Jones House, located at 191 Nonotuck Street in the village of Florence in Northampton, was built in 1849 by Basil Dorsey. He was a fugitive slave who had escaped from Maryland in 1836 to New York with the help of Robert Purvis, a prominent black abolitionist. Florence was home at that time to a utopian community called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. The NAEI opposed slavery and aided fugitive slaves. Selah B. Trask briefly lived in the house when Dorsey and his family moved to another home in Florence in 1852. Mary Jones, the wife of Thomas H. Jones, who was also a fugitive slave, purchased the house in 1854. Jones had escaped from slavery in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1849, having already arranged for the escape of his free wife and her enslaved children. Jones then published a narrative of his life entitled The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years. Jones and his family lived in Florence until they moved to Worcester in 1859.