I love road trips, especially when those road trips include several people and I don’t have to do all the driving. Every year that we develop the schedule for where members of the Slave Dwelling Project will spend nights in extant slave dwellings, it is always our hope that northern states are involved. To date, members of the Slave Dwelling Project have spent nights in former slave dwellings in the northern states of Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. The 2018 schedule does not disappoint, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey are three northern states included on the schedule. Of those three states, New Jersey will be a new state added this year. And, is Minnesota considered a northern state, midwestern state, or both.

Both my ventures into Pennsylvania was to spend nights at Cliveden in Philadelphia. In 2011, Cliveden was my first venture into a northern state, and it made me aware of the challenges of convincing northerners of their state’s involvement in the chattel slavery that existed in this nation. Unlike the South and rightfully so, the Revolutionary War gets far more play than the Civil War. Additionally, Abolitionists, Underground Railroad and Union soldiers garner most of the attention when applying the subject of slavery to northern states. It is as if, they have established themselves as saviors. While they deserve some praise as saviors, they were also contributors to the institution of slavery. 

The Slave Dwelling Project apply the history of slavery to northern states in a different manner than do most northerners. Until proven otherwise, we are under the impression that every state in the continental United States once had some form of slavery on its soil. For some states, that fact is easier to prove than others. I receive a lot of pushback when I talk to northerners about the slavery that existed in northern states, therefore I am grateful to the historic sites that allow us access for us to do what we do. They to, know the value of changing the narrative to tell the whole story of this great nation.

Recently, board members, Prinny Anderson, Terry James and living history coordinator, Jerome Bias, embarked on a trip to Columbia, Lancaster, and Lansdale, Pennsylvania. Our newest board member, Leslie Stainton, drove from her home in Michigan to join us in Columbia and Lancaster. Leslie also assisted in planning the trip. Long before Leslie became a member of the Slave Dwelling Project, she and I had been trying to plan a trip to her hometown of Lancaster, but no one was buying what we were selling. That spark was lit when Leslie spent a night with Prinny and me in 2015 at Hofwyl – Broadfield Plantation in Glynn County, Georgia. She was conducting research on her slave-owning family in that area. It took three years, but Leslie made the trip happen. It was a great lesson in the patience, strategy, and tactics necessary to gain access to audiences that we would not otherwise engage. 

Columbia, Pennsylvania

Sometimes we don’t hit the bullseye, but we still hit the target. Our time in Columbia, Pennsylvania can be described in that manner.

We hit the ground running as our host, Chris Vera, President of the Columbia Preservation Historic Society had assembled a standing room only audience to hear about the Slave Dwelling Project. Chris assisted Leslie, Prinny and me with planning the event. Chris also gave our walking tour which contained lots of references to Abolitionists, Underground Railroad and Union soldiers, one of which was Stephen Swails, an African American who became mayor of my hometown of Kingstree, SC during the time of reconstruction.

We spent the night in Columbia Bank & Bridge Building, which is currently a print shop. This was my first time sleeping in a former bank building, which made me realize that I need to develop a category for the miscellaneous buildings and places that we sleep in the name of the Slave Dwelling Project. They range from barns, courthouse grounds, jails, museums and now a bank. If enslaved people in search of freedom were housed here in their transition to freedom, then it would be highly appropriate for the Slave Dwelling Project to cross-pollinate with the Underground Railroad.

Here is a local TV station account of the event.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Our day in Lancaster would be like our previous day in Columbia. The audience assembled was much more diverse. I joined Lancaster city council member Ismail Smith-Wade-El and other members of the Lancaster community for a public forum in Millersville University’s Ware Center. The 90-minute event included me and two other panelists discussing and addressing the history of slavery in Lancaster and its present-day legacy.

The Lancaster walking tour contained elements of the Underground Railroad but also elements of the slavery that existed locally and throughout the state of Pennsylvania. I was reminded that Thaddeus Stevens was from Lancaster. I need to learn more about Lydia Hamilton Smith, Thaddeus Stevens African American paid housekeeper and a prominent businesswoman after his death.

