1. Book on Westchester's 'Hills'
community, Civil War
Richard Liebson, rliebson@lohud.com6:13 p.m. EDT June 27, 2015
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/2015/06/27/new-book-describes-civil-war-contributions-
eras-largest-african-american-communituy-westchester/29404277/
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(Photo: The Journal News)
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
 Edythe Ann Quinn, a former Harrison historian, is a social history professor at Hartwick College.
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The "Eureka!" moment came in 1986, while Edythe Ann Quinn was working on her
master's thesis, doing research at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
She was studying "the Hills" community — a rugged, rocky, woodsy stretch of land on the
Harrison-White Plains-North Castle border that was once home to the largest African-
American settlement in Westchester County. Blacks had been settling there since the
late 1700s, when Quakers and then Methodists began freeing their slaves. In 1860, at
the start of the Civil War, according to census records, the population peaked at 191.
A former Harrison Town historian who is now a social history professor at Hartwick
College in Oneonta, Quinn knew that 36 of the community's men fought in the war. She
knew that 13 of those veterans were buried in the neglected, overgrown cemetery near
the remnants of a church foundation — the only physical signs that the Hills community
ever existed.
Countless hours had been spent poring over census data, black Civil War unit rosters
and other records. And while she carefully documented everything she found, Quinn was

2. hoping for something more human than names on a page. On that day at the Archives,
she opened a thick file containing the pension application of Hills resident Sarah Jane
Tierce, the widow of Sgt. Simeon Anderson Tierce, who had, as the file noted, served in
Company E of the Fourteenth Rhode Island Regiment, Heavy Artillery (Colored).
Book by Edythe Ann Quinn is called Freedom Journey:Black Civil War Soldiers and The Hills Community,
Westchester County, New York. (Photo: Submitted)
And there they were. Five letters from Tierce to his wife. Long, carefully written missives
detailing life in the Army, and descriptions of the liberated city of New Orleans. There
were messages to friends and family. There were passages about his devotion to God.
There were sentences about his love for the Hills. And for Sarah.
"I understood that I had a treasure in my hands," Quinn said. "I realized that I was
probably the very first person to read the letters since they had been filed away in the
1880s."
Almost three decades later, Tierce's letters serve as the foundation for "Freedom
Journey: Black Civil War Soldiers and The Hills Community, Westchester County, New
York," Quinn's book on her life's research, which was published in May by SUNY Press.
The meticulously researched book serves as a history of both the military units the 36
Hills men served with and of the community that produced them, and their commitment to
the cause of freedom. It includes the battle stories, the census data, the unit rosters and
the pension records. Perhaps more importantly, it humanizes the hopes, dreams and
struggles faced by one isolated, segregated community caught up in the swirl of history.

3. "If you look at it closely, you realize that pretty much every able-bodied man in the Hills
enlisted," Quinn said. "These were the bread-winners, the men who were in the prime of
their lives. They went, knowing that it would cause hardship for their wives, their children
and the elderly of their community. But they wanted to end slavery. It was embedded in
the marrow in their bones - they wanted to end slavery."
The book has already been hailed as an important addition to the history of black
participation in the Civil War.
"I'm an academic," Quinn said. "Obviously I want it to be well-received for it's scholarship,
but I think it's important for the general public to know of the contributions this community
made to Westchester, to New York and to U.S. history. These were very real people, and
it's real people who make history. Their story deserves to be told and acknowledged and
remembered."
Visit www.sunypress.edu or www.amazon.com to purchase Freedom Journey: Black Civil
War Soldiers and The Hills Community, Westchester County, New York.
Twitter: @RichLiebson
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