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Chapel Hill Old Fort Road between Gallahan Road and Washington Lane, Piscataway area Historic resources (2)
ABOVE: Long Quarters, on the Hatton farm. Although demolished long ago, it is likely that, before they built their own dwellings and developed their own small farms, some of the Chapel Hill families lived in this converted farm building. Long Quarters was later used to house soldiers stationed at Fort Washington during World War I. BELOW: The residence of William Delaney at 12510 Old Fort Road, which was demolished after 1993.
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hapel Hill is a small rural community which grew up near the intersection of the old roads connecting Fort Washington, Fort Foote, and the village of Piscataway. This was land that, before the Civil War, had been the large plantations of the Hatton, Edelen, Thorne, and Gallahan families, located on tracts known as “Boarman’s Content” and “Frankland.” The community took its name from the ancient private Roman Catholic chapel erected for the Digges family on their Frankland tract; by the end of the nineteenth century the chapel was gone, but gravestones marking a group of burials can still be seen on its site.
By the 1880s several families of free blacks and freedmen began to settle and establish farms on land that they purchased from the families of former plantation owners. Descendants of these first African-American families still live in the community today. The Freedmen’s Bureau School was established here in 1868; following an established pattern, it served also as a place of worship before the construction of a Methodist meetinghouse on the adjoining land. The first meetinghouse was constructed probably by 1880 and certainly before 1883, when the two-acre parcel immediately north of the schoolhouse (on which the Methodist meetinghouse had already been constructed) was legally conveyed to the church trustees. By this time, the two buildings, church and school, had become the focal point of what was to become the Chapel Hill community. In 1887, several five-acre parcels owned by the Hatton family were sold to two black men, Jeremiah Brown and Albert Owen Shorter. Brown served as the pastor of the new Methodist Church at Chapel Hill and also taught classes at the school. Shorter was a member of a free black family that had worked for the Hatton-Robey family and he had married Alice, the daughter of Jeremiah Brown, in 1872. During this period, Albert and Alice Shorter lived on part of the Hatton family farmland, known as Pleasant View, located close to the crossroads which would become the community of Chapel Hill.
CHAPEL HILL African-American Historic and Cultural Resources
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