My ancestry includes some of the earliest settlers of Connecticut, including one Thomas Hungerford. He was recorded in Hartford early, 1639, moving to New London in 1650 where he died a dozen years later. Of late, I've been looking into his descendants, many of whom are clustered in the NW & SE parts of the state.
The starting point for this diary is the short life of Dr. Robert Hungerford (1862-1888), which will lead us to the nation's first all-Black incorporated town, and its most celebrated resident, Zora Neale Hurston.
I don't know much about the family of Robert's mother, Ann Gilbert Daniels, but perhaps something can be inferred by her listing in the 1850 Census at Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, MA at age 15. The school was the first coeducational boarding school in the nation, back when any sort of formal education for girls was controversial, and it admitted Chinese students starting 1847. It served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Robert's father, Edward Codringham Hungerford (1827-1910) was the firstborn son of a man who was 50 when he was born. After his father's death when he was 15, Edward taught school for a few years, then headed west to Utica, NY where he went to work for Fairbanks & Co, scale makers, as a machinist. He must have caught someone's eye because six years later, he "had charge of many men" in the construction of the St. Mary's canal between Lakes Superior and Huron. He stayed on for nearly a decade, working as a surveyor and state road commissioner on Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
In 1862, he returned to Connecticut where his son was born, after "having jurisdiction over 180,000 acres of mining and timber land" in Michigan by the age of 35. Back in his home state, he held a variety of public offices, church and civic positions, and was treasurer, then president of the Chester Savings Bank, which he had co-founded.
Edward never went to college, but his only son Robert did, earning his medical degree from Columbia University.
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