Fales Family letters (Ms. 2008.006)

Biographical note

The history of the Fales family is socially, geographically and commercially aligned with their more prominent Bristol neighbors, the DeWolfs. Although the slave trade was officially abolished in 1808, the DeWolf Family used their wealth and political power to ply the "triangle trade" long afterwards. One of the points of that triangle was Cuba, where they owned coffee and sugar plantations well into the nineteenth century, and where Stephen Fales ran his plantation for twenty years.

Stephen Smith Fales was born in Bristol, Rhode Island., on 24 November 1783, the eldest son of William and Mary (Smith) Fales. His father died in 1797 at age 38, and in 1803 Levi DeWolf (brother of Sen. James DeWolf, a prosperous Bristol slave trader) became the guardian of Stephen and his four surviving siblings. (According to some accounts, Levi was to his brother James as Moses was to John Brown; after one slave voyage, Levi abandoned the trade.) Stephen married his second cousin Phebe Wardwell (17 Feb.1784-26 Sept.1839) in 1804, with whom he had nine children. He was a shipmaster and lived on a plantation in Cuba for twenty years before returning to Bristol shortly before his death on 22 June 1839. His wife Phebe died the same year on September 26.

His sister Lydia Smith (Fales) French was born in Bristol, Rhode Island, on 15 November 1790. In 1816 she married Capt. Zechariah French, who died at sea six years later. After his death, Lydia kept a school in Bristol and died on 1 March 1877.

Thomas James Fales was born in Bristol on 18 June 1815. He married Anna Gray in Cuba and had one child.

References

• Fales, DeCoursey. The Fales Family of Bristol, Rhode Island. Boston: T.R. Marvin & Son, 1919.
• Davis, Paul. "Living Off the Trade: Bristol and the DeWolfs" from the series "The Unrighteous Traffick: Rhode Island's Slave History" (Providence Journal 17 Mar 2006)