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02/21/2018 07:30 AMOnce Billy Winters was one of the best-known residents of Deep River. That was more than 100 years ago. Rhonda Forristall, the curator of the Deep River Historical Society, would like today’s town residents to know about Winters as well, and that’s why she has written a book about the former slave, who arrived in Deep River in early 1829, helped in his escape by the Underground Railroad, the informal network of abolitionists that gave both safe haven and travel assistance to fleeing slaves.
Rhonda will sign copies of Billy Winters: One Man’s Journey to Freedom at the Carriage House of the Deep River Historical Society on Sunday, March 11 from 4 to 6 p.m.
Winters’s life was also the subject of one chapter of another recent book, Deep River Stories, by Frank Santoro. Rhonda decided to do a book devoted entirely to Winters after getting questions every year posed by visiting 4th graders from Deep River Elementary school who study the Underground Railroad.
“The school children always asked me to tell them more about Billy,” she says.
Rhonda always obliged, detailing how Winters was born on a Virginia plantation in 1808 and sold to a harsh master in South Carolina when he was 20 for $500. Winters didn’t stay long in South Carolina, however. After just a few months, he and another slave made their escape north, using their legs and their wits, along with help and transportation offered by sympathetic anti-slavery advocates.
The two escapees split up, reasoning that two black men would attract more attention from bounty hunters than single individuals. Winters ended up in New Haven and continued on to Deep River, which Rhonda says was an active underground railway stop managed by George Read. (Read’s business, which made ivory combs, merged with other local companies in 1863 to form Pratt, Read & Co.)
Read told Winters, who had been born Daniel Fisher, to change his name as a way of preventing recapture.
“I think Billy chose the name Winters because he arrived in winter,” Rhonda says.
Read also suggested that Winters wear a red wig as a disguise.
“He said the wig was so Billy wouldn’t attract attention, but that doesn’t seem logical,” Rhonda adds.
The status of slaves in Connecticut was confusing. In 1784, Connecticut passed the Gradual Abolition Act granting freedom to those who would have been born slaves, but only granting freedom once they were 25. There were, in fact, slaves in Connecticut until at least l848. After the passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which required that citizens of free states return captured slaves to their southern masters, Winters left Deep River for New Bedford, Massachusetts, because Massachusetts was thought to be more firmly in the abolitionist camp, but he returned to Deep River in l863 after the Emancipation Proclamation. He built a house on what is still called Winter Avenue.
“He held a wide variety of jobs; he was a jack of all trades and a chef,” Rhonda says.
Rhonda used the archives of the historical society along with computer research to put together Billy’s story.
“It was like finding pieces of a puzzle,” she says.
The challenge was not the research, but the writing, even though Rhonda wrote a book a decade ago about the history of the Deep River Fire Department. A nurse by profession, Rhonda, now retired, points out that nursing demands a different kind of writing.
“Nurses don’t write complete sentences; they type things on a chart. Nurses don’t write paragraphs and have to figure out where the commas go,” she says.
But there was help. A new arrival in Deep River, Veronica Makowsky, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, came by to ask how she could volunteer at the historical society. Rhonda had just the job for her: reading the manuscript. Rhonda also credits her son Rich, a technical writer, with some of the computer help she needed in assembling the book. She also recognizes her husband Richard’s patience as she worked.
“He spent a lot of time in the family room while I spent a lot of time at the computer,” she says.
Rhonda is a Deep River native, a graduate of Valley Regional High School and Hartford Hospital Nursing School. For many years she worked at the Middlesex Hospital Shoreline Clinic (now the Shoreline Medical Center) in Westbrook where she started the very successful high school career day program.
After she retired in 2012, Rhonda admits to worrying about what she was going to do. Jeff Hostetler, the president of the Deep River Historical Society, solved that problem, when he asked if she would fill the vacant post of curator.
“I told Jeff I loved history, but I was not trained as a curator,” Rhonda says. “He told me not to worry.”
Rhonda has since taken classes at the Connecticut League of Historical Organizations that have helped her develop strategic plans and a collections policy for the society and also how to take care of the material the society owns.
“There was a real learning curve,” she says, pointing out that some popular commercial products had ingredients that could harm the objects and papers the society owns. “Learning about all the science of archival collection, that is really wonderful.”
Now the society has gotten a grant from Connecticut Humanities to reorganize its permanent collection and has hired local museum expert Brenda Milkofsky to head the project. Rhonda is particularly interested in a better way to display the material on the second floor of the historical society’s building.
“There a lot of stuff up there. Now it’s just a bit overwhelming. We need to put like things together to tell a story,’ she says.
Since questions from the 4th grade prompted her biography of Billy Winter, Rhonda consulted Kathy Mozzochi, a longtime elementary educator, to make sure the book’s vocabulary was suitable for young students. Rhonda hopes the biography will prove fascinating to a wider audience.
“I hope both adults and children read it,” she says.
Billy Winters himself did not marry, but his sister Nancy also settled in Deep River after emancipation and two of her children lived in Deep River until the end of their lives; Robert Sturgis died in 1955 and Florence Sturgis in 1964. Billy died in 1900 at the age of 92. He is buried in Fountain Hill Cemetery.
“It’s a lovely white marble stone that says, ‘William Winters At Rest,’” Rhonda says.
Rhonda Forristall will give a talk about her biography Billy Winters: One Man’s Journey to Freedom on Sunday, March 11, from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Deep River Historical Society, 254 Main Street Deep River. The event is free and open to the public.