Racial Justice and the Campaign to Save Abolition Hall

few miles northwest of Philadelphia lies what was once the little crossroads village of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, named for the local Quaker meeting of the same name — and now a flourishing suburban community. There, at the corner of Germantown and Butler Pikes, stands a cluster of buildings belonging to the Corson family, whose members played a heroic role in the fight against American slavery. These structures are among the few remaining, authentic sites that testify to the dedication and courage of men and women who risked their lives, their liberty, and their livelihoods to rid this nation of the scourge of slavery. The same set of buildings later served as the home and studio of artist Thomas Hovenden, the most famous genre painter in the United States at the time of his death, whose best known work is the Last Moments of John Brown, now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Because of the momentous events that unfolded at Plymouth Meeting, these properties were among five separately listed structures when the larger Plymouth Meeting Historic District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, the first such district in Pennsylvania. They are also part of a Local Historic District, created ten years earlier by adjoining Plymouth and Whitemarsh Townships in accordance with Pennsylvania enabling legislation. The Corson properties comprise a mid-eighteenth-century residence, an early nineteenth-century stone bank barn, and what later generations came to call Abolition Hall. Sadly, the approximately eight acre parcel behind these iconic structures — the remainder of a much larger farm — is now under consideration for a dense residential development. There are current plans to place several dozen new townhouses close against these historic buildings, erasing what remains of a rural landscape that gives critical context to the property and that will make it difficult to access this historic site whose future use is yet unclear. An option to buy the property was triggered by the death in 2012 of Nancy Corson, whose heirs have decided to sell it.

Members of the Corson and neighboring Maulsby families, related through marriage, starting helping slaves to escape to freedom as early as the 1810s, well before the term Underground Railroad was coined about two decades later.1 As such, they were part of a wider regional network that can be explained by both geography and religion. Geographically, Philadelphia and surrounding Southeastern Pennsylvania were just north of the Mason-Dixon Line which separated them from slave-holding Maryland. In large part because of this proximity and because Pennsylvania had decided in1780 to gradually abolish slavery, Philadelphia had the largest free black population of any city in the North, many of whom organized early on to assist their brothers and sisters fleeing slavery. In addition, members of the Religious Society of Friends, more commonly known as Quakers, who had strong beliefs in justice and equality, opposed slavery very early in Pennsylvania. Some of them became leading abolitionists as well as participants in the Underground Railroad. These included members and attenders of the Plymouth Monthly (Quaker) Meeting located diagonally across the road from the Corson homestead.2

Despite the opposition to slavery in Philadelphia and surrounding Southeastern Pennsylvania, there were many in the area who despised the abolition cause and who considered African Americans as inferior beings. Their opposition was so intense that in May 1838 a large mob attacked and burned to the ground an abolitionist meeting place in Philadelphia called Pennsylvania Hall just three days after it was completed. Those helping slaves to escape not only risked the ire of local residents, but also of being arrested and punished for violating the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Constitution had included a Fugitive Save clause that allowed slave owners to pursue runaways into other states and to recapture September – December 2018 | and take them back into bondage. The recent Fugitive Slave law was part of the larger Compromise of 1850 that attempted to deal with North-South disputes over the newly annexed territory in the West resulting from the Mexican-American War. In order to appease the slave states, the law provided stiff penalties for anyone helping slaves to escape, namely six months in prison and a fine of $1,000 (worth approximately $31,000 in 2018).

Understandably, those associated with the Underground Railroad worked as much as possible in secrecy, one explanation for the term “underground.” The term was also a reference to bewilderment at the way runaways seemed to disappear as if they had gone underground, since they were hidden during the day and were transported from one place to another under cover of darkness. The other part of the name — “railroad” — was a play on the relatively new form of rail transportation that suggested names for those operating the hidden network: Persons who guided runaways were called “conductors,” the various stops along the way were “stations,” and those who provided for fugitives at stops were known as “station masters.”3 George Corson (18031860) operated one of these stations on his property at Plymouth Meeting, where he, his wife (Martha Maulsby Corson), and other family members concealed runaways on their farm. They also fed and when necessary clothed them, administered as best they could to sicknesses and wounds, and offered emotional support before the next leg of their long and dangerous journey. From the Corson place, runaways were conducted to adjoining Bucks County and from there they crossed into New Jersey where they continued up through New York State and, if all went well, they crossed into the safety of Canada. They were now free, since in 1833 the British parliament had abolished slavery throughout the empire to which Canada still belonged.

