CUFF CONDOL

Plaque location: 482 Hamburg Rd, Lyme Public Library

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Cuff Condol, Jr. (1757-1814), born in Charlestown, RI, was enslaved in Lyme by Stephen Smith (1725-1800) until 1787 when he was purchased by Daniel Wright, Sarah Cyrus, and Joseph Punham, persons of color who may have been his relatives and emancipated him three years later. The emancipation document in 1790 identifies Cuff as “a negro man of Capt. Stephen Smith,” to whom the buyers “gave our obligation for the payment of him the said Cuff out at Different Times until October AD 1790.” If Cuff “pays up said Obligations and Discharges them,” he would “Receive his full Freedom.”

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Cuff Condol married in about 1789 Catherine Waukeet (1770-1819), a Native woman born either in Charlestown, RI, or in Lyme, and he appears in the 1790 census with four in his household. He purchased two small plots of land in 1794, followed by a tract with 10 ½ acres and a dwelling house in 1796. In the 1800 census he is listed with a family of nine, and by 1809 he was selling timber to merchant and shipbuilder Ebenezer Hayden (1752-1838) across the Connecticut River in Essex. He may also have worked as a shoemaker, since “part of a set of Shoemakers tooles” was listed in his estate inventory. 

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Condol posted a newspaper notice in 1810 stating that his wife Catherine “has left my bed and board without any provocation” and he would therefore “not pay any debt of her entracting.” By then he and Catherine had eleven children. After his death in 1814, his property was appraised at $1,516.98, and before his debts were settled and some land sold at auction, he owned 94 acres with the buildings standing thereon. His estate inventory lists five items of clothing: a short brown coat, a pair of pantaloons, an under vest, two pairs of stockings, and a shirt. He also owned two old Bibles, a pair of spectacles, a spelling book, five spinning wheels, kitchen and farm implements, and modest household furnishings. His livestock included ten pigs, eight sheep and eight lambs, two cows, a heifer, four bulls, and a 6-year-old mare.

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Two unmarked field stones in the Colt Cemetery on today’s Beaver Brook Road mark the likely burying places of Cuff and Catherine Condol. The field stones flank the inscribed gravestone of their son Daniel Condol (1791-1875), whose homestead on today’s Gungy Road later passed to farmer and memoirist Joseph A. Caples (1873-1954). The property today includes stone walls that Caples states were built by Cuff Condol.

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