Nancy Carter Quander was an enslaved woman at Mount Vernon, George and Martha Washington's plantation in Virginia. She was eleven years old in 1799, when George Washington made a list of all the enslaved people on his plantation. She lived on River Farm with her mother, Suckey Bay, a field-worker. Nancy’s father, an enslaved man with the last name of Carter, lived at the plantation of Washington’s closest neighbor, Abednego Adams. Nancy had two siblings who also lived on River Farm: Rose, who was twenty-eight in 1799, and a four-year-old sister also listed as Nancy on Washington’s census. Because Suckey Bay belonged to George Washington directly, she and her children were among those freed in January 1801, by Martha Washington, following the provision in her husband’s will.
Sometime in the next ten years after receiving her freedom, she married Charles Quander, a free black man from Maryland; the couple had three children: Gracy, born about 1811; Elizabeth, born about 1815; and Osmond, born about 1825. Nancy returned to Mount Vernon in 1835 to support the men caring for the tomb of George Washington.