Peter Wentz Farmstead

Peter Wentz Farmstead in Lansdale, Pennsylvania would be our last stop. They kicked it up a notch and planned a conference titled: Creating Conversations: Interpreting Slavery. At this conference, I was honored to meet Brenda Parker and Cheyney McKnight. They both made us all aware of all the harassment, mostly sexual, and prejudice that African American female interpreters deal with. I admire them both for their fortitude and desire to interpret the history of our Enslaved Ancestors in the manner that they do.

We would sleep in a barn. My first time sleeping in a barn was in Simpsonville, SC. A runaway ad for an enslaved man named Jack is written proof that the owners of the property were enslavers. Sarah Biehl is the curator there and she is ensuring that the story of Adam is told. Sarah’s research is cutting edge in that location because she is changing the narrative to include the chattel slavery that existed in the state of Pennsylvania.

Conclusion

There are historic sites in some northern states that are doing what is necessary to change the narrative and tell the stories of those people who were enslaved there. The Slave Dwelling Project continues to work with many of these sites. It is our hope that more northern sites will help interpret slavery in the North. The Slave Dwelling Project will always be here to assist in that effort.

Leslie Stainton

Although I grew up in Lancaster County and wrote a book about its storied Fulton Theatre, I’d been largely ignorant of its African-American past (and present) until this past weekend, when I joined Joe McGill and members of the Slave Dwelling Project for an overnight stay and series of public events in the county.

In the town of Columbia, where we spent the night, I learned about the surprisingly large enclave of free blacks who settled there before the Civil War—a bold “in-your-face” to whites living south of the Mason-Dixon line (some 15 miles from Columbia) and to the dozens of slave catchers who set up shop in Lancaster County during the first half of the 19th century. Columbia’s blacks seem to have been alternately sheltered and attacked by their white neighbors. (In a troubling prelude to our own times, Columbia’s white working class rioted against the town’s African Americans in 1834—upset that brown people were “taking” their jobs.)

In downtown Lancaster, I learned about 20th-century discrimination against black workers in Hager’s Department Store (“I was just light enough to get a job as an elevator attendant,” remembered Leroy Hopkins, emeritus professor of German at Millersville University). I heard a poignant rendition from performer Amanda Kemp about what it’s like to “walk while black”—protected, to a slight degree, from white fear and aggression by her reassuringly female pink and green ensemble. (Black boys like her son, Kemp said, have no such protection.) On a walking tour of African-American heritage sites in Lancaster, I saw the city through a new and welcome lens.

Missing from most of this, though, was a clear picture of the history of slavery in my home county. Lancastrians are eager to celebrate the county’s decisive role in the Underground Railroad—a result in large part of its strategic geography. But what of its less celebratory past? Slavery came to Pennsylvania in 1636, according to Randy Harris (who led the downtown African-American heritage tour), and enslaved people inhabited the city until at least 1840. To the question of whether (and where) enslaved people were auctioned in downtown Lancaster, Randy had no answer.

Ditto the matter of where enslaved people lived. Aside from a few known sites and records—the plantation of the 18th-century slaveholder and Revolutionary War General Edward Hand; letters in which the 18th-century slaveholder (and town magistrate) Edward Shippen described the purchase of an enslaved woman—there’s little physical evidence of Lancaster County’s century-long involvement in slavery.

Randy’s tour included a stop at a pair of underground cisterns where abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens and his mixed-race companion, Lydia Smith, are believed to have housed African Americans fleeing slavery. But the city’s more difficult history—its deep complicity in the slave system, even after Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780—remains largely buried. When I was researching my book on the Fulton Theatre, I discovered lists of enslaved African Americans who were incarcerated in the town jail after running away from their “owners” in the early decades of the 19th century. Many were sent back into slavery. I also found newspaper accounts of the thriving cotton mills Lancaster opened in the 1840s—mills that helped perpetuate Southern slavery, and whose existence Thaddeus Stevens praised.

The weekend visit by the Slave Dwelling Project was a welcome reminder that like the slave dwellings Joe McGill is working to preserve, this part of the story needs our attention.

