ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Did you know Fredrick Douglass, the abolitionist, was at one time in Jacksonville and St. Augustine?
Most people know of him, but few people know about his wife, Anna.
She was instrumental in making him the man he was. That's the story Lana Turner and Cassandra Bromfield want to share.
Turner is the chair of a literary society. Cassandra Bromfield is a fashion designer. Both live in New York.
Last year, Turner asked Bromfield to create a wedding dress like the one Anna wore when she married Frederick Douglass in 1838.
"She wore a plum colored silk cloth dress," Turner explained. She says it's one of the few details known about Anna Douglass' life.
Turner knew the dress would help tell Anna's story. Turner wants people to know more about the woman who enabled Douglass to be the man he became.
Anna was a free person. Frederick was a slave. She financed Frederick out of slavery.
"And often times when historians talk about Frederick Douglass, Anna gets a sentence," Turner said. "She bet her life on freedom. She didn’t know if it was going to happen. He did not know it was going to happen."
As we know, Douglass became an orator and author, pushing for abolition of slavery, and had the ear of Abraham Lincoln.
"He couldn’t have been him without her," Bromfield said. "A lot of people, a lot of educated people really don't know about this woman."
Last September, in New York, Turner and her literary society held a wedding reception for Anna, who never had one.
Hundreds of miles south in St. Augustine, Jane Weizmann, who is involved with the Pena Peck House Museum and the Women’s Exchange, read an article in the New York Times about the wedding dress.
This struck a chord with her because she knew that just a block down the road from the Pena Peck House Musuem, Frederick Douglass has given a speech in 1889. But she had never known about Anna.
So Weizmann and other woman such as Women's Exchange President Becky Cole had an idea to tie together the history of Douglass' visit to St. Augsutien and his wife's story.
The Women’s Exchange has a motto, women helping women. So, in wanting to share a story about a woman left in history’s shadows, the Women's Exchange invited Turner and Bromfield to St. Augustine to show off that plum gown and to tell Anna's story.
"Like so many powerful men, he had a powerful woman behind him," Cole said.
The Women's Exchange has partnered with the Lincolnville Museum for a string of events about Anna Douglass this weekend.
The dress exhibit is open to the public Friday, Feb. 10 and Monday, Feb. 13 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m at the Pena Peck House Museum.
Speaking about Anna and Frederick Douglass, Weizmann said, "It took both of them and lots of good fortune and whimsy to accomplish what that family has accomplished."
And now, a tangible object such as a dress can help reveal the fabric that makes up U.S. history.
"Anna Murray Douglass is in fact the woman in all of us," Turner said. "That’s what a dress says."