06/02/2026
While many of the Wi******ers don't mention members of the enslaved community by name, we can often glimpse their work and routines through inadvertent comments from various members of the Wi******er family.
For example, in a surviving letter written in 1823 from Napoleon Wi******er to his sister Caroline, he tells her, "Caroline, I write this in order to thank you for the valuable consignment directed to me, and to free your mind from any uneasiness by assuring you that the floors are scoured once a week at least, and that Val cleans his feet well at the door."
The comment about their brother, Val, suggests there was likely an ongoing issue with his tracking dirt into the house. The remainder of the letter indicates that Caroline was perhaps the tidiest of the siblings. Napoleon's mention of scouring the floors does not have a name attached, but we can infer that enslaved workers performed this chore. While we don't have a name, this brief note indicates that at least one, and possibly more, members of the enslaved community worked on this task weekly. Scouring floors in the 1820s was a grueling task that required scrubbing them with a mixture of sand and wood ash, and possibly bleaching them with lye.
