Sally Etting lived until age four in York, Pennsylvania, then a frontier outpost, where her father was an Indian trader and army supplier. The seventh of eight children born to Elijah Etting and his wife, Shinah Solomon, Sally’s life was to change dramatically with the death of her father in 1780. Her distressed mother moved the family to Baltimore two years later. In search of a way of supporting herself and her five young children, she opened a gentleman’s boarding house at the corner of Baltimore and Calvert Streets, which she ran with their aid for many years.

Sally, along with her sisters Hetty and Kitty, never married. Nevertheless, like her mother, she would set herself up in trade. Raised as a genteel young lady, it seems that Sally eschewed the idea of setting up a public shop; instead, she appears to have conducted a modest trade in tea and sundries from her home, obtaining desirable luxury commodities from a family member in Philadelphia and selling to her friends, relations and acquaintances. Sally, it would appear, never lacked for companionship, and actively maintained her ties with a network of siblings (including brothers Reuben and Solomon), nieces, nephews and cousins in Baltimore and Philadelphia.