The Rural We: Bill Jeffway
The history buff and director of the Duchess County Historical Society talks about the upcoming Frederick Douglass event.
Bill Jeffway
Director of the Dutchess County Historical Society (DCHS), Bill Jeffway serves on Celebrating the African Spirit’s (CAS) research committee. He is one of the organizers of the upcoming event, “The Poughkeepsie Words of Frederick Douglass” at College Hill Park in Poughkeepsie on August 1. He has done copious research on the abolitionist’s visits to and speeches in Poughkeepsie, one of which the award-winning “Hamilton” actor Paul Oakley Stovall will reenact. But Jeffway’s interest in history isn’t a new thing; he’s always loved local history and even joined the Northhampton Historical Society when he was only 13.
I worked in global advertising for Ogilvy & Mather for almost 30 years in New York, London and Singapore, and when I retired, we became permanent residents of our weekend house in Milan. I’m on the town board in Milan, and up for reelection this year. Step by step I ended up becoming the Dutchess County Historical Society’s director about four-and-a-half years ago.
I have my own website, History Speaks, because I decided to publish my philosophy that history speaks if you care to listen. People like me enjoy the dry texts, but the challenge in getting the broader audience is to turn it into something more interesting, like the Frederick Douglass event on August 1. Any historian hopes their research can be brought to life.
I’m especially interested in lesser-told stories. The DCHS had a two-year program in observation of the 100-year anniversary of suffrage and the local women's path to get the right to vote. We know about them, but the histories of people of color tend to be lesser told.
College Hill 1837 — the wooded western slope where Douglass actually spoke.
Frederick Douglass spoke three times in Poughkeepsie. The first thing I wanted to know about was, what did he talk about? The New York Times published one of his speeches, but when I did more digging, I found that the complete speech went beyond what The Times published. I was able to track down the rest of the speech through an academic at Yale. In it, Douglass supported Lincoln’s views about slavery, which Steven A. Douglass confronted Lincoln with in the fourth Lincoln/Douglass debate in September of 1858.
The August 1 event came together quickly only recently. Word was getting out that we’d found this speech, and Paul Oakley Stovall, who’d been playing George Washington on tour with “Hamilton,” turned his attention to studying Frederick Douglass during the pandemic. He was part of the New York Stage and Film’s partnership at Marist and Vassar, and when he found out that the speech had been discovered, suggested that he could perform it at College Hill, where the speech took place. Douglass actually spoke for three hours, but Paul’s going to turn it into a (shorter) performance. The afternoon will start with a procession around the College Hill Park Pavilion by Souls United of Hudson Valley, and the Center for Creative Education’s Percussion Orchestra of Kingston.
The event is co-hosted by Celebrating the African Spirit with Carmen McGill and Katie Hite as the lead board members on the event, and co-hosted by the City of Poughkeepsie — Yvonne Flowers, 5th Ward Councilwoman. Marist and Vassar colleges also had a supporting role.
