This book is a work of fiction. But! It’s also full of facts.
All the modern-day characters (Rachel, Joon, Linda, Dave, Terry, Brewster . . .) are fictional, but the historical figures (Anna Smith Strong, Abraham Woodhull, Caleb Brewster, George Washington . . .) are real. And all the history that Rachel learns in the book really happened, from the Battle of Brooklyn to the Battle of Yorktown. The Culper Spy Ring was absolutely real!
But . . . there is no actual treasure hunt. And there’s no legend of the Strong family’s lost treasure. I made that up (yay, fiction!), but I wove history and fact into every clue that Rachel and Joon find. For example:
Setauket itself is a real place, and you can visit it. You can see the Vance Locke murals in the auditorium of Setauket Elementary School. You can climb on Patriots Rock. You can view the bullet inside Caroline Church and walk over the two old millstones in front of the replica grist mill. If you’d like, you can take one of the Tri-Spy Tours and have a local expert show you all the key historical spots around town by foot, bike, or canoe. And you can visit the Three Village Historical Society, study the maps and codebook painted on the walls, and buy yourself a 355 refrigerator magnet or a candle scented like espionage in the gift shop. (I still don’t know what espionage smells like, but I did write most of this book while drinking hot chocolate out of my favorite mug, the one that says “Culper Spy Ring: Who was 355?”)
You can also visit Anna Smith Strong’s grave, read the inscription (or as much of it as you can decipher), and look across Little Bay. When you do that, you’ll be standing not far from where Nancy could have strung her famous magic clothesline to signal head spy, Abraham Woodhull, that the whaleboat captain Caleb Brewster was ready to meet in a nearby cove.
The story of Nancy’s clothesline was first revealed in 1939 by local historian Morton Pennypacker (isn’t that a fantastic name?), after talking with the descendants of Anna Smith Strong and reviewing their family papers. It was then told in detail by local historian Kate Wheeler Strong, a direct descendant of Nancy, in one of her True Tales pamphlets in 1940. Since then, it has been embraced as absolute truth by some historians, writers, and Culper Spy enthusiasts. And it has been dismissed as pure legend by others.
We won’t ever know for certain whether it’s truth or legend for one very good reason: we weren’t supposed to know.
Spies are supposed to be secret. But they still left behind puzzle pieces, and we can use those pieces to try to figure out the truth of Anna Smith Strong and the Culper Spy Ring. Like Rachel and Joon did.
George Washington knew he needed spies.
In 1755, during the French and Indian War, he witnessed a terrible ambush and learned firsthand how important it was to know where the enemy was at all times. But when he became commander in chief of the Continental Army at the start of the American Revolutionary War, he had no intelligence service (spy system). And he wanted one.
In the summer of 1776, his army suffered its first major defeat in the Battle of Brooklyn, which was also known as the Battle of Long Island. The Patriots lost New York City and the entirety of Long Island to the British. It was a serious blow to the rebel cause. Outgunned and outmanned (to quote the musical Hamilton), Washington knew that to win the war, he had to know what the British were up to—where their troops were, where their ships were, and, most important, where they were all headed next. He especially needed accurate, timely information about what was going on in Manhattan, where the British were headquartered.
First, he tried to send in spies from the outside.
This failed miserably.
Ever heard of Nathan Hale? He’s famous for saying, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” before he lost his life. (Note: he might not have actually said this, but he’s famous for it anyway.) Less well-known is that he was a terrible spy. He was very smart and extremely brave, but by all accounts, he was completely unsuited to the job. He was just too honest. One of his classmates wrote of Hale: “His nature was too frank and open to deceit and disguise, and he was incapable of acting a part equally foreign to his feelings and habits.”1 In other words . . . great guy but a bad spy.
In September 1776, Hale crossed Long Island Sound from Patriot-controlled Connecticut to British-controlled Long Island. As he traveled west toward Manhattan, he began visiting taverns and asking not very casually about British troop movements. A British officer named Robert Rogers, who happened to be very suited to his role, caught wind of this, visited one of these taverns, and struck up a conversation with Hale that went something like this:
“Hey, nice to meet you,” Rogers said. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m actually here in secret, spying on behalf of George Washington.”
