The service of a doctor requires skill, understanding, patience, and knowledge. To become one after being torn from your family and forced into servitude for a man you know nothing of makes the already arduous feat exceptional. In the late 18th century, after years of enslavement Dr. Primus Manumit became Windsor’s first Black doctor.
Both families who lived in the Society’s two historic houses were involved in a quarantine situation in the late 1700s. Dr. Chaffee ordered the Howard family to be quarantined after Capt. Howard contracted smallpox and spread it to his three sons. The care for all of them fell on the shoulders of Mrs. Ann Howard.
Bray Rossiter (1610-1672) was born to a family of wealth and power. They were Puritans, but were also loyal to the royal family. Bray was well-educated and likely received some medical training before coming to New England aboard the Mary and John in 1630, along with his father Edward, an influential Assistant of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and eleven other family members and servants.
Across the green from our Strong-Howard House, there once lived Dr. William S. Pierson (1788-1860) and his family. In 1829, Dr. Pierson purchased a day book that became a place for reflection on family and business affairs as well as a record of his medical and agricultural practices from 1829-1831.
If you've been to the grounds of the Society's Dr. Hezekiah Chaffee House, you might have seen a memorial plaque dedicated to Horace Hayden. This monument has been here since 2008, when it was [...]