Skip to main content

Item of the Week: Cousin Nicoll’s Snowstorm Visit

Thu, 02/17/2022 - 10:40

From the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection

 

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.

Villages

First East Hampton, Then the World

In the summer of 2011, Alex Esposito and James Mirras addressed a specific need with Hamptons Free Ride, an electric shuttle service that ran in a fixed loop through East Hampton and from parking lots in town to Main Beach. Since then, a “hometown side project” has developed into Circuit, an all-electric, on-demand “micro-transit” solution in more than 40 cities and towns.

Jul 17, 2025

WordHampton Moves Downtown

The public relations firm WordHampton has long had its finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the East End business community. That comes with the job. And now, with a new office overlooking Park Place in East Hampton Village, it is part of that pulse in a way that was not quite as tangible from its former headquarters in Springs.

Jul 17, 2025

Sag Harbor Rejects Proposed Tree Settlement

The case of Augusta Ramsay Folks, an 81-year-old accused of cutting down two trees on Meadowlark Lane in Sag Harbor in June of last year — in violation of the village’s new tree-protection law — was back in court on July 8, when a settlement proposed by Ms. Folks was rejected by the village and then withdrawn by her attorney.

Jul 17, 2025

 

Your support for The East Hampton Star helps us deliver the news, arts, and community information you need. Whether you are an online subscriber, get the paper in the mail, delivered to your door in Manhattan, or are just passing through, every reader counts. We value you for being part of The Star family.

Your subscription to The Star does more than get you great arts, news, sports, and outdoors stories. It makes everything we do possible.