SLAVE DWELLING PROJECT OVERNIGHT – LANCASTER COUNTY, PA – Slavery Was Complicated There

Prinny Anderson

Our hosts and guides wanted to be sure we knew that Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780. We were in Lancaster County, PA, located immediately north of York County, right across the Susquehanna River. And York County, PA, borders on Maryland, which was a slave state. Freedom-seeking enslaved people needed to get out of the states where slavery remained legal to have a chance of achieving their goal. But they also had to get beyond the reach of the slave-catchers before they could have a moment to catch their breath. The mighty river was a deterrent. Once across it, they might find help and continue their journey out of the country.

Columbia and Lancaster, old cities along the river in Lancaster County, are proud of their history of supporting fleeing African Americans by hiding them, passing them along in various clever ways to other hiding places, and sending them northwest by train or by river, toward Canada. We spent one night in a print shop, formerly the Columbia Bank & Bridge Company, where fugitives were hidden in a basement hidey hole until they could be sent on. The next day, we took a walking tour of places associated with African American history in Lancaster, including the home and offices of Thaddeus Stevens.

Understandably, everyone we talked to about the county’s role in slavery spoke proudly of everything done by abolitionists and Underground Railroad conductors to bring people out of bondage.

What seemed to be missing in the discussions, what tended only to emerge with some probing and examination of other facts was the other side of the state’s involvement with slavery. Yes, slavery was abolished in 1780, but not all at once, on a date certain. It was a gradual emancipation program. People enslaved in 1780 remained enslaved. Children born to enslaved mothers became “indentured servants,” whose term lasted for 28 years.

The law also stated that no additional enslaved people could be imported into the state, but a variety of records and oral histories make it clear there was little enforcement.

After some extended conversation with a variety of historians, we learned that the story of slavery in Lancaster County, PA, was much more complicated than the initial statements on our first overnight stay. Abolitionists and Underground Railroad operators lived side by side with slave owners and communities of free African Americans. Furthermore, slaveholding could be found among Christians of most denominations, Quakers, and Mennonites, among small hold farmers, larger farmsteaders, and urban dwellers.

We applaud our friends in Pennsylvania for their heritage of liberty, and we hope we nudged them into examining that more complicated and less comfortable narrative of the past.

PETER WENTZ FARMSTEAD, LANSDALE, PA – Who Was Jack?

Prinny Anderson

Peter and Rosanna Wentz are primarily known to Pennsylvania historians through a few documents, the buildings remaining on their mid-eighteenth century, southeastern Pennsylvania farmstead, and George Washington’s overnight stay in one of their second-floor bedrooms. There are no portraits of either Wentz or of their children, so we do not know what they looked like.

But we do know what Jack looked like. Jack was an enslaved person, probably one of two people held in slavery by the Wentz family. Because Jack tried to gain his freedom, not once but twice, we know what he looked like and how he was dressed. He was described in runaway notices posted both times he made a break for liberty. We know he had one leg that was larger around than the other, and that he wore buckskin breeches. We also know he was in his 20’s for at least one escape, and maybe in his 30’s for the second.

Beyond those facts, though, we know nothing else. We don’t know where on the property he lived, and we don’t know what kind of work he did. We also don’t know whether he had any relationship to the other, unnamed, undescribed enslaved person whose existence is recorded only as a notation on a tax record.

Nonetheless, the current staff of the Peter Wentz Farmstead have not been discouraged from interpreting Jack and bringing him as much to life as possible. They tell his story as they talk about the main house; they have decided to set up an unheated, airless loft room as a possible living space for Jack because in other farm buildings in the area, such lofts were used to house enslaved people. We held our overnight in the barn, with the possibility that Jack, or another enslaved person, might have slept closer to his work in the barn with the hay and the farm animals, as was also customary.

Based on the runaway notices, replicas of the clothing Jack wore are being created, to be displayed in the loft. Cooking demonstrations take place in the back kitchen, and the Farmstead is still an active agricultural enterprise. We don’t know Jack’s occupation, but through this living history, it is possible to visualize many of the possibilities. He might have cooked or done domestic trades. He might have taken care of cattle, sheep or goats. Haying, planting, harvesting – any of the routine farm tasks might have been Jack’s occupations.

