Wing heir gives trove to ACC

By Mark Frost, Chronicle Editor

A seventh generation descendant of Glens Falls founder Abraham Wing has donated a trove of family documents — including many in Wing’s own handwriting — to the Hill Collection at SUNY Adirondack college library in Queensbury.

The heir, Kit Cornell, worked with Paul McCarty, executive director of the Fort Edward Historical
Association, in making the gift.

It has documents dating as early as 1717. One paper in Wing’s handwriting dated March 11th 1776 complains: “Stolen, taken and carried out of my house by Capt. Lammar’s Company.” [The handwriting is difficult to decipher.]

Wing goes on to itemize each thing he said was taken and state its value, starting with what appears to be “one blue broad cloth jacket.” Wing’s outrage is emphatic.

“He was a businessman, let me tell you,” says his five great granddaughters.

Ms. Cornell inherited the trove in 1992 from her uncle David Roberts (brother of Ms. Cornell’s mother). “When he died he left this to me. I said: ‘What do I do now?’ It took a number of years before I decided I need to make the time to do this.”

Mr. McCarty was aware of the documents and spoke over the years with Ms. Cornell, who lives in New Hampshire.

“I felt a real sense of responsibility for them,” Ms. Cornell told The Chronicle last week, standing at the Hill Collection in the SUNY Adirondack library. “And Paul was very patient and not at all making me feel any guilt about the fact that they were sitting in my closet. When I was ready, the right time I think, they came out and here we are.”

The gift will be known as the Wing Roberts Collection, in part reflecting Mr. Roberts’s own efforts. “Uncle David did more work on it, probably collected more things into it,” says Ms. Cornell.

He also did verbatim typewritten transcriptions of many of the documents, a colossal contribution to making them accessible, given the difficulty for modern eyes to decipher 18th century penmanship.

Mr. McCarty said that Asahel R. Wing (1850-1928) — Ms. Cornell’s great grandfather — assembled much of the collection originally.

It was Mr. McCarty who recommended that the collection go into the Hill Collection in the library at SUNY Adirondack.

The Hill Collection is named for William Hart Hill (1891-1959), founder of the Fort Edward Historical Association and himself such a vast collector that his artifacts went not just to SUNY Adirondack but also to the New York State Library in Albany and the Old Fort House Museum’s John P. Burke Research Center in Fort Edward.

Mr. McCarty reasoned that the Wing documents will be best protected and best accessed at the Hill room at the college.

He says of the Wing Roberts collection, “It’s significant to us locally on a large scale — not just to Glens Falls-Queensbury, to Sandy Hill and Fort Edward and even Moreau.

“I hope it will increase the usership of this [Hill] collection and I think it will…

“I think a lot of people will be curious.”

Mr. McCarty is at the Hill Collection on Thursday mornings and at other times.

He said the Wing documents will be scanned, both to increase their accessibility and to preserve the originals.

But Ms. Cornell, a potter by profession, says the value of the originals should not be overlooked. “There’s something about the real thing that communicates to us in a way that things on a computer screen or digitized doesn’t. They have history in the scent, in the touch, in the handwriting and the type of ink that all put us in contact with the moment and the person.”

Says Ms. Cornell, “To me it’s really wonderful to have a whole collection of materials that are available to the [Wing] family and to the public for study.” She sees a chance to “educate the next generation so that there will be understanding, and history will become real for future generations.”

Asked if particular documents in the trove especially excite him, Mr. McCarty mentions a letter dated in the 1870s to Kit’s great great grandmother from Henry Ward Beecher, who’d been invited “to come back to speak” in Fort Edward.

Before the Civil War, Beecher had drawn a throng estimated at 20,000 people to hear his call for the abolition of slavery.

Mr. McCarty says Mr. Beecher’s subsequent letter “referenced remembering that time in 1856.”

Mr. McCarty also mentions a document authorizing “Abraham Wing to act as William Duer’s agent to rent his property.”

“William Duer of course is a big Fort Edward name,” said Mr. McCarty, noting that among other things Mr. Duer was the first Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Alexander Hamilton.

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