Lincoln Cemetery was founded in November 1877 by the Wesley Union African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (A.M.E. Zion Church), [1] and is located at 201 South 30th Street in the Penbrook area of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. [2] [3]
| Lincoln Cemetery | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Details | |
| Established | 1877 |
| Location | |
| Country | United States |
| Coordinates | 40°16′50.49″N76°51′19.67″W / 40.2806917°N 76.8554639°W |
| Owned by | Wesley Union A.M.E Zion Church |
| No. of interments | over 4400 |
| Find a Grave | Lincoln Cemetery |
The oldest extant Black cemetery in Harrisburg, Lincoln contains many people re-interred from the approximately five original African-American Burial Grounds in the city of Harrisburg. Members of the Wesley Union church, spread out through the Harrisburg Area, were active in the Underground Railroad. [1] Civil War veterans, including Ephraim Slaughter, the last surviving Civil War Veteran of Harrisburg are buried in the cemetery. He served in the 37th regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops and the 3rd N.C. Colored Infantry. [1] [4] It is the site of one of the historical markers in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. [5]
In July 2021, part of the descendant community of Lincoln Cemetery began clean-up, restoration and reclamation of the grounds. [6]
The Christian Methodist Episcopal (C.M.E.) Church is a historically black denomination within the broader context of Wesleyan Methodism founded and organized by John Wesley in England in 1744 and established in America as the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1784. It is considered to be a mainline denomination. The CME Church was organized on December 16, 1870 in Jackson, Tennessee by 41 former slave members with the full support of their white sponsors in their former Methodist Episcopal Church, South who met to form an organization that would allow them to establish and maintain their own polity. They ordained their own bishops and ministers without their being officially endorsed or appointed by the white-dominated body. They called this fellowship the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America, which it remained until their successors adopted the current name in 1954. The Christian Methodist Episcopal today has a church membership of people from all racial backgrounds. It adheres to Wesleyan-Arminian theology.
Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen, born Jarm Logue, in slavery, was an African-American abolitionist and bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and an author of a slave narrative.
Camp Curtin is a historic neighborhood in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's northern end, located in Uptown and named for the American Civil War camp of the same name. It is bordered currently by landmarks of Fifth Street to the west, the railroad tracks next to the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex to the east, Maclay Street to the south, and Reels Lane to the North.
Lewis Woodson was an educator, minister, writer, and abolitionist. He was an early leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Woodson started and helped to build other institutions within the free African-American communities in Ohio and western Pennsylvania prior to the American Civil War.
Daniel Alexander Payne was an American bishop, educator, college administrator and author. A major shaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.), Payne stressed education and preparation of ministers and introduced more order in the church, becoming its sixth bishop and serving for more than four decades (1852–1893) as well as becoming one of the founders of Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1856. In 1863 the AME Church bought the college and chose Payne to lead it; he became the first African-American president of a college in the United States and served in that position until 1877.
Thomas James (1804–1891) had been a slave who became an African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister, abolitionist, administrator and author. He was active in New York and Massachusetts with abolitionists, and served with the American Missionary Association and the Union Army during the American Civil War to supervise the contraband camp in Louisville, Kentucky. After the war, he held national offices in the AME Church and was a missionary to black churches in Ohio. While in Massachusetts, he challenged the railroad's custom of forcing blacks into second-class carriages and won a reversal of the rule in the State Supreme Court. He wrote a short memoir published in 1886.
Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church is a historic African Methodist Episcopal Church in Springtown, New Jersey, United States. The church was part of two free negro communities, Othello and Springtown, established by local Quaker families. The congregation was established in 1810 in Greenwich Township as the African Methodist Society and joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1817. A previous church building was burned down in the 1830s in an arson incident and the current structure was built between 1838 and 1841.
Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church and Mount Zion Cemetery is a historic church and cemetery located at 172 Garwin Road in Woolwich Township, New Jersey, United States. The church was a stop on the Greenwich Line of the Underground Railroad through South Jersey operated by Harriet Tubman for 10 years. The church provided supplies and shelter to runaway slaves on their way to Canada from the South. The church and cemetery were part of the early 19th-century free negro settlement sponsored by Quakers known as Small Gloucester.
