Two hundred and two years ago, on Feb. 7, 1820, Sarah Frances Dering (1792-1833) of Shelter Island wrote her paternal first cousin Elizabeth (Eliza) Packer Gardiner (1788-1863) in New York City. Sarah was a daughter of Esther Sarah Havens Dering (1763-1839) and Sylvester Dering (1758-1820). Eliza grew up in East Hampton, the child of Dr. Nathaniel Gardiner (1759-1804) and Elizabeth Dering Gardiner (1762-1801).
In her letter, Sarah relayed the dramatic departure of “Cousin Nicoll” and his four oldest sisters, who had come for tea and got caught in a snowstorm. It’s difficult to be sure which cousin this would have been, since several family members were named Nicoll. However, the snowstorm came up quite suddenly, with “violent” winds, and the cousins felt they should try to go home.
Sarah described how she and her father insisted that the cousins stay the night, but after dinner Nicoll and his sisters became quite anxious to return home despite the “impossible mountains of snow.” So Sarah’s father helped bundle them into two sleighs, with another Shelter Islander, the Rev. William Evans, and a rider accompanying them.
After several hours, the cousins made it only a short distance to a nearby house, and they had to return to Sarah’s. After breakfast, the cousins made a second attempt to go home, taking extra shovels and a rider or two to shovel a path from the Dering house. One sleigh was again driven by Reverend Evans, and it seems that the other was driven by an indentured or enslaved person named Benjamin. It’s unclear whether Achilles, another name Sarah mentions as part of the group making the second attempt to escort the visitors home, was also enslaved or indentured.
The second attempt at travel was more successful, and within 48 hours all the snow was completely gone. Sarah concluded her letter with two more pages of mundane family news.
Andrea Meyer is the head of the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
