Benjamin Turner: From Slavery to Freedom Beside St. Paul's Church

An artist's view of Benjamin Turner working the family farm beside the Hutchinson River, with St. Paul's Church at upper left, in the early 1800s. NPS.

Benjamin Turner was an African American man who lived for several decades in the early 19th century on a small farm beside St. Paul's Church in Eastchester, New York, about 20 miles north of New York City. His story traces a local passage from slavery to freedom, the value of a settled home for a family, and a vanished rural way of life.

Origins

His exact origins are unclear, but the 1770 will of Phoebe Turner, a Quaker widow in the town of Westchester about five miles south of St. Paul's, likely explains them. She declared that at her death the people she enslaved could choose new masters — a policy that led in time to the freeing of those on her farm, including Benjamin, then a child.

Family and land

• Marriage: he first appears near St. Paul's in the early 1800s as the husband of Rebecca, enslaved on the estate of Glorianna Franklin, a wealthy Eastchester widow and also a Quaker. Ben probably helped win Rebecca's freedom in 1810.
• A homestead: first guests of the parish, they settled on a narrow strip beside the churchyard, with the community's tacit approval, and farmed for their own needs, raising six children. On Eastchester Creek they added fish, clams and oysters to their diet.
• Ownership: Ben never held a written title, but the community recognized the land as his, and he paid taxes on it.

A trusted neighbor

In 1818 the town chose the Turner property as the place where the Town Pounder would hold stray animals until owners paid their fines. Ben's farm sat at the town's center, beside the common — but the choice meant more than location.

• Context: local records usually mentioned Black people in runaway-slave rewards, rules for gradual emancipation (slavery lasted in New York until 1827), and good-behavior bonds required of free laborers.
• Confidence: against that background, entrusting this to a man born enslaved, in town for less than ten years, showed extraordinary public trust — and his offer of land for paid town service showed a resourceful way to sustain his farm.

Church and school

• St. Paul's: living perhaps 100 yards away, the Turners belonged to the Episcopal church, the town's only place of worship, where African Americans had taken part since the early 1700s. Membership likely confirmed Ben's standing.
• Segregation: his children went to the all-Black Sunday school, and the family probably sat on gallery benches, since pew boxes went to families who gave more.
• After Ben: by the late 1830s Rebecca had joined other families in founding a nearby independent Black church.

Death and legacy

Ben died in 1833 or 1834, probably in his mid-60s. Until then he was listed as guardian of the children at the town's schools, which were integrated; afterward Rebecca signed for them. He may be buried in the St. Paul's cemetery, though the parish log has no record of it.

His life recalls the rural past of today's urban, industrial Mount Vernon, where St. Paul's Church National Historic Site stands: days shaped by crops, animals and the river, with the hearth at the center. Above all he taught his family that land meant independence — a value that kept the family on its ground into the 20th century. In the 21st century, a Mount Vernon school about half a mile from St. Paul's was renamed Benjamin Turner Middle School.

Sources

Based on "Benjamin Turner: Patriarch of an African American family that lived for three generations, from slavery to freedom, near St. Paul's Church," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.