Remembering Sarah

Tableau of the Dr. Hezekiah Chaffee House kitchen, showing where the women enslaved there might have worked and eaten. | Photo by Kristen Wands.

They worked in the kitchen from dawn to dusk cooking three meals a day. They washed and ironed clothes, sheets, and towels. They mended socks and spun yarn. They emptied chamber pots every morning after sleeping in basements and attics. And they were supposed to be invisible whenever guests came calling. Who are ‘they’?

They are the enslaved women of Windsor’s Chaffee family.

For years we have known that Dr. Hezekiah Chaffee, Jr. (1762-1821) and his wife Charlotte (1764-1812) enslaved Nancy Toney (1775-1857). We also knew that Dr. Hezekiah Chaffee (1731-1819) enslaved Elizabeth Stevenson (b. 1791), Elizabeth’s mother, and a man named Jack Japhet Pell. While searching for Windsor records in a LexisNexis database in 2011, we discovered that Dr. Chaffee enslaved another person – Sarah. Buried in a long-forgotten court record, that crumb led us to dig further for Sarah. We still know only pieces of her story.

Sarah was born around 1766. We don’t know anything else about her life until she was 19, when she had a daughter, Fanny. At the time, Sarah was enslaved by Jonathan Butler (1760-1830) and living in Hartford. Butler separated mother from daughter when Fanny was just three years old, when he gave the toddler to his son Frederick, who lived in Wethersfield. Ten years later, in 1795, Jonathan Butler sold Sarah to Dr. Chaffee, moving her to Windsor and farther away from her child.

Sarah worked in the Chaffee household alongside Elizabeth Stevenson (aged 4 at the time) and possibly with Elizabeth’s mother, who was enslaved by the Chaffees when Elizabeth was born in 1791. Nancy Toney lived next door, and together the enslaved women and young Elizabeth might have shared the burdens of laundry and household chores.

Sarah lived in the Chaffee household for only six years – on September 15, 1800, Hezekiah Chaffee manumitted her. We have still not found this original emancipation record, but a transcript exists in a book by Windsor historian Jabez H. Hayden, Historical Sketches. That record stated that Sarah was “a healthy person, and now in her 34th year of her age, and to all appearance capable of taking care of herself, also that she is desirous to be set free.”

It’s possible that Dr. Chaffee was motivated to free Sarah because she had suffered the death of an infant only a month earlier. The records of First Church of Windsor include a notation on August 17th, 1800, documenting the death of a “child of Sary, Dr. Chaffee’s negro – sudden death – age 4 months.”  Whatever the reason for her manumission, afterwards she could have continued to work as a domestic servant to earn a living.

First Church of Windsor death record for Sarah’s 4-month-old child in 1800.

Meanwhile, Sarah’s daughter Fanny remained in bondage until 1810, when she turned 25 and therefore Connecticut’s Gradual Emancipation law forced the Butlers to release her from servitude. Fanny soon left Wethersfield for Windsor, presumably where Sarah had stayed after being freed. It’s possible that over two decades had passed since they had last seen each other.

Within six months of moving to Windsor, Fanny became “chargeable” to the town, meaning she could not financially support herself, nor could she support her two children, both of whom were born after she moved here. The court document that started this research project referred to Fanny’s children as “illegitimate,” but it also gave her a surname, Libbet. We do not know where this surname came from, whether it was the name of her father or a husband or other family member. Sarah never took on a surname, even after her manumission. Indeed, we know little of Sarah or Fanny until the Town of Windsor sued the Town of Hartford in 1817 for the cost of supporting Fanny and her kids. Because Fanny was born in Hartford, the Supreme Court of Errors found in favor of Windsor and required Hartford to pay Windsor for taking care of Fanny and her children.

Account document showing the town’s various expenses for taking care of the poor in Windsor. “Fanny Libit and children” were among those receiving welfare from the town in 1817, receiving nearly half of the total amount for the year. | Courtesy of the Windsor Town Clerk’s office.

It appears that as a free woman, Sarah remained in the town where she was formerly enslaved. She must have felt comfortable enough in Windsor to bring her family here. And we are relatively confident that she stayed for the rest of her life because we found one more Windsor record that is likely related to her. A different First Church record book lists a death record on May 28th, 1817 for “Sarah, a black woman, age 52.” That matches Sarah’s age in her emancipation record, and the lack of a surname for a person of color usually implies that the person is or was once enslaved.

We haven’t found any clues for Sarah’s activities more specifically in the years between her gaining freedom and her death. It is difficult to pinpoint where she or Fanny lived in Windsor. The 1810 federal census merely listed fifty “other free persons” – meaning the town’s people of color. Unfortunately, the 1810 census did not describe the age or sex of any non-white free people. Did Sarah or Fanny live in one of the seven Black Windsor households enumerated in that census? Or did they live and work as domestic servants in white households? Did Sarah ever marry? Did she attend church or become friendly with neighbors? Because the Chaffees attended First Church, it makes sense that the church recorded the death of Sarah’s child, as she was still enslaved by the Chaffees at the time. The fact that Sarah’s own death 17 years later was also recorded suggests that she was still affiliated with the church even then.

Unless new documents or records come to light, we may never know what Sarah did after she left the Chaffee household. But she will not be forgotten again. Since re-discovering Sarah, we have included her in the interpretation of the Dr. Hezekiah Chaffee house, and we continue to strive to learn more about Windsor’s enslaved population who have been silenced by history.

By Christina Vida, curator, 2011. Updated by Michelle Tom, librarian/archivist, 2025.