Preserved in Brooklyn Historical Society’s collections is a wax audio cylinder from 1927 with a big story to tell.
Intent listeners will just make out the soft voice of a woman identified as “Mrs. Hunt.” She thanks the congregation of Plymouth Church for inviting her to Brooklyn Heights to celebrate “the memory of one whose name always seems to me to be the complement of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.”
Although a somewhat obscure figure today, Mrs. Hunt, (also known as Sally Maria Diggs, Rose Ward, and, troublingly, "Pinky," throughout her life), shared a unique connection to Beecher. Her story reveals intriguing details about slavery and freedom, abolitionism, and the complex legacy of racism in nineteenth-century Brooklyn and the United States.
Beecher was one of the most famous (or infamous) Brooklynites of the nineteenth century. The son of prominent Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher and brother to Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward quickly made a name for himself when he moved to Brooklyn in 1847.
Henry Ward Beecher
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