Having emigrated to America about a decade earlier and become freemen of Massachusetts Bay in 1691, Peter's father, Benjamin, and his uncle, Andrew, had subsequently been early settlers of New Rochelle.

Their widowed, childless uncle Andrew had become one of New England's wealthiest men through shrewd trading and Boston real estate investments.

Peter Faneuil's first claim to fame occurred in 1728 when he helped his brother-in-law Henry Phillips escape to France after he killed Benjamin Woodbridge in the first duel ever to take place in Boston.

When in 1736 his ship Providence was seized for exchanging fish and oil for French gold, he complained that only the "caprice" of the admiralty judge, a "Vile" man, was responsible for "Impositions" on a "fair trader" that was "in no way founded on law and justice.

Benjamin Jr. preferred wedlock to a share of the enormous Faneuil fortune, which in addition to ships, shops, and a mansion in Tremont Street included £14,000 in East India Company stock.

This offer was by no means uncontroversial: Bostonians had debated throughout the eighteenth century whether a centralized market was preferable to peddling in the streets, bringing conveniences such as home delivery but also inconveniences including noisy push-cart hucksters and higher prices.

John Lovell, who gave his funeral eulogy, said that Faneuil "fed the hungry and he cloathed the naked, he comforted the fatherless, and the widows in their affliction."

An obituary noted that he was "a gentleman, possessed of a very ample fortune and a most generous spirit," his "noble benefaction to his town and constant employment of a great number of tradesmen, artificers, and laborers, to whom he was a liberal paymaster .

He donated liberally to the Episcopal Charitable Society, an endowment for the families of the deceased clergymen of Trinity Church, to which he belonged, and was treasurer of the project to build the present King's Chapel.

[2] He left his fortune, including five enslaved black people and 195 dozen bottles of wine, to his sister Mary and brother Benjamin Jr. (who was later to become a Loyalist in the American Revolution).