William Still, a successful free black businessman in Philadelphia, who was also a conductor on the Underground Railroad and chair of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, kept meticulous records which he published in 1872. Of Corson, he wrote,

There were perhaps few more dedicated men than George Corson to the interests of the oppressed anywhere. The slave, fleeing from his master, ever found a home with him and felt while there that no slave hunter would get him away until every means of protection should fail. He was ever ready to send his horse and carriage to convey them on the road to Canada, or elsewhere towards freedom.4

According to brother Hiram Corson, George was a man “who knew no fear when in the right.”5

In addition to operating a station on the Underground Railroad, George Corson grew concerned about attacks by pro-slavery mobs on churches and Quaker meeting houses in the area that hosted abolitionist speakers and discussions. The Quaker meeting at Plymouth, fearful of being accosted by such mobs, closed its doors to additional anti-slavery gatherings. In response, Corson decided to build a second story above his carriage shed on his farm across the road where abolitionists could come together without endangering the meeting house. Completed in 1856, the space above his shed, which came to be called Abolition Hall, could seat about 200 people. In the words of William Still, “His home was always open to entertain the anti-slavery advocates. . . .”6 According to an account in the 1884 History of Montgomery County, Corson had,

Opening page ONLY THREE DAYS AFTER THE DEDICATION CEREMONIES, PENNSYLVANIA HALL WAS SET ON FIRE BY AN ANTI-ABOLITIONIST MOB.

RIght CORSON STONE BARN (ON LEFT) NOW CONVERTED INTO A RESIDENCE, AND (ON RIGHT) FRONT OF FORMER CARRIAGE SHED WITH ABOLITION HALL ABOVE. PHOTO BY SYDELLE ZOVE, 2018.

Opposite HISTORICAL MARKER AT ABOLITION HALL, ERECTED IN 2000 BY THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA.

Determined to build a hall, over which he could have control [on his own private property]. He made quite a large one and furnished it well with seats, warmed and lighted at his own expense. . . . We can see how convenient it was for the lecturers to make his house their temporary home. As time wore on, more and more neighbors and friends were attracted

to the meetings to hear the eloquent and earnest men and who pictured the atrocities of slavery.7

Among the famous abolitionists who spoke in Corson’s hall were Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Lucretia Mott, and William Lloyd Garrison.8 These assemblages continued for the next four years, until Corson’s death in 1860. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to experience the joy of Lincoln’s freeing the slaves three years later in 1863.

George’s brother Hiram, a medical doctor who was also active in the local abolition movement, later wrote that they often received harsh treatment from those who opposed their efforts: “Those thirty years or more spent in advocacy of rights and justice to the slave was no holiday picnic. The vilest abuse was heaped upon us; and threats of violence and a resort to boycotting [our businesses] was used.”9

A short generation later, in 1881, George Corson’s daughter Helen (1846-1935) returned to live in the family home following her marriage to Thomas Hovenden (1840-1895).10 Both of her parents had died by then, but she had grown up on memories of the family’s devotion to the abolitionist movement. Helen had met Hovenden in France, where they had both had gone to study art. The two settled into the old house on the corner and set up a painting studio in what had been Abolition Hall, adding a large window to the rear to capture the north light. Fittingly, given the site’s anti-slavery history, Hovenden’s most famous work remains The Last Moments of John Brown (1882-1884). In 1859 Brown and his band of followers had attempted to break into the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia (then Virginia) with a plan to seize guns and give them to slaves who would hopefully rise up and fight for their freedom. Brown was captured and sentenced to death by hanging. Hovenden, who visited Charles Town, Virginia, where the hanging took place and who read numerous newspaper accounts of the event, depicts the dramatic moment as Brown is walking down the wooden steps of the jail on his way to the gallows. Brown pauses to kiss the forehead of a child whose young African America mother holds him up as the boy reaches out his little hand towards Brown’s neck, an event that did not actually occur but that appears in the painting as a blessing and a promise that the little boy will someday be free.11 For models Hovenden turned to neighbors and members of Helen’s family, as was his habit during all the years at Plymouth Meeting. According to family tradition, it was Helen who posed as the mother holding out her child to Brown.