He was lying, of course, but Hale believed him and said (not in these words), “Wow, what a coincidence! Me too!”
And then he was arrested.
After that, it was deemed too dangerous to send spies in from the outside. What Washington needed was a spy ring already embedded in the territory behind enemy lines.
And in the summer of 1778, he got that.
It began with an out-of-the-blue letter from a brash young man named Caleb Brewster, a rumored smuggler, who ran a fleet of whaleboats between Connecticut and Long Island. He offered to gather intelligence on Long Island for Washington.
And Washington replied, “Yes. That. Please. Right now and lots.” (Okay, he didn’t exactly say that. While Brewster’s original letter is lost, we do have Washington’s reply, in which he told Brewster to “not spare any reasonable expense to come at early and true information.”2 He went on to say he’d rather here a “vague and uncertain account” than silence.) Brewster wrote his first report on August 27, 1778, and, ta-da, the Culper Spy Ring was born! Almost . . . It still needed a few more pieces.
In order to coordinate these reports, Washington tasked Brigadier General Charles Scott with creating a spy network, but Scott didn’t really want to. (In fact, he retired a few months later.) The bulk of the work fell to his assistant, the young Major Benjamin Tallmadge.
My favorite description of Tallmadge comes from Alexander Rose’s book Washington’s Spies, in which he says that Tallmadge had “a disconcerting habit of cocking his head like a quizzical beagle.”3 Canine mannerisms or not, he was given the job of assembling a spy network, and that’s what he did.
Tallmadge had been born in a tiny town called Setauket, fifty-five miles east of Manhattan. He was the son of the minister of the Setauket Presbyterian Church (the same church Rachel and Joon encounter), and he had ample reason to dislike the British. In addition to his father’s church being turned into a fort, his older brother died in a British prison after his capture during the Battle of Brooklyn. Plus Tallmadge had been a college friend of Nathan Hale. The fates of his brother and of his friend may have motivated Tallmadge to work hard to outspy the enemy.
To form his spy network, he called on his childhood friend Abraham Woodhull, a potato farmer who lived in Setauket, to work with Caleb Brewster. Austin Roe, another childhood friend and a tavern keeper in Setauket, was recruited as well.
According to Bill Bleyer in his book George Washington’s Long Island Spy Ring, Washington himself dubbed the group the Culper Spy Ring, in honor of Culpeper County, Virginia, where Washington had worked as a surveyor when he was seventeen.
The Culper Spy Ring functioned the way Rachel learns it did:
None of the Culper spies were ever caught. And their impact on the outcome of the American Revolutionary War was significant, as Rachel’s stepdad-to-be asserts. Their most significant achievement was alerting Washington as to a planned surprise attack on the French fleet, who were landing in Rhode Island to reinforce the Patriots; but the Culper spies have also been credited with helping expose the famous traitor Benedict Arnold, as well as supplying vital intelligence that led to the Patriots’ final victory in Yorktown.
After the war, British spymaster Major George Beckwith stated, “Washington did not really outfight the British; he simply outspied us!”5
How do I know all this is true? Quite simply, I don’t. All of what you just read was retold based on puzzle pieces collected by historians such as Beverly Tyler (the historian at the Three Village Historical Society), Kate Wheeler Strong, and Morton Pennypacker, as well as writers such as Bill Bleyer and Alexander Rose. In other words, it’s a guess—an educated guess, which means it’s based on as much information as we can find (which is sometimes quite a lot and sometimes not).
History is full of such guesses.
With the exception of Caleb Brewster, who didn’t even use an alias (probably because he was the least likely to be caught, out in his boat), none of George Washington’s spies ever admitted to their actions during their lifetimes. Even Major Benjamin Tallmadge, who wrote his memoir after the war at the request of his children, recorded only a single paragraph that referred to his spy ring: “This year (1778) I opened a private correspondence with some persons in New York (for Gen. Washington) which lasted through the war. How beneficial it was to the Commander-in-Chief is evidenced by his continuing the same to the close of the war, I kept one or more boats constantly employed in crossing the Sound on this business.”6 And that was it.
Spy craft at the time was considered “ungentlemanly.” It is possible that despite the value of their work to George Washington, the Culpers kept quiet out of embarrassment, even after the war ended and they were no longer in physical danger.
