| Mount Gilead A.M.E. Church | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Location | 1940 Holicong Road, Buckingham Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA |
| Coordinates | 40°19′22.3″N75°01′59.9″W / 40.322861°N 75.033306°W Coordinates: 40°19′22.3″N75°01′59.9″W / 40.322861°N 75.033306°W |
| Built | 1852 |
  Location of Mount Gilead A.M.E. Church in Pennsylvania | |
Mount Gilead African Methodist Episcopal Church is a historic black church located atop Buckingham Mountain, near Holicong, Buckingham Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
The congregation was founded in 1822 by fifteen free and escaped enslaved Africans, and it is thought to be the second-oldest A.M.E. congregation in Bucks County. [1] The first church building was a log chapel, built in 1834. Title to the church property was in the name of the minister, Daniel Yeomans, when he deeded it to the congregation in 1843. [2] The present stone church was built in 1852. [1] The sloped site allowed for a single-room, 20-by-30-foot sanctuary above and a Sunday school room below.
Tradition holds that the community was a station on the Underground Railroad, the last station before fugitive slaves crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey. [3] The surrounding landowners were white Quaker abolitionists, who tolerated the escaped slaves' building cabins on Buckingham Mountain. [1] Selling or giving the land to the squatters would have been a direct violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which made it a federal crime to assist an escaped slave. The mountain's isolation and lookout views in all directions seemed to provide residents with some degree of protection from slave-catchers. At the community's height, reportedly a hundred African Americans lived on the mountain. [4]
Fugitive slave Benjamin "Big Ben" Jones (ca. 1800–1875) was a massive man – reportedly 6-feet 10 1/2-inches tall – who escaped from Maryland and settled on Buckingham Mountain around 1833. [5] In March 1844, his master and four slave-catchers appeared and captured Jones following a bloody struggle. They transported him to Philadelphia, and placed him on a ship to Baltimore, Maryland, where he was held in the notorious Hope Slatter slave prison, awaiting transfer to New Orleans for sale. [6] A group of Buckingham and Philadelphia Quakers raised the $700 (equal to $20,358 today) to buy him out of slavery. [7] He returned to the mountain, where he married a woman named Sarah Johnson. [8] He lived the last decade of his life at the Bucks County Almshouse, dying there in 1875.
The graveyard contains 243 marked graves and an unknown number of unmarked ones. [9] Among the burials are a number of the church's ministers, Civil War veterans of the United States Colored Troops, and William E. Teat (1914–2001), a baseball player from the Negro leagues. [10]
Regular services were held at the church into the early 20th century. For generations the property was maintained by descendants of the congregation, and the church building continued to be used for weddings, funerals, and special services. [1] Following the death of caretaker John Reinhardt in 2014, a community group formed to take over the care of the church, renaming it Mount Gilead Community Church. [11]
The North Star, an independent film loosely based on "Big Ben" Jones's life, debuted in 2015. [12] A circa-1870 photograph of Jones, the only known image of him, appears on the film's poster. [13] Some of the scenes were filmed at the church.
The Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early- to the mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and Canada. The network was assisted by abolitionists and others sympathetic to the cause of the escapees. The enslaved persons who risked escape and those who aided them are also collectively referred to as the "Underground Railroad". Various other routes led to Mexico, where slavery had been abolished, and to islands in the Caribbean that were not part of the slave trade. An earlier escape route running south toward Florida, then a Spanish possession, existed from the late 17th century until approximately 1790. However, the network now generally known as the Underground Railroad began in the late 18th century. It ran north and grew steadily until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. One estimate suggests that by 1850, approximately 100,000 enslaved people had escaped to freedom via the network.
Levi Coffin was an American Quaker, Republican, abolitionist, farmer, businessman and humanitarian. An active leader of the Underground Railroad in Indiana and Ohio, some unofficially called Coffin the "President of the Underground Railroad," estimating that three thousand fugitive slaves passed through his care. The Coffin home in Fountain City, Wayne County, Indiana, is now a museum, sometimes called the Underground Railroad's "Grand Central Station".
In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe people who fled slavery. The term also refers to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. Such people are also called freedom seekers to avoid implying that the enslaved person had committed a crime and that the slaveholder was the injured party.
Buckingham Mountain is located in Buckingham Township in Central Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is the second most elevated land in all of Bucks County at 520 feet.
Daniel Hughes (1804–1880) was a conductor, agent and station master in the Underground Railroad based in Loyalsock Township, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania in the United States. He was the owner of a barge on the Pennsylvania Canal and transported lumber from Williamsport on the West Branch Susquehanna River to Havre de Grace, Maryland. Hughes hid runaway slaves in the hold of his barge on his return trip up the Susquehanna River to Lycoming County, where he provided shelter to the runaways on his property near the Loyalsock Township border with Williamsport before they moved further north and to eventual freedom in Canada. Hughes' home was located in a hollow or small valley in the mountains just north of Williamsport. This hollow is now known as Freedom Road, having previously been called Nigger Hollow. In response to the actions of concerned African American citizens of Williamsport, the pejorative name was formally changed by the Williamsport City Council in 1936.