Timbuctoo is an unincorporated community in Westampton Township, Burlington County, New Jersey. Located along the Rancocas Creek, Timbuctoo was settled by formerly enslaved and free Black people, beginning in 1826. It includes Church St., Blue Jay Hill Road, and adjacent areas. At its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, Timbuctoo had more than 125 residents, a school, an AME Zion Church, and a cemetery. The key remaining evidence of this community is the cemetery on Church Street, which was formerly the site of Zion Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal African Church. Some current residents are descendants of early settlers.
Mount Zion Cemetery/Female Union Band Society Cemetery is a historic cemetery located at 27th Street NW and Mill Road NW in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in the United States. The cemetery is actually two adjoining burial grounds: the Mount Zion Cemetery and Female Union Band Society Cemetery. Together these cemeteries occupy approximately three and a half acres of land. The property fronts Mill Road NW and overlooks Rock Creek Park to the rear. Mount Zion Cemetery, positioned to the East, is approximately 67,300 square feet in area; the Female Union Band Cemetery, situated to the West, contains approximately 66,500 square feet. Mount Zion Cemetery, founded in 1808 as The Old Methodist Burial Ground, was leased property later sold to Mount Zion United Methodist Church. Although the cemetery buried both White and Black persons since its inception, it served an almost exclusively African American population after 1849. In 1842, the Female Union Band Society purchased the western lot to establish a secular burying ground for African Americans. Both cemeteries were abandoned by 1950.
William Howard Day was a black abolitionist, editor, educator and minister. After his father died when he was four, Day went to live with J. P. Williston and his wife who ensured that he received a good education and learned the printer's trade. He received his bachelor's and master's degree from Oberlin College. He was a printer and newspaper editor. He fought for civil rights of African Americans a number of ways, as a journalist, teacher, and leader of the Freedmen's Bureau. He was an orator, making a speech to 10,000 newly emancipated people on what biographer Todd Mealy called the first march on Washington.
Bishop Singleton T. Jones was a religious leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. When he was ten years old, he was apprenticed to a lawyer and worked for him for four years, after which he found positions at an inn, as a hod carrier, and on a riverboat on the Ohio River. He became a pastor in the 1840s, serving churches throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Although he had little education, he taught himself to be an articulate orator. Besides being a pastor to churches, he also edited AME Zion publications, the Zion's Standard and Weekly Review and the Discipline.
Rev. John E. Price was an elder and minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. He was a minister for around 50 years. He was the founder and president of the Garnet Equal Rights League at Harrisburg. He wrote hymns and was an editor for the Zion Church Advocate and, with William H. Day, the Zion Church Herald and Outlook, the first paper of the AME Zion Church. Day was a minister, abolitionist, and educator.
Harriet McClintock Marshall was a conductor on the Underground Railroad whose home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania served as a stop or safe house for the clandestine network, along with the Wesley Union African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and other homes in the city. She offered shelter, food, and clothing to people escaping slavery. Her husband Elisha Marshall, a formerly enslaved man and veteran of the American Civil War, was also active in helping people reach freedom, often providing transportation.
Harrisburg's role as a hub in the Underground Railroad (UGRR) was pivotal and successful for several reasons, one of which was because of the number of free blacks that could assist runaways and the many routes through the area.
The Wesley Union African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church is an AME Zion Church of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It was formally founded in 1829, starting with a log church building. As the congregation grew throughout the 19th century, the building was expanded until two brick church buildings were constructed in 1862 and 1898. For a period of time, the church operated a school for African American children.
Hosanna Meeting House, also known as the Hosanna A.U.M.P. Church, is a historic African American church near Oxford, Pennsylvania, United States, on the present-day campus of Lincoln University. Organized in 1843 and constructed by 1845, the Hosanna Meeting House was a station on the Underground Railroad and a primary place of worship for members of the free Black community of Hinsonville. A Pennsylvania state historical marker was placed at the church in 1992.