We only know the identity of the Culper spies through the detective work of historians. For example, Robert Townsend, the merchant who went by the alias Samuel Culper Jr., was only identified in the 1930s after historian Morton Pennypacker compared his handwriting on some personal letters to the handwriting in known Culper letters. It’s entirely possible that there are other spies who have yet to be recognized at all for their contributions. For example, there’s new research that points to Selah Strong as a possible Culper, as well as Austin Roe’s cousins Phillips and Nathaniel Roe. There could easily be others.
Everything we know about George Washington’s spies has been pieced together from scraps of evidence, drawn from a mix of primary sources and secondary sources.
Primary sources are accounts by someone who actually witnessed the events—diaries, memoirs, letters, birth certificates, deeds, wills, other legal documents. Secondary sources are reports by people who weren’t present, and include such things as family stories and books written by historians.
The Culper letter that Rachel and Joon view in the Long Island Museum (which actually exists and was discovered in 2020—it’s put on display for several weeks each fall) is an example of a primary source. The story about Nancy collected by Kate Wheeler Strong and published in her True Tales pamphlets is a secondary source. Both have value; and to get the clearest view of history possible, it’s important to look at every scrap of evidence you can find and consider each one critically—how reliable is the source, how thorough is the report, and how accurate are the details when compared to other known facts.
It’s a treasure hunt. And the treasure at the end is truth, or as close to the truth as we can get.
Was Anna Smith Strong a spy who was a key part of the Culper Spy Ring, or is that just a nice family story? And if she was a spy, was she Agent 355?
As Three Village Historical Society historian Beverly Tyler points out, Nancy couldn’t have been Agent 355 because the word “Agent” wasn’t used to refer to any of the Culper spies. But she could have been 355, the lady in the Culper letter. And she could have assisted Woodhull and Brewster, either with her famous clothesline or by simply visiting her nearest neighbor, her friend Abe, and telling him (out of earshot of any British officers or Loyalists) that Brewster was nearby.
What are the puzzle pieces in favor of Nancy as a spy?
First, she had motive. Despite her extended family being Loyalists, Nancy’s husband, Selah, was a known Patriot. He was arrested in January 1778 for “surreptitious correspondence with the enemy” (aka exchanging letters with rebels), a fact reported in a Manhattan newspaper called Rivington’s Royal Gazette. He was imprisoned for a time, possibly aboard a prison ship or in a sugarhouse (a makeshift prison) in Manhattan; and then after his release, he went into exile in Patriot-controlled Connecticut. It seems likely that Nancy would have sided with the Patriots after the British arrested her husband. She also couldn’t have been pleased at the way the British soldiers trashed her family’s church, yanking out the pews, stabling horses inside, and tearing up the gravestones to use as fortifications.
Second, she had the means. St. George’s Manor, her family’s home, was on a peninsula with views of both Setauket Harbor and Conscience Bay. From the outer houses on the property, she was well positioned to see Caleb Brewster’s whaleboat, and she was also well positioned to signal to Abraham Woodhull, whose house and farm was directly across Little Bay. Plus, as a woman in the Colonial era, she would have been dismissed as unimportant. Certainly, no one would have suspected she was wrapped up in any unsavory spy business, especially while doing something as mundane as laundry.
Third, she had known Abraham Woodhull for decades. There simply weren’t that many people living in Setauket at that time; and though there are lots of families who live on Strong’s Neck now, back then there was just St. George’s Manor (Nancy’s childhood home) and Woodhull’s family farm. They would have known each other for their entire lives.
But what about actual evidence? Papers? Letters?
While no one piece of evidence is enough on its own, taken together a story begins to form, with Nancy at its heart . . . But a word of caution: when we look at the puzzle pieces of the past, we can’t just pick and choose the bits that fit with the story we like. We have to look at all of them.
For example, there is evidence that shows that Selah Strong wasn’t in exile in Connecticut for the entire tenure of the Culper Spy Ring. According to the town records of Brookhaven, New York (a jurisdiction that includes Setauket), he was elected president of the town board of trustees in 1780, which meant he had to be back in Long Island by then and could have been the one to incur those espionage expenses . . . but there are still two years after the start of the spy ring (August 1778) and before Selah’s election (May 1780) when Nancy could have done her spy work. Plus there’s nothing to suggest that Selah would have stopped Nancy if he were home early anyway. He was a known Patriot. He might have even encouraged her.
