Whitehead, or Aunt Peggy’s House, at 4 Aunt Peggy’s Lane, dates to at least 1702 and was built by tailor Nathaniel Roberts. It remained in the family for five generations. Its steeply gabled roofs and step-shouldered flanking chimneys are typical of early St George’s grant houses. In his 1718 will, Roberts divided his dwelling among his five adult children, giving a bedroom and closet to John, the hall to Nathaniel Jr, porch chamber to widowed daughters Mary Newbanks and Elizabeth Hinson, and a bedroom to Edward after his wife’s death.

John Roberts, a shoemaker, was the head of the crowded household and paid assessments through 1779 when the house passed to John’s youngest son Nathaniel, a farmer. In 1802 Nathaniel died and left it to his son Charles after his wife Susannah’s death.

Charles Roberts was a grocer and a property value increase suggests that he expanded the house in the 1820s. Bermuda Slave Registers reveal that he owned a 10 year old ‘coloured house girl’ named Susan in 1821, who was still living there in 1834 when she was emancipated. After Charles Roberts died in 1842, his widow and then his son Nathaniel, also a grocer, occupied the house until 1882, when Samuel Chapman bought the house and two adjoining lots. A landlord with numerous St George’s properties, Chapman apparently rented the house to tenants.

In the 1890s, visitors to St George’s frequently met an elderly Black woman who lived in the house, a former enslaved person who was ‘known to keep a watch on the town as she sat by her window, chatting to passersby’. She was photographed in the 1890s and appeared on numerous postcards produced over the next thirty years. Other than her nickname ‘Aunt Peggy’ her identity is not known but one wonders whether she is Sue, the girl who lived and served in the house in the 1820s.