Sarah Mary Benjamin, Revolutionary War Heroine

Near here lived a woman remembered locally as an eyewitness to the American Revolution. According to local tradition, Sarah Mary Benjamin was more than one hundred years old when she died in the eighteen fifties, and she spent her final decades right in this area, known for the vivid stories she told of the war. She is said to have traveled with her husband's New York unit from seventeen eighty to seventeen eighty-three, doing the sewing, washing, and bread baking that kept soldiers in the field.

She reportedly stood guard as a sentinel at Kingsbridge in his place, and at Yorktown she is said to have carried food to the soldiers. She was one of thousands of women who served the Continental Army in ways history rarely recorded.