Andrea Meyer, who works at the East Hampton Library, happened to be at the scanning machine in the lobby when I walked over for coffee recently. Andrea is the head of the Long Island Collection of historical material, so when she says she has something she wants to show me I pay attention. This time was no different — and then some.
The Long Island Collection may not be well known to most library users. It is tucked behind a nondescript metal door at the end of a short hallway off of which, just past a microfilm reader, one can find a bathroom.
When the Long Island Collection door is open, Monday and Tuesday and Thursday through Saturday, 1 to 4:30 p.m., a visitor can stroll in and come face to face with many of the East End’s most significant documents. Original town records and ancient maps are stored there, as are reams of correspondence, oral histories, and so on. Invaluable, too, are handwritten notes made by earlier researchers into the Island’s past. It was one of these that Andrea wanted to make sure I saw.
I have been studying East End slavery for close to a decade now, but that has not diminished the shock that accompanies many of the documents that turn up. This one, a pencil transcription of an 1805 advertisement from the Suffolk Gazette, is worth reprinting here in its entirety.
“For Sale, A NEGRO WOMAN, in every respect suitable for a Farmer. — She is 25 years old, and will be sold with or without a girl four years old. A credit will be given if required. For further information apply to Mrs. Frothingham in Sag-Harbor.”
Things get complicated regarding Mrs. Frothingham, the former Nancy Pell, who had taken over the Suffolk Gazette’s precursor, Frothingham’s Long-Island Herald, after her husband, David Frothingham, disappeared in about 1799 after being freed from prison following a libel conviction in a suit against him by Alexander Hamilton. Mr. Frothingham was rumored to have died at sea in 1814; Mrs. Frothingham had a headstone put in Oakland Cemetery never knowing for sure her husband’s fate.
In 2018, the Press Club of Long Island had a blue-and-yellow historical marker placed at 180 Main Street in Sag Harbor, where the Frothinghams had lived and published their newspaper. It makes no mention of the unnamed woman, nor the child, presumably her daughter, who had in all likelihood lived there, too.
Several days after Andrea showed me the note, I found the Gazette issue for May 13, 1805, with Mrs. Frothingham’s advertisement. I sent it to Donnamarie Barnes, herself a Sag Harbor resident and co-founder with me of the Plain Sight Project slavery study. “No matter how many of these I see it still gets me,” she responded. I feel exactly the same way.