Frederick Starr was born on May 1, 1799, in Warren, Connecticut. He grew up and attended school in Warren, and he moved to Litchfield in the 1810s. There, according to an early biographer, he “sat under the ministry of the famous Lyman Beecher, and there made a profession of religion.” He eventually settled in Rochester, New York, and he began working as a furniture maker around 1820. He married Lucy Ann Hills around 1831, and they had at least five children: Sarah, born around 1835; Caroline, born around 1838; George, born on January 8, 1840; Henry, born around 1842; and Charles, born around 1844. Starr’s furniture business prospered, and by 1850, he owned $60,000 of real estate.

 

He supported the Whig Party, and he served in the state legislature in the early 1840s. In April 1842, he published an address defending personal liberty laws. When state legislators debated repealing a law that “grant[ed] the right of trial by jury to those who were claimed as fugitive slaves within this State,” Starr raged that they were “striking from under the feet of the oppressed that safeguard of human liberty.” He also supported temperance, and he attended at least one State Temperance Convention. He died in Rochester on November 27, 1869, “after a brief illness.”

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