First Parish Burial Ground
Ashby, MA
Prince Estabrook is widely celebrated as the first Patriot of Color to fight in the American Revolution, having fought at the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775. Though Estabrook was shot during the skirmish, he survived his wounds and went on to see combat again. By July 1776, he was headed to Fort Ticonderoga. After serving a few tours of duty as a militia man, he joined the Continental Army in 1780. He was last listed on a muster roll in October 1783.
According to Estabrook biographer Alice Hinkle's Prince Estabrook, Slave and Soldier, a 1780 military report described Estabrook as being, “39 years old, 5 feet 11 inches tall, negro, and a farmer.”
Throughout the war, Estabrook was enslaved. After the war concluded, he received manumission from Benjamin Estabrook, the Lexington man to whom he had been indentured. It remains unclear whether the terms of his emancipation were contingent on his service.
After his emancipation, Estabrook moved to Ashby and stayed with Benjamin Estabrook’s son, Nathaniel. He lived there until his death just shy of 90 years old and was buried in Ashby’s First Parish Burial Ground in 1830.
One hundred years after his death, following a petition of the Brigadier General James Reed Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution to the U.S. Department of War, a headstone was installed to honor Estabrook. The stone is described in the article “Headstone for Grave of Negro Warrior’” in the May 23rd edition of the Fitchburg Evening Gazette as, “being similar to that which marks the graves of other heroes of that conflict.” It also describes Estabrook as a “brave defender of American liberty.’
The grave marker reads:
PRINCE
ESTABROOK
NEGRO
GREATON’S
CO.
3 MASS. REGT.
REV. WAR