In his 1891 memoir, Rev. W.W. Crane recalled growing up in the town of Nelson, on a farm three miles east of the village of Cazenovia, New York. He attended school at Jackson’s Corners, a half-mile east, where he “fell in” with an African American boy he called “black Jerry.”
Crane remembered Jerry, “though very meek and innocent, was so taunted, on account of his color, that he went to the brook and tried to wash off the black, and while his tears fell like rain drops on the water, he pushed his hand to the bottom and brought the sand and tried to scour off the black.” The two became intimate friends, and Crane learned that Jerry’s father had a been a soldier in the Revolutionary War and General George Washington’s cook. [Read more…] about Plymouth Freeman: American Revolution Veteran, Former Slave