Letter discovered in antique desk piques interest of Southold historians 

As an expert in antique furniture, Colette Gilbert McClain looks for the devil in the details.

Where others may see an old desk as simply a piece of wood, she’s attuned to pick out the stories it may hold: an ashy mark from a candle snuffed out, calligraphy ink spills in the grain.

It’s why she took particular interest in a cherrywood slant desk that dates to the 1700s on a recent tour of the Wickham farmhouse on the village green in Cutchogue, ultimately uncovering a decades-old letter in a hidden compartment.

Written in the mid-20th century and signed Aunt Jo Cornell Horton, the note tells the history of the desk, which was passed down within the Horton family, an early English founding family in Southold. The letter marks a fascinating discovery for local historians and is stirring debate over family folklore and fact.

Explaining how the letter was found, McClain, 60, recalled that she asked Mark MacNish, executive director of the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council, to open the desk's writing surface during the tour of the farmhouse. She then traced her finger along what looked like a decorative Grecian column. Out slid a thin wooden panel containing an envelope.

“When you look at 18th century furniture, these pieces were meant to be handed down to future generations,” McClain, a Southampton resident and former curator of education at East Hampton Historical Society explained, adding that the compartments were often used to conceal love letters and family heirlooms. “You didn’t really have a centralized banking system, so you’d hide things — important documents, jewelry, gold, silver, money in these heavy pieces.”

MacNish said: “For an organization like us, this was better than a love letter.”

The letter says that the desk belonged to William Burnette Horton, who owned a farm in Cutchogue extending to the Peconic Bay before leaving in “1830 or thereabouts” for Andersonville, Georgia, to operate “a plantation with slaves until the Civil War was over” and then returning to the North Fork. The desk continued to be passed down until 2011, when Curtis Wells Horton II donated the desk to the historical council.

The letter's discovery piqued the interest of Southold historian Amy Folk, who has been researching the history of slavery as part of the North Fork project with several others for the last four years.

“My first instinct was to research it,” Folk said. Her research led her down a path of genealogy and census data that challenges the historical accuracy of the letter.

Though a national slave schedule from 1850 shows a William B. Horton lived in Georgia and owned three slaves, Folk’s research indicates that he might actually be William Brinson Horton, not William Burnette Horton from Southold.

“The author would have been going off of their family's history as she knew it,” Folk explained, describing the letter as “problematic" to that version of history.

"She wouldn’t have had the ability to do that kind of intense research that we can [do] now online,” Folk said.

Despite the historical ambiguity, MacNish still reveres the letter for its significance.

“Provenance attached to an item is very important," said MacNish, referring to any records of ownership for an antique. "It makes the piece come alive, and gives us points for further research."

McClain concurred that the questions are valid, since the account didn’t come from a primary source.

“But now we have names. And because we have names, we have access to history,” she said.

Names, and interesting details to weave into tours of the pre-Revolutionary era farmhouse. “If I didn’t touch it, it might have been hidden for another 60 years.”