Fairweather family

The Fayerweather name is well known in South County history. Several generations of the Fayerweather family, descendants of slaves, served the village of Kingston and the surrounding countryside as blacksmiths throughout the nineteenth century. Ironically, however, the Fayerweather name is most often remembered for a person who acquired it through marriage rather than by birth.

Sarah Ann Harris Fayerweather, wife of George Fayerweather III, achieved her place in history at the tender age of twenty-one in the small village of Canterbury, Connecticut. Sarah, a native of Connecticut, was born in Norwich in 1812 and moved with her family to a farm in Canterbury in early 1832. Hoping to pursue a career as a teacher, she enrolled in Prudence Crandall's "select school for girls" in the fall of 1832, the only black girl admitted to the school. Her admission caused an immediate uproar in Canterbury, during the course of which the parents of most of the white students withdrew their children from the school.

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