JENNY

Plaque location: 482 Hamburg Rd, Lyme Public Library

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Jenny was manumitted in 1799 at “about 54 years of age” by Dr. Eleazer Mather’s son Dr. Samuel Mather (1742-1834). The emancipation certificate discharged Jenny “from all Claims to her service as a Slave” for reasons that included her “good and faithfull Services.” She was thenceforth “free and at full Liberty to Transact her own prudential affairs.”

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The circumstances of Jenny’s early life and the length of her enslavement on today’s Bill Hill Road are not known, but she was not the only person held in bondage in the neighboring households of the two Lyme physicians, who also engaged in mercantile trade. In 1767 when Jenny was about 22, Dr. Samuel Mather purchased Robin from Dr. Gibbons Jewett (1738-1789) in East Haddam, and a decade later in 1777 Dr. Eleazer Mather freed his “Negro manservant Pompey.” By the time Salley, a “black girl of Dr. Samuel Mather’s . . . presented herself for baptism” in the North Lyme Baptist Church in 1813, Jenny had been free for more than a decade.

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 In 1799 Jenny moved to Colchester to live with Dr. Samuel Mather’s daughter Louisa Mather Watrous (1776-1823), whom Jenny likely helped raise. A year earlier in 1798 Louisa had married, as her second husband and his second wife, her cousin Dr. John Watrous (1754-1842). Jenny’s death date has not been found, but she later lived in Colchester with Dr. Watrous’s son-in-law, Dr. Frederick Morgan (1791-1877).​