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Sally Shadd

Ice Cream
Among the growing number of free blacks, most women were employed as household servants or washer women and received low wages. Yet, despite these heavy burdens, a few free black women emerged from poverty to achieve education and success. Betty Jackson, a black woman from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, established a tea room on French Street in Wilmington, Delaware, where she sold cakes, fruit, and desserts to wealthy people for their parties. Her son, Jeremiah Shadd, was a butcher, well-known for his ability to cure meat. His wife, known as Aunt Sallie Shadd, achieved legendary status among Wilmington's free black population as the inventor of ice cream. The story was that the butcher Jeremiah purchased Sallie's freedom. Like other members of her family, she went into the catering business and created a new dessert sensation made from frozen cream, sugar, and fruit. Dolly Madison, the wife of President James Madison, heard about the new dessert, came to Wilmington to try it, and afterward made ice cream a feature of dinners at the White House.

Whether the Aunt Sallie Shadd story is true or only a pleasant legend, it is an indisputable fact that Mary An Shadd, a later descendant of the Shadd family, who was born in Wilmington in 1823, became an important teacher, newspaper publisher, and crusader for the abolition of slavery. She was probably the first black woman in America to publish her own newspaper. The daughter of Abraham Shadd, a free shoemaker and abolitionist leader, Mary An attended a school in Wilmington which had been founded in 1816 by the city's Quakers to educate free blacks.

Earlier confectioners who sold ice cream

 * 1795: John Mercier, Philadelphia