Five years after completing the John Brown painting, Hovenden exhibited a work that referenced a hoped-for reconciliation between North and South. The scene is a cozy middle-class home in Gettysburg just after the epic three day battle there in July 1863. Entitled In the Hands of the Enemy (1889), he depicts a Union soldier bandaging the leg of a wounded Confederate as the family members of this Union home look on with tender solicitude.

Hovenden also painted a number of genre scenes featuring African American families who lived in or around their village. His favorite was entitled Their Pride (1888), the focal point of which is a stylishly dressed young black woman standing in the middle of a room and looking in a hand mirror as she tries on a new hat. Surrounding and looking up at her admiringly are her parents and a younger brother. The furnishings in the room reflect a middle-class aura of comfort as a sign of the family’s upward expectations.

Hovenden’s wife Helen, who was an accomplished artist and photographer, painted a canvas that she called Uncle Ned and his Pupil (1881). Given the name, one might initially assume it was the sort of condescending theme that would soon become familiar from the Uncle Remus stories which were published the same year as the painting. However, in Helen’s painting the teacher — “Uncle Ned” — stands out as a kindly authority figure who is passing on his knowledge to a younger generation. Posing as Uncle Ned was probably a local resident named Samuel Jones, whom the Hovendens often used as a model.

Another favorite topic for Thomas Hovenden were local craftsmen whose occupations would soon fall victim to growing urbanization and industrialization. Among these paintings are A Village Blacksmith 1882), The Cabinetmaker (1888), and The Traveling Clock Mender (1893). The latter is an especially compelling scene of an itinerant craftsman who goes from house to house to clean, oil, and repair the mechanical clocks of that day. In the painting the elderly clock mender has taken apart a family time piece and laid out the workings on a wooden table, except for a gear that he holds up between his thumb and forefinger to inspect it visually. Two children, for whom the Hovendens’ son Thomas, Jr. and daughter Martha have posed, look on with fascination from opposite ends of the table.12

Picking up the theme of changing times is another of Hovenden’s masterpieces, Breaking Home Ties (1890). The staging for the picture was the front room of their home. Represented in the painting are three generations of a family, who have just finished breakfast. At the center of the room a mother has placed her hands in blessing on her son’s shoulders, probably in his late teens, as a man on the far side of the room is carrying the boy’s luggage in a large carpet bag toward the back door of the house. His sisters, grandmother, and even the family dog look on in sadness. The boy who is clearly leaving the family farm for the opportunities of the city, gazes off beyond his mother, no doubt fearing that he is about to cry. The painting, now a prized acquisition of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was a sensation when exhibited at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, doubtless because so many individuals and families had experienced similar partings. It remains a powerful, iconic scene a century and a quarter later for anyone who has left for college or a new job far from home—as well as for loved ones who have witnessed these scenes.

When Hovenden died in 1895, newspapers throughout the country, including the New York Times, reported his passing with glowing obituaries. Nevertheless, his fame began to fade within a few years as less representational forms of painting gained prominence, but his star has risen again in recent years because of his great skills as an artist and because of the insights that his works offer into an earlier time that is still recognizable. The Hovenden house and George Corson’s Abolition Hall behind it remain as testaments to a remarkable family whose lives and works are at the center of the American experience. They deserve to be preserved in ways that can inspire present and future generations. It is all well and good to read or hear about such issues in school or in books, but there is no substitute for standing in the very places where history was made.

The lessons that Abolition Hall and the Underground Railroad have to teach about combatting racial oppression are especially pertinent today: at time when the President of the United States inflames racial and ethnic grievances; when the manager of a Starbucks coffee shop in Philadelphia calls the police on two African-American men who were merely waiting for another member of their party to show up before ordering; and when immigration authorities, with the president’s knowledge and permission, tear children from their parents’ arms who have come across the border seeking asylum, an act not unlike, in its horror and emotional devastation, the ripping of children from slave mothers and fathers who were being sold to another master.

