The Folger Line
The story begins with Peter Folger(1617–1690), the poet, schoolmaster, and interpreter who helped found Nantucket. Peter’s descendants spread across New England and beyond. One branch produced Benjamin Franklinthrough Peter’s daughter Abiah. Another branch stayed on the island and built fortunes in whaling and trade.
In 1846, the Great Fire of Nantucket destroyed much of the town. Among those who left was eleven-year-old James Athearn Folger. At fourteen, he joined the California Gold Rush, but instead of mining, he went to work for Pioneer Steam Coffee and Spice Mills in San Francisco. Through persistence and skill, he took over the business and renamed it J.A. Folger & Co.—the company that became Folgers Coffee, one of the most recognized brands in American history.
J.A. Folger II continued the family business. His grandson Peter Folger became chairman. Peter’s daughter was Abigail Anne Folger.
Abigail Folger
Abigail Anne Folger was born on August 11, 1943, in San Francisco. She was the great-great-granddaughter of James Athearn Folger and an heiress to the Folgers Coffee fortune. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1966 and moved to New York, where she worked at the University of California’s art museum. She was deeply committed to social causes, volunteering for Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign and doing civil rights work with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and social welfare organizations in Watts and South Los Angeles.
In late 1968, Abigail moved to Los Angeles with her boyfriend, the Polish writer and filmmaker Wojciech Frykowski. Through Frykowski’s connection to Roman Polanski, the couple began staying at 10050 Cielo Drive, a secluded home in the hills above Benedict Canyon in Los Angeles, rented by Polanski and his wife, Sharon Tate.
August 9, 1969
On the night of August 8–9, 1969, four members of the MansonFamily—Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian—drove to 10050 Cielo Drive on the orders of Charles Manson. Roman Polanski was away in London. Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, was at the house with three guests: Jay Sebring, a celebrity hair stylist; Wojciech Frykowski; and Abigail Folger.
Shortly after midnight, the intruders cut the telephone lines, climbed the fence, and entered the property. Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old who had been visiting the property’s caretaker, was shot in his car as he tried to leave. Inside the house, the four victims were brutally murdered. Abigail Folger was found on the lawn. She was twenty-five years old.
The Tate–LaBianca murders shocked the nation and came to symbolize the end of the 1960s counterculture era. Manson and his followers were convicted in 1971. The house at 10050 Cielo Drive was demolished in 1994.
The Contrast
What makes Abigail Folger’s story so wrenching is the contrast. She was a Radcliffe-educated woman who used her privilege and fortune not for luxury but for civil rights work in some of Los Angeles’ most underserved communities. She had the resources to live anywhere and do anything, and she chose to volunteer. The senselessness of her death—random, brutal, committed by strangers who didn’t even know who she was—stands in stark opposition to the life she was building.
The Folger coffee fortune was built by a Nantucket teenager who followed fires from island to city, who chose coffee over gold, who turned a mill into an American institution. Four generations later, his great-great-granddaughter was doing the same kind of work—building something, contributing, trying to make the world slightly better—when it was taken from her.
Connection to This Family
Abigail Folger descends from the same Peter Folger who is your direct ancestor and the grandfather of Benjamin Franklin. The connection runs through Peter’s Nantucket descendants, through the whaling era, through the Great Fire, through the Gold Rush, and into the coffee empire. The Folger name threads through four centuries of American history—from a colonial island schoolmaster to a Founding Father to a coffee dynasty to a Radcliffe graduate doing civil rights work in 1960s Los Angeles.