Concert Number 28: 4/30/23 at the Grafton Community Church

...donations benefited Third Act

Women’s suffrage, Black homesteading, and a pioneering community foundation

I’ll eventually get to the concert, I promise, but there’s a lot to say first about the town of Grafton and the stories centered on the hosting church.

Helen Lake Greene was the first to recommend the Grafton Community Church, telling us the 1830 sanctuary’s acoustics were “stunning, with a cathedral-like resonance that’s astonishing in such an intimate space”. Most New England churches dating from this era of long sermons and no amplification have good sound. But Grafton’s is indeed remarkable and unexpected in this handsome but modest structure. Similarly, this unassuming little church is at the center of three remarkable Vermont trailblazer stories: an early African-American dynasty, an uncompromising suffrage activist, and one of Vermont’s first community foundations.

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the Turner Family

In early communications about scheduling, point person Mary Howard Feder gently corrected us when we referred to the “White Church”, as it used to be called in distinction to the Brick Church down the street. Parishioners now prefer to call it the Community Church, to avoid any suggestion of racial exclusion. This sweet but seemingly oversensitive concern made more sense when I learned about the church’s most storied members, the Turner family.

Alessi Turner was a half-Yoruba, half-English trader enslaved by the English in 1830—the same year the church was built in the town that would eventually be home to Alessi’s posterity. Alessi was sold into slavery in Virginia, where his son Alexander (Alec) was born in 1845. While still in his teens, Alec escaped to join the 1st New Jersey Cavalry, in which capacity he eventually led his regiment to his old plantation where he shot and killed his onetime overseer. After the war he sought his fortune in the north, taking work as a logger in Grafton, where he expected racial attitudes would be more favorable. Alec and his wife Sally joined the Community (at that time the Baptist) Church, purchasing two pews for themselves and their 13 children.

Many stories capture Alec’s legendary strength and the subtler but still endemic racism he faced in his adopted home. One day he was unloading 300-pound barrels of flour and told the storekeeper he would like to buy ten pounds. The storekeeper told him he could have a whole barrel for free if he could carry it home without setting it down. Turner took the challenge, and followed by a corps of doubters, trudged the three miles home up Turner Hill. While I suspect the barrel may have grown heavier in the retelling—a standard barrel of flour weighs “only” 196 pounds—the many taunting skeptics became witnesses, so the gist of the story is well attested, and Turner was thereafter acknowledged the strongest man in Grafton and something of a hero.

We know so much of the Turners because one of Alec and Sally’s 13 children, Daisy, was a great storyteller who lived to be 104. Jane Beck interviewed her repeatedly in her final years and preserved much family lore in the book Daisy Turner’s Kin. A remarkable woman in her own right, Daisy once sued a fiancé for breach of promise—a Black woman against a white man in 1927—and won. Several of Alec and Sally’s descendants are members of the church to this day, and the Turner homestead, Journey’s End, is now open to the public. While the house burned decades ago and is now only a cellar pit, Birchdale Camp, the family summer lodge, has recently been restored.

Lucy Daniels, suffragist

The Turners were not the only social justice warriors to attend the Community Church. Pastor Bill Watson lives next door in the house of his great-aunt Lucy Daniels. Lucy was a suffrage activist arrested several times at demonstrations in Boston and D.C., and briefly jailed under harsh conditions intended to humiliate and terrify. It didn’t work. Lucy instead became a tax resister, refusing to fund a government that did not represent her. She used her legal training to avoid impoundment of her real assets by transferring ownership of her properties to relatives, then neglecting to register the deeds, putting the properties into a bureaucratic limbo that prevented the government from seizing them.

Daniels was involved in the National American Woman Suffrage Association and repeatedly lobbied Alice Paul to recruit and include Black women in the fight. Once, a tax collector coming to auction off her assets reminded Daniels that she had at least the right to vote in school meetings; Daniels responded by pointing to her housekeeper, saying that until the working-class women of Vermont could vote as well, she would not either.

the Windham Foundation

The Windham Foundation was established in 1963 by Dean Mathey, a New York financier who summered in Grafton. Grafton’s main businesses, the Grafton Village Cheese Company and the storied Grafton Inn, were on the verge of collapse, as was the White Church building, when Mathey began the Foundation. A student of New England architecture, Mathey’s intent was not to establish a museum town “but to create vibrant social enterprises with historical resonance that benefited the local community and provided good jobs. The Foundation was set up as an ‘operating’ foundation with the purpose of running the two enterprises. The Foundation has expanded into other ventures as well, protecting nearly 1200 acres of forest and open land, operating the Grafton Trails and Recreation Center, and preserving the aforementioned Turner property and restoring the Birchdale Camp.

Mathey not only rescued these iconic enterprises, and through them, much of the town’s vitality and nearly unbelievable charm. He also rescued Princeton University’s finances as the effective sole director of the endowment in the 1920s and 30s. In 1928, he moved the University out of common stocks he considered overvalued and into a diverse portfolio of corporate bonds and a modest selection of preferred stock. In the first week of October 1929, he sold almost half of Princeton’s remaining common holdings just as the Dow hit its then all-time high, only 3 weeks before the crash. Princeton, today, has the largest endowment per student of any American university—almost twice that of Harvard’s.

Corporate bonds were not the only thing Mathey purchased in 1928...