In order to preserve and defend these historic properties in Plymouth Meeting, a group of local residents have formed the Friends of Abolition Hall, an unincorporated association. Since the buildings themselves are protected by the local historic district, they cannot be demolished. In order to do so, the first step would be a certificate of appropriateness from the local Historic Architectural Review Board (HARB). However, this board is only advisory to the township Board of Supervisors in the case of Whitemarsh Township, where the Corson property is located, and it is the supervisors who are empowered to make a final decision about a historic property. Then there is always the danger of “demolition by neglect”—a situation wherein a present or future property owner might purposely allow a structure to decay and then claim that it must be demolished in the name of the community’s health, safety, and welfare, or claim economic hardship such that he or she cannot afford to repair the property.

Ideally, the Friends of Abolition Hall would like to see preserved all the land making up the remnant Corson farm around and behind the historic buildings. Indeed, it can be argued that the National Register designation intended to include the land as well as the buildings, but such protection would apply only if federal funds or regulations, such as environmental rules and/or guidelines, were applicable. If these situations do not in the end apply, the Friends of Abolition Hall seek to broker a compromise that sets aside as much land as possible as a buffer to the historic structures, perhaps by using public open space funds. Later, the organization wishes to participate in identifying viable uses for the buildings and grounds. At the time of this writing, the fate of these extraordinarily properties lies with the various commissions and governing boards of Whtitemarsh Township. The Friends and the scores of residents who support their efforts are determined to use every legal means to save a precious piece of our nation’s life and future promise.

DAVID R. CONTOSTA is Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. He is the author of more than 20 books ranging in subject from urban ecology to the history of American politics, religion, and foreign policy, in addition to several biographical studies. His most recent publications are Rebel Giants: The Revolutionary Lives of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin and America’s Needless Wars: Cautionary Tales of US Involvement in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Iraq. At present David is writing a book about the American presidency, along with collaborating on a documentary film about Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Valley. He has lectured at universities in China and South Korea and is a frequent speaker before academic and civic groups. Professor Contosta provided on-camera commentary in the American Freethought film series funded by the James Hervey Johnson Charitable Educational Trust.

1 Hiram Corson, The Corson Family (Philadelphia: H. L. Everett, 1906), 112-117. See also Hiram Corson, “The Plymouth Group” in The Abolitionists of Montgomery County (Norristown, PA: Historical Society of Montgomery County, 1900), 41-43. Hiram Corson, M.D. (1804-1896) was a brother of George Corson and a founding member of the Plymouth Meeting Abolition Society. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, which opened in 1850 as the second medical school in the world to train women as medical doctors and to award them the M.D. degree. His Quaker beliefs in equality extended to women as well as to African Americans.

2 On the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, see Charles L. Blockson, The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania (Jacksonville, NC: Flame International, Inc., 1981), 9-32. Blockson also devotes a chapter in his book to Underground Railroad activities Montgomery County (pages 39-51) where Plymouth Meeting is located. Helpful, too, is Nilgun Anadolu Okur, “Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, 1830-1860,” Journal of Black Studies 25(5) May 1995: 537-57.

3 A good general history of the Underground Railroad is Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. (New York: Harper Collins, 2005).

4 William Still, Underground Railroad: A Record (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), 721. On Still and his activities there is Larry Gara, “William Still and the Underground Railroad,” Pennsylvania History 28 (1961), 33-44.

5 Hiram Corson, Abolitionists of Montgomery County, 41-43.

6 Still, Underground Railroad, 721.

7 Theodore Weber Bean, “The Corson Family,” in History of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Evarts and Peck, 1884), 1036-37.

8 Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 2000.

9 Hiram Corson, quoted in Blockson, Underground Railroad, 45.

10 An excellent account of this artist is Anne Gregory Terhune, Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Also well worth consulting is the catalog of an extensive exhibit of Hovenden’s works at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum marking the centenary of his death, Thomas Hovenden: American Painter of Hearth and Homeland (Philadelphia: Woodmere Art Museum, 1995). The catalog contains essays by Anne Gregory Terhune, Suylvia Yount, and Naurice Frank Woods, Jr.

11 For a discussion of the fictitious story of Brown kissing the child, see Terhune, Hovenden, 136-37.

12 Martha Maulsby Hovenden (1884-1941) would go on to study sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Art Students League in New York. Her best known works are the relief panels that she designed for the George Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.