The Jerry Rescue occurred on October 1, 1851, and involved the public rescue of a fugitive slave who had been arrested the same day in Syracuse, New York, during the anti-slavery Liberty Party's state convention. The escaped slave was William Henry, a 40-year-old cooper from Missouri who called himself "Jerry."
Ercildoun, population about 100, is an unincorporated community in East Fallowfield Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, United States. The hamlet was founded by Quakers and was an early center of the abolitionist movement. In 1985 the entire hamlet, including 31 properties, was listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places. Of these properties two were vacant land, 14 were significant buildings, ten were contributing buildings, and five buildings, built in the 1950s, were non-contributing. The Lukens Pierce House, an octagon house listed separately on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, is located about half a mile northwest of the hamlet. Ercildoun is one of about ten hamlets in the township, which has no cities or towns, but has 31 sites listed on the National Register. It is one of the larger hamlets, located near the center of the township, and historically among the best known. The city of Coatesville is about 3 miles north.
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.
The Underground Railroad in Indiana was part of a larger, unofficial, and loosely-connected network of groups and individuals who aided and facilitated the escape of runaway slaves from the southern United States. The network in Indiana gradually evolved in the 1830s and 1840s, reached its peak during the 1850s, and continued until slavery was abolished throughout the United States at the end of the American Civil War in 1865. It is not known how many fugitive slaves escaped through Indiana on their journey to Michigan and Canada. An unknown number of Indiana's abolitionists, anti-slavery advocates, and people of color, as well as Quakers and other religious groups illegally operated stations along the network. Some of the network's operatives have been identified, including Levi Coffin, the best-known of Indiana's Underground Railroad leaders. In addition to shelter, network agents provided food, guidance, and, in some cases, transportation to aid the runaways.
William Parker was an American former slave who escaped from Maryland to Pennsylvania, where he became an abolitionist and anti-slavery activist in Christiana. He was a farmer and led a black self-defense organization. He was notable as a principal figure in the Christiana incident, 1851, also known as the Christiana Resistance. Edward Gorsuch, a Maryland slaveowner who owned four slaves who had fled over the state border to Parker's farm, was killed and other white men in the party to capture the fugitives were wounded. The events brought national attention to the challenges of enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
Bethel A.M.E. Church, now known as the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum, is a historic African Methodist Episcopal church at 119 North 10th Street in Reading, Berks County, Pennsylvania. It was originally built in 1837, and is a 2½-storey brick and stucco building with a gable roof. It was rebuilt about 1867–1869, and remodeled in 1889. It features a three-storey brick tower with a pyramidal roof topped by a finial. The church is known to have housed fugitive slaves and the congregation was active in the Underground Railroad. The church is now home to a museum dedicated to the history of African Americans in Central Pennsylvania.
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.
Appoquinimink Friends Meetinghouse, also known as the Odessa Friends Meetinghouse, is a very small but historic Quaker meetinghouse on Main Street in Odessa, Delaware. It was built in 1785 by David Wilson and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. Members of the meeting, including John Hunn and his cousin John Alston, were active in the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman may have hid in the meetinghouse. Measuring about 20 feet (6.1 m) by 22 feet (6.7 m), it may be the smallest brick house of worship in the United States.
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.
Basil Dorsey was a self-emancipated slave born in Libertytown, Maryland. He fled to Bristol, Pennsylvania, and later moved to Florence, Massachusetts, where he lived for the remainder of his life.
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.
Indian Run is a populated place in Wilmington Township of Mercer County, Pennsylvania, named for the stream Indian Run. Indian Run had a reputation as a "safe haven" for African Americans, whether they were free or escaping slavery. White Chapel Church was established by abolitionists who broke away from a church in New Wilmington. In the 1840s, a settlement was created for freedmen called Pandenarium. John Young and others were prominent Underground Railroad conductors.
Wright Modlin or Wright Maudlin (1797–1866) helped enslaved people escape slavery, whether transporting them between Underground Railroad stations or traveling south to find people that he could deliver directly to Michigan. Modlin and his Underground Railroad partner, William Holden Jones, traveled to the Ohio River and into Kentucky to assist enslave people on their journey north. Due to their success, angry slaveholders instigated the Kentucky raid on Cass County of 1847. Two years later, he helped free his neighbors, the David and Lucy Powell family, who had been captured by their former slaveholder. Tried in South Bend, Indiana, the case was called The South Bend Fugitive Slave Case.
