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Year of Jubilee (1863)
20th Century History |
Harrisburg Presbyterian Church
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.
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