Collect Day #15, DINAH CHASE WHIPPLE
Loving God, at Whose command we love and support each other, thank you for those who heard Your call to serve and provided help to those in need, without fanfare and with few resources of their own. These Saints of Yours, such as Dinah Chase Whipple, were Stewards of Your Gifts, claiming and using all they were given to the benefit of Your people. We remember and affirm all of those whose labor provided safety, understanding and dignity for others; in Jesus’ loving name, we pray. Amen
DAY #15, March 2, 2018
Portsmouth
DINAH CHASE WHIPPLE
(1760-1846)
Angela Matthews
In 1781, Dinah Chase Whipple came as a free woman to marry Prince and to live in the household of William and Katharine Moffatt Whipple. After Gen. Whipple’s death in 1785, Madam Whipple gave the Black Whipples the use of a small corner patch of her garden where Prince and, another enslaved servant, Cuffee Whipple moved their two-story house onto the lot. There they all lived with their children for the rest of the men’s lives.
Dinah and Cuffee’s wife, Rebecca Daverson Whipple, like women of their station in other African American communities, were organized to improve life through mutual aid. They founded the Ladies African Charitable Society, acting in the spirit of a recollected and passed-down West African tradition of communal responsibility, where it was understood that helping the individual helped the community.
They opened a school on the first floor of their house where formerly enslaved adults may have been among the children being taught basic survival skills needed by free people. The school continued into the 1850s by Dinah and her successors in the charitable society. Following the death of her husband in 1796, Dinah continued to support herself until 1832. When living in her house had become a fire hazard, the Whipple family provided Dinah with a small annuity and the use of a house just a few steps away from her church and the neighborhood where she had lived for so long.
Dinah Whipple died in February of 1846 at age 86 and is buried in North Cemetery beside her husband, Prince.
