Mrs. Warner at work in the kitchen of Meals on Wheels in 1976.

This week, a brilliant leader will be laid to rest. She never ran for elected office and never engaged in partisan debate but the path she traveled is one that Newburghers would be well advised to follow.

Frederica Hunter Warner was born in our small city in 1917. Her childhood was like so many of her neighbors: not at all easy but buoyed by love.

Her father, Lafayette Hunter, was a waiter at the Palatine Hotel and his family were early free black settlers who participated in the Underground Railroad.
Mrs. Warner would speak with great pride of accompanying her father to the grand Masonic Temple for annual events. Her mother, Sarah Frint Hunter, cared for her daughter through a devastating childhood disease requiring leg surgeries and Frederica returned that care after her father’s untimely death. She stopped her education at Newburgh Free Academy and went to work full-time to help support their household in Chambers Street. (For her 100th birthday year, NFA awarded Frederica her official diploma.)

Mrs. Warner once told me about her restless energy and can-do personality when she described her favorite childhood game of climbing telephone poles, despite her small size, to keep up with her male playmates. Frederica grew up and married Loren Warner, a man who also had deep Orange County roots. Indeed, the couple organized a celebration in 1988 for the 100th anniversary of Loren’s parents’ wedding, which had taken place in the Orange County Village of Florida.

Long family connections may have been partly responsible for Frederica Warner’s perceptive understanding of her hometown but there was some other internal flame that drew people to her and all her endeavors. She listened and she remembered. She delighted in weaving together the threads of connection among people and events. I remember showing her an old Newburgh News issue proclaiming the allied victory in World War II. After sharing her recollections of how Newburghers streamed out to Broadway to celebrate that news together in 1945, she quietly turned the other pages of the paper and was able to relate so many interesting details about nearly every family who had advertised their business. She knew all that because she truly cared about her neighbors. Frederica and Loren worked and socialized across and around color barriers before most others found that talent.

Loren worked at Sears and Frederica was head cook at the Powelton Club. Together, they also ran a successful catering business.

Mr. and Mrs. Warner owned a beautiful old house on Ann Street that fell victim to the Urban Renewal demolition program. They filled the antebellum house with antiques and entertained often, hosting events for many causes. As she said to one reporter who asked her about life in her beautiful old mansion, “Well, if you weren’t invited to the Warner’s home, you just weren’t anyone!” Frederica served on church and charity boards at every stage of her life, always doing at least as much work as she asked her volunteers to give. The Hudson Valley Sound and Story Project includes two audio interviews with Frederica that describe her old Ann Street home and also her early days with her signature charity, Meals on Wheels of Greater Newburgh. Those interviews can be found at: soundandstory.org/search/?sq=Warner

Frederica Warner told one reporter that she consistently fought any misgivings about taking on a worthy project by listening for the little voice she always found within herself that whispered, “Try.” After 101 years among us, she will no longer be the one to urge us to try and do more for Newburgh, but in her memory we can follow her light and keep going down the path she set.