Daniel Hand House (1878)

The Italianate house of Daniel Hand, at 47 Fair Street in Guilford, was built in 1878-1879 by the builders George W. Seward and Sons. Daniel Hand, born in Madison, was a businessman and philanthropist, who died in 1891 at the age of ninety. Please Read on to learn more about what happened to Hand during the Civil War and his act of generosity 25 years later:

As explained by C.J. Ryder in The American Missionary, Vol. LVI, No. 11 (Nov. 1902),

When comparatively a lad he went to Augusta, Ga., as an assistant in the business of Daniel Meigs, his uncle, and a prominent merchant of Augusta and Savannah. Daniel Hand succeeded to his uncle’s business, enlarging it and prospering until five years before the Civil War. He kept in close touch with his early Connecticut home and spent a portion of nearly every summer near the shores of the Sound. At the opening of hostilities in the defense of slavery Mr. Hand was temporarily a resident in New York City. An incident of peculiar interest occurred immediately after the declaration of war. Mr. Hand went South through the Union lines, having business in New Orleans. Upon his arrival in that city he was immediately arrested by the mayor, who had received a telegram stating that he was a ” Lincoln spy.” He was paroled on condition that he reported himself to the Confederate authorities at Richmond. When traveling thither to fulfil the conditions of his parole, he was threatened by a mob at Augusta and would doubtless have been murdered for his outspoken anti-slavery sentiments had not the leading citizens of that town saved his life. His personal arrest and discharge did not, however, end his dealings with the Confederate government. A case was brought against him and tried in the courts on the ground of his being an alien and a Yankee. An effort was made to confiscate Mr. Hand’s property, but justice rising above political considerations, the courts decided the case in accordance with right and law, be it said to their honor. At the close of the war Mr. Hand came North. His interests were defended by his partner, Mr. Williams, a Southern man. Visiting Mr. Hand at his old residence. Guilford, Conn., after the war closed, Mr. Williams reported to Mr. Hand a large sum which had accumulated during the senior partner’s absence. This property, earned in the midst of slavery and partly by slave labor, against which Mr. Hand protested at the time, created and increased by an incorruptible Southern partner, defended by a Southern court, was the foundation for the munificent benefaction known as the Daniel Hand Educational Fund, given into the care of the American Missionary Association.

As further explained in A Crusade of Brotherhood: A History of the American Missionary Association (1909), by Augustus Field Beard:

His partner, Mr. George W. Williams, who was conducting a branch of the business at Charleston, South Carolina, protected the capital of Mr. Hand from the confiscation seriously threatened, in view of his being a Northern man of undisguised antislavery sentiments. After the war, when Mr. Hand came North, Mr. Williams adjusted the business, made up the account, and paid over to Mr. Hand his portion of the long-invested capital and its accumulations, as an honorable merchant and trusted partner would do. Bereaved of wife and children for many years, his benevolent impulses led Mr. Hand to form plans to use his large wealth for the benefit of his fellow men. He was a man of striking presence, of strong mind and strong convictions, earnest in his modes of thought and vigorous and terse in their expression. His religious life and character were formed upon the model and under the influence of his Puritan ancestors. Uniting with the First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia, when twenty-eight years of age, for thirty years he presided over its Sunday-school as its superintendent. In his old age, as he laid his hand upon his well-worn Bible, he said, ” I always read from that book every morning, and have done so from my boyhood except in comparatively few cases of unusual interruption or special hindrance.” Such being the man, his splendid philanthropy is a natural sequence. It is well to hold his honored name and his benefactions in lasting gratitude.

Beard also writes that he himself

well recalls the day in October, 1888, when the Hon. Luzon B. Morris, afterwards governor of Connecticut, the trusted legal and financial adviser of Daniel Hand of Guilford, entered the office to transfer securities to the amount of “one million eight hundred and ninety-four dollars and twenty-five cents,” to be designated “The Daniel Hand Educational Fund for Colored People.” The gift was one of mature deliberation, made after careful examination of the work of the Association extending through a period of many years; made during the lifetime it avoided the possibility of future litigation. It was bestowed upon a race with whose wants Mr. Hand had become thoroughly conversant. It was given to a society with whose history, amid obloquy and distrust, he was perfectly familiar, and it was made a permanent fund, — the income only to be available, — thus insuring its perpetual usefulness.