After intensive research, the Farmstead’s staff have found enough material to make a good start at answering the question: “Who is Jack?” In addition, going beyond the constraints some historic sites find daunting, this historic site has built a context for Jack’s life based on knowledge from other sites in the area and on the known activities of a Pennsylvania German farm in the mid-1700’s.

And once we can visualize Jack and imagine what his life might have been like, we have a deeper understanding of what slavery in northern states looked like. What has been invisible has been made visible; what was undiscussable is now up for daily conversation. Well done, Peter Wentz Farmstead!

Sarah Biehl
Curator, Peter Wentz Farmstead

When people think of slave dwellings they seldom imagine an 18th century farmhouse in Pennsylvania that was owned by German immigrants, but that’s exactly what the Peter Wentz Farmstead is. The staff of Peter Wentz Farmstead is working to educate on the story of Jack, an enslaved man who lived at the farmstead during the 1760’s- 1770’s. We began compiling information for the interpretation and realized this was unchartered waters for us. One thing that we knew is that we wanted to do it right and consult respected professionals in the field. Interestingly enough, only a few weeks after this decision was made, we learned that the Slave Dwelling Project was making a trip up north, and knew we had to have them.

We paired the Slave Dwelling Projects overnight with a conference called, Creating Conversation: Interpreting Slavery. The presenters of the conference were Brenda Parker, Character Interpreter at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Cheney Mcknight, founder of Not Your Momma’s History, and Joseph McGill, the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project. Parker discussed how to interpret the topic, McKnight informed the audience of the harsh realities for African American reenactors, and McGill spoke about northern slave dwellings. The conference went better than expected and a large majority of the guests went back to Peter Wentz Farmstead to continue further discussions over dinner. The conversations were friendly, knowledgeable, and left many of us feeling hopeful that maybe someday soon museums could finally get interpreting slavery right.

Joe, Prinny, Jerome, and Terry were the members of the Slave Dwelling Project that joined us for our events. When we think back to their visit we can’t help but smile, since they’re the four kindest and not to mention, funniest people that we’ve encountered. In theory anyone could stay at historic sites and claim it’s for the preservation of enslaved history, but what makes Joe so successful is his welcoming nature, knowledge of the topic, and the fantastic people he surrounds himself with. Without a doubt in our minds, the staff of Peter Wentz Farmstead can say that this program is one of the best we’ve ever offered and next time the Slave Dwelling Project is back in our area we will be sure to have them visit again.

Lynda Davis

On the day that I drove to Columbia, Pennsylvania, I read an article by Fania Davis and Jonathan Scharrer entitled “Reimagining and Restoring Justice: Toward a Truth and Reconciliation Process to Transform Violence Against African-Americans in the United States.” I read this for a Summer Peacebuilding Institute class entitled “Truth Telling, Racial Healing and Restorative Justice.” In this article, Davis and Scharrer mention the four approaches of Coming to the Table: facing history, making connections, working toward healing, and taking action. They say that the Slave Dwelling Project “offers an innovative modality for facing history.”

 

Spending the night in the Columbia Bridge Bank in Columbia, Pennsylvania certainly offered innovative ways to face history. It allowed me to imagine how it must have felt to be hiding from slave catchers in the bank, waiting for instructions from African American abolitionists such as Stephen Smith and William Whipper, and then hiding in the African American neighborhood of Tow Hill. It allowed me to learn about these two African American abolitionists and about the African American neighborhood of Tow Hill whose residents sheltered hundreds of people who were trying to escape from enslavement.

Before this overnight, I had not heard about these two African American abolitionists and about the African American neighborhood of Tow Hill. I believe this is because I learned about the contributions of the European American abolitionists not the African American ones in school. Learning this reinforced the myth that the European Americans were the saviors and the African Americans were the victims. This could not be further from the truth. African Americans had agency and were not victims. Many risked their lives and livelihoods to escape from enslavement, help others escape, and gain and maintain their own freedom and the freedom of others. I am thankful that the Slave Dwelling Project allows me to face and feel the full truth of history, to shatter the myths I learned in school, and to learn a more complete and inclusive history so I can work on not repeating it.