Andrew Frazier (grave stone)
*Andrew Frazier's birth is celebrated on this date in 1743. He was a Black enslaved laborer and soldier.
Born at the Manor of Morrisania, New York, Frazier served in the Revolutionary War first as a "waggoner" or wagon driver, then as a "waiter" or body servant to Colonel Morris Graham and was at the Battles of Harlem and White Plains with Graham. After the war, Frazier married and became a landowner in the adjacent town of Milan, where there was considerable land ownership by 'Free Blacks.' (Anthony Williams, Henry, and Almira Jackson were others).
In his just-over-a-century life, he would see the rapid expansion of slavery in New York, then its "gradual" abolition. He would see the land patents of the wealthy turned into the freehold farmland of Jefferson's ideal agrarian economy, becoming a landowning farmer himself while raising seven children. He would become patriarch to an ever-growing family that included soldiers in the Civil War. His name would resurface three generations later when a lineal descendant, Susan Elizabeth Frazier, led the call for equal opportunity into the early 20th century and through WWI.
Andrew Frazier died June 2, 1846, at the age of 102. As was the tradition then, he was buried at his family homestead in Milan, NY. He and other family members were removed to a particular section of the Rhinebeck Cemetery sometime after 1900 (perhaps when the farmland was sold outside the family). The family plot has grown to 19 headstones. Andrew Frazier was African American, in part or in whole, with the debate of that issue becoming part of the extraordinary story.
"The family plot lies adjacent to section E, sometimes called Potters Field. It was created in 1853 through Mary Garrettson's gift for African Americans and the poor. Frazier's headstone reads, "In the Revolutionary War 1776, in his memory. "The family plot lies adjacent to section E, sometimes called Potters Field. It was created in 1853 through the gift of Mary Garrettson for African Americans and the poor. Frazier's headstone reads, "In the Revolutionary War 1776, in his memory.
