a book about Harrisburg...
by George F. Nagle
Study Areas:
Chapter
Nine
Deluge
For Harrisburg blacks, the decade-long