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Note: l Foster on Saturday November 21, 1998
"By choice or by chance, six women of ninetenth-century East Hampron lived single lives either because they never married or because they became widowed or separated in mid-life. How did they fare in the changing social and economic times of nineteenth-century Suffolk County? They were well-educated, most of them attended Clinton Academy. They kept diaries, ran a farm or business, educated their children. They were daughters of well-to-do families whose uncles and brothers 'went west' in search of better land, perhaps more land. . ."
"I will be discussing these six women: Phebe van Scoy, Polly Hicks, Cornelia Huntington, Abbie Parsons, Deliia Sherrill, and Eliza Glover. The first three were single women. Phebe van Scoy lived in Northwest and ran a farm 'by herself', so tradition says. Polly Hicks of Amagansett also ran a farm by herself, and Cornelia Huntington, the doctor's daughter, was a poet and author, neither financially rewarding. The next two were in their mid-thirties when they became widows and did not remarry. Delia Sherrill of East Hampton and Abbie Parsons of The Springs. Eliza Glover, at age 55, was legally separated in New York City in 1890 from her husband after eleven children.
"These six women lived long lives: Polly Hicks lived to age 91; Cornelia, 87; Phebe [Van] Scoy, 81; Delia, 77; and Eliza, 75. Only Abbie died at age 54, her life cut short by cancer. Each of these women had a well-developed sense of her own worth.
"Legends in their own time, Phebe van Scoy and Polly Hicks were noted as farm managers--'running a farm by themselves' as contemporaries said."
"Phebe van Scoy (1787-1868) is the only one of the six who lived her entire life in the same house. She assumed complete control of her father's farm in 1846 when she was 59. . .
"Northwest is the area located northwest of the center with the wood lots. Its first buildings were the warehouses of the East Hampton merchants. By mid-eighteenth century, the Town Trustees, probably pressured by descendants of the first settlers, decided on a special division or sale of the acreage. Phebe Scoy's grandfather [Isaac Van Scoy, Sr], an early purchaser, was the first to move there shortly after his marriage in 1757.
"Although Phebe van Scoy (1786-1868) is known to posterity as a woman who 'ran a farm by herself', she was not living in isolation. The nine families who 'farmed' in Northwest became a close-knit group, the original settlers' children married and even some of their grandchildren married each other
"In 1792, a schoolhouse was built in Northwest on the van Scoy property. In that year there were thirty scholars, children of the other families were Bennett, Edwards, Miller, Parsons, Payne, Ranger, Terry.
"After the Civil War, the families moved away, the land reverted to woodland, the houses disappeared through fires or dismemberment. Today, much of the land is publicly owned parkland.
"Phebe's family included her parents, Isaac and Temperance, her older sister, Mercy, then Phebe, then the two brothers and baby sister, Betsey, all born within ten years. . ."
Note: Phoebe Van Scoy did not marry. A biography of Phoebe appears in a lecture given by Sherril
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