There’s also evidence that says Nancy did not live in St. George’s Manor during the war. She could have instead lived with her in-laws in what was then called Mount Misery, the Belle Terre area of Port Jefferson, miles from where her clothesline supposedly was. In 1769, her father sold her childhood home to a Loyalist (Andrew Seaton or Seton—both spellings were used) to pay off his debts. Records show that Selah and Nancy bought back St. George’s Manor at auction after the war. So this means that while St. George’s Manor was Nancy’s childhood home, it wasn’t hers at the time of the Culper Spy Ring. It was owned by a Loyalist, which is not the same as being forcibly occupied by British officers as the popular story claims.
Taken on their own, these puzzle pieces hint that Nancy wasn’t on Strong’s Neck during the war, which means she couldn’t have used her magic clothesline.
But her father sold only the house itself. Nancy’s family retained the surrounding estate, which included several outer houses. After her father’s death in 1776, Nancy would have been the one to maintain her family’s land and buildings during the war. In fact, the primary reason that women like Nancy stayed on Long Island instead of joining their Patriot husbands in exile in Connecticut was to watch over the family property and keep the farms running. So even if her primary residence was with her in-laws, she still could have spent significant time on her family’s lands . . . which would put her right back in the perfect position to either signal or visit Woodhull to let him know where to meet the whaleboat captain.
New puzzle pieces are being uncovered all the time—especially when it comes to the unsung heroes, those who were discounted and overlooked—which is part of what makes the study of history so fascinating. No one piece reveals the whole picture. No one story tells the whole. The hunt for the truth continues, always.
I live two miles from where Anna Smith Strong lived, spied, and died. For years, I had no idea. And then one day, I started to notice all the signs for the Washington Spy Trail along the familiar roads. I began to read all the historical markers. I listened to the stories and read the books and talked to the people who’d studied the past. And I discovered that there was history all around me—and a tale I wanted to tell.
Maybe you don’t happen to live in a town where the Revolutionary War was fought, but wherever you are, there is history that has seeped into the ground beneath your feet as well. There are stories waiting to be told. There are secrets waiting to be uncovered. There are hidden heroes waiting to be remembered.
And they’re waiting for you.
If you have a chance to visit Setauket, I highly recommend it, especially if you can visit for the annual Culper Spy Day (a town-wide event celebrating Setauket’s local heroes).
If you don’t . . . here are a few of my favorite books and websites:
There’s more out there too. More books. More articles. More letters. More websites. More videos. More puzzle pieces to be discovered. More truth to find . . . and maybe you will be the one to find it!
You don’t need to be a Culper to make your own spy code!
There are several different kinds of codes you can create. You could make a code where every letter is written as a sequential number: A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, etc. Using this method, the word “spy” would be written as “19-16-25.”
In chapter three, Rachel’s spy notebook is filled with this kind of code. To make her code trickier to crack, she builds on the idea of A = 1 by adding two to every number, so A = 3, B = 4, C = 5, and so on. You could add any number you want. Or you could subtract or multiply. . . . For example, here’s a sentence written by adding three to every number:
11-12-22-23-18-21-28
12-22
8-25-8-21-28-26-11-8-21-8.
To read it, all someone needs to know is what mathematical formula you used. (The above example translates to: “History is everywhere.”)
Another option is to write your secret message with numbers that specify individual letters in a particular sentence, the way Nancy does in chapter four with the numbers in her ring and the inscription on her grave. For example, using the sentence “The spy used her clothesline to send signals,” you can encode the word “Culper” like this: 14-7-15-5-3-13. This code works like a lock and key—you need both to reveal the secret.
If you want to take it a step further, you could create your own codebook, like Benjamin Tallmadge did for the Culper Spy Ring. In chapter nine, Rachel and Joon need a copy of the Culper codebook to translate the famous letter that stated, “I intend to visit 727 before long and think by the assistance of a 355 of my acquaintance, shall be able to out wit them all.” While Tallmadge picked 727 to stand for “New York” and 355 for “lady,” you can invent your own codebook with whatever numbers and words you like in order to write whatever secret message you want!