Bill Jeffway, the Executive Director of the Dutchess County Historical Society, will tell the tale of Morris Graham and Andrew Frazier who arrived in northern Dutchess County in the 1760’s under quite different circumstances.
This final event celebrating the Pine Plains Bicentennial will be held at the Community Room above the Library on Nov. 18 at 1:00. The event, presented by the Little Nine Partners Historical Society, is free and refreshments will be served.
Frazier was born in the early 1740’s in what is now the Bronx and his birth was noted in a Graham family bible, indicating that he might have been enslaved by that family. He and Graham came to Pine Plains and served in the Revolutionary War. Frazier was a wagon driver and later a servant of Colonial Graham. Both were involved in the Battles of Harlem and White Plains in September and October of 1776.
Later in life, Frazier owned land and had a family in Milan. He lived to a very old age. Graham, who was not the owner of the Graham-Brush House (his brother Lewis lived there) built the first stone house in Pine Plains in 1772 that still stands near Rte. 82 south of the hamlet. He raised and funded a militia that was called “Graham’s regiment.” That investment may have impoverished him as he sold his house and moved away in 1798, and died in 1804 at the age of 58.
The intertwined lives of these two men and their very different fates after the Revolutionary War will be central to Jeffway’s talk on Saturday. A Milan resident, Jeffway serves on the research committee of Celebrating the African Spirit, and serves on the advisory committee of the Vassar College Inclusive History Initiative.