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Harrisburg on the eve of Civil War

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Year of Jubilee (1863)

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Harrisburg Presbyterian Church

Modern day Market Square Presbyterian Church, built 1859.

Market Square, Harrisburg, PA

Harrisburg's English Presbyterian congregation acquired their own building in 1806, with the completion of a two-story brick church on the northeast corner of Second Street and Cherry Alley. That structure, the First Presbyterian Church, was rebuilt in 1842, but burned to the ground in a disastrous 1858 fire. The congregation moved to temporary quarters in (John H.) Brant's Hall, on Market Street, until a new church could be built.

Two churches came out of the fire, due to a serious split between Old School and New School theologies. While the Old School congregants decided to build at Third and Pine streets, the New School congregants, led by longtime minister Rev. William Radcliff DeWitt, rebuilt on the southwest corner of Second Street and Blackberry Alley. The new location was one block north, and followed the fashionable shift in Harrisburg toward the square. Built by Joseph C. Hoxie in a mixture of Romaneque and Gothic styles, the new structure, completed in 1860, became known as the Market Square Presbyterian Church.

African American connections, from The Year of Jubilee:

A group of Harrisburg’s Presbyterian women had organized a “Sabbath School” for the “encouragement and promotion of Learning, Morality and Religion.” One of the organizers, and the society secretary, was Rachel Graydon, daughter of William Graydon. Rachel would soon find her family involved much more closely with Harrisburg’s African American community and at the center of several key events in the city’s anti-slavery history.

In 1817, however, she was an organizer and teacher in the Sunday school that offered classes to both white and black students, regardless of age, in the old Harrisburg Academy building on Market Street. The school’s enrollment, in addition to whites, included thirty-seven African American students the first year, and twenty-nine students the second year. In addition to religious and moral curriculums, the students were tutored in basic reading and spelling, as evidenced by the eighteen spelling books and forty-two reading primers in the school library. Among the African American students in the first classes were members of the Butler, Fayette, Carr, Carter and Dickerson families, representing five of the seven free African American families first documented in the borough. (YOJ, Vol I: Men of God, p. 368-369)

In 1836, [Reverend DeWitt] had allowed visiting American Antislavery Society lecturer and minister Jonathan Blanchard to deliver a sermon in the church on Second Street as a guest minister. The choice of Blanchard led numerous congregants to walk out on the services that day.

Reverend DeWitt was a frequent visitor to the home of Charles C. Rawn, with whom he regularly discussed the issues relevant to the slavery question. DeWitt, like Rawn, initially embraced the colonization idea, and then seems to have turned away from it. The issue remained divisive for Harrisburg Presbyterians for several decades.(YOJ, Vol II, Men of Muscle, p. 164)

African American Presbyterians, by 1857, worshipped generally on their own in conjunction with the established church, although they were not recognized as a separate congregation by their church’s General Assembly as such. Late in that year, Joseph Bustill and Mordecai McKinney began discussing the formation of an official African American Presbyterian Church in Harrisburg. Bustill contacted an old friend in Philadelphia, Reverend Charles W. Gardiner, then about seventy-five years old, who visited Harrisburg in September to explore the idea further and to negotiate possible aid and support for the church with Reverend DeWitt.

In April [1858], Harrisburg’s Presbyterian African Americans rented from the Haldeman family the second floor of the building at the southwest corner of Walnut Street and River Alley and prepared to hold temporary services there, under the direction of Reverend DeWitt and his assistant pastor, Reverend Thomas Robinson. Mordecai McKinney agreed to supervise the Sunday school, and in mid-April, Reverend Gardiner returned to Harrisburg from Philadelphia to officially take charge of the new church. Assisting Reverend Gardiner were elders Jeremiah Kelly, a local tradesman, and Hiram Baker. (YOJ, Vol II, Men of Muscle, p. 165-166)

This latter mentioned church would become Capital Street Presbyterian Church, in 1867.

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All photographs and text on this page copyright © 2010 George F. Nagle and Afrolumens Project.

Sources

  • Egle, William Henry, Notes and Queries, 1879-1895
  • Frew, Ken, Building Harrisburg, 2009
  • Morgan, George H., Annals of Harrisburg, 1858.

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