Sarah Elizabeth Nelson: Land, Faith and Family Beside St. Paul's Church

Sarah Elizabeth Nelson's 1934 appeal against a demand for back taxes that threatened foreclosure on land beside St. Paul's Church, held by her family since the early 1800s. NPS.

Sarah Elizabeth "Libby" Nelson lived in the shadow of St. Paul's Church from the mid-19th century into the early 20th, until the changing neighborhood ended a traditional way of life and forced her from a three-generation family homestead.

Family

• Born in 1849, she was the granddaughter of enslaved African Americans who lived on a narrow strip of land along the church's eastern edge.
• Her father, Sam Nelson, arrived in the mid-1830s — perhaps meaning to stay briefly — and remained more than 30 years, marrying Sarah Turner, who lived with her parents on the land they had occupied since 1810.
• After her mother's death, by the time of the Civil War, Libby moved back to the little farm with her father and sister, and lived there another forty years.

Her life was shaped by the racial prejudice that marked the North until the modern civil rights movement — and by deep religious faith and pride in her land and family.

Keeping a church alive

Libby's family helped found the Asbury Methodist Church, an African American congregation near St. Paul's, in the 1830s. When a new Methodist church in Mount Vernon drew members away in the mid-1800s, Asbury closed. Libby worshipped at St. Paul's for some years, but kept Asbury alive by holding Sunday school in her home and saving the students' donations. When Asbury reopened in 1890, it was partly with the money she had collected.

Losing the land

Her central devotion was the homestead — and the industrialization of the late 1800s swallowed its semi-rural world. Even work as a laundress became impossible:

"My sister and me lived alone; our chickens were taken and we were disturbed nights. The garbage was dumped around our place so that it was difficult for us to get to the road. It was also impossible for us to do laundry work for a living any more, as the grass and everything was covered with ashes and the well water was spoiled."

She moved to New Jersey around 1910 and later to Nyack, New York, fighting to keep her rights to the land, until the city foreclosed for unpaid taxes in 1935. She wrote to the city:

"The land is in your hands. I am the last heir. … It is now over a hundred years ago, since our dear and godly grandparents, gathered their children for family prayers, morning and evening, and a blessing at each meal, and it was handed down to us, to me, the last heir. Now I can say with boldness their God is my God."

See also: Benjamin Turner, who farmed beside the churchyard from the early 1800s.

Sources

Based on "Sarah Elizabeth Nelson: A Woman Devoted to Land, Faith & Family," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. In the first quotation, the original's "to that" is read as "so that."