Daniel Hand

   Walking the streets of picturesque Guilford, Connecticut today, one would come upon an Italianate home at 47 Fair Street known as the Daniel Hand house. Built in 1878 by the esteemed George W. Seward, it features a two-story bay with triangular lintels over the windows and an elegant portico.
All this, combined with a monitor topped by a finial marks it as “an ornament to the street as well as a recommendation of the workmanship of Mr. George Seward  and Sons.” *

   This house became the home of Daniel Hand, who was born in 1801 in a house built by his grandfather, Captain Daniel Hand, and he received his early education at the Madison Woods District School. However, in 1818, at the age of seventeen, he decided to leave Connecticut and go to work  as a grocery clerk for his uncle Daniel Meigs, in Augusta, Georgia.

   Ultimately, he became head of his uncle’s grocery business, and he took into partnership a Southerner, George W. Williams. Because of Hand’s anti-slavery stand, it was safer for him to return north to conduct the business during the Civil War years. While returning South to help with the business, he was arrested three times and charged with spying. He was acquitted, but forced to stay in the South until the war ended.

   Entrusting his share of the business to his partner, Daniel Hand returned to Connecticut, swearing that he would never go South aagin. A quarter of a century later his partner, Mr. Williams, arrived in Guilford to tell the dumbfounded Hand his share of the profits was 1.5 million dollars (about 35 million dollars today). Hand gave !,000,000 dollars to the American Missionary  Society...earmarking it to be used for the education of Southern Black Americans. Daniel Hand died in  Guilford in 1891, at the age of ninety.

* Guilford: A Walking Guide ... Sarah Brown McCulloch.

Daniel Hand High School, Madison CT