It all started with The Summer Christmas Came to Minnesota. This 1989 article by Dr. William D. Green sent Jason Benjamin, a long-time South Minneapolis resident and teacher, down a Minnesota history rabbit hole.
The article tells the story of Eliza Winston, an enslaved woman brought to Minnesota in 1860 by the Christmas family, one of many Southern slaveholding families who summered in Minnesota. By the time Eliza Winston arrived, the new state had ratified a constitution that stated: “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in this state.” Yet many locals turned a blind eye to the presence of enslaved people in this “free state.”
Eliza Winston forced Minnesotans to reckon with this contradiction. She was the first and only enslaved person in the state of Minnesota to secure her freedom through the court system.
“I was taught growing up that the institution of slavery was in the South, and Minnesota didn't have anything to do with it,” Jason said. “And here you have this story that contradicts that. … It's like, wait a minute, let's find out more about this.”
Eliza Winston worked with both free African Americans and White abolitionists in Minneapolis to flee her captors. She finally broke free at the Thornton Boarding House, which was described as a “cottage by Lake Harriet.”
Jason is a fourth grade teacher at Burroughs Elementary, which is located just south of Lake Harriet. He needed to know: could he and his students see this site of Winston’s fight for freedom from their school?
To answer this question he reached out to Mapping Prejudice. Penny Petersen and Michael Corey scoured historical plat maps, property records and city directories to find that the historic Thornton Boarding House once sat on a small triangle of greenspace on the shores of Lake Harriet.
Jason credits the work of historians like Dr. Christopher Lehman, museum directors like Coventry Royster Cowens, John Crippen at Hennepin History Museum, and poets like Mary Moore Easter with unearthing Eliza’s story. But there is still so much to unearth. He notes that it “is pretty amazing that we have this piece of history in Minnesota. And it's still being revealed as we talk about it.”
Over the last year, Jason has been bringing Eliza Winston’s story to the fourth and fifth graders at Burroughs Elementary, who live in the neighborhood surrounding Lake Harriet. For him, the goal of teaching such place-based history is the connection students make to the present day and to take action.
“And the action,” said Jason, “can be as simple as: ‘Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Grandpa, we went to a place today, and we learned about this person, Eliza Winston.’”
Jason is taking these conversations out of the classroom and into the neighborhood. He is gathering community movers and shakers, including Mapping Prejudice and Hennepin History Museum, to create an interpretive site marker and commemorative bench at that grassy triangle by Lake Harriet.
“We want that marker to have words that are powerful … to understand what are the action steps to make our community a better place, to make Minneapolis a better place, to make the state of Minnesota a better place.”
You can learn more about Eliza Winston and her story by joining Jason Benjamin, and the Mapping Prejudice and Hennepin History Museum teams on Saturday, Sept. 26 from 12-3 p.m. at the Lake Harriet Parkway between Thomas and Sheridan Ave South.
This item appeared in the Sept. 18, 2026 UMN Mapping Prejudice Project e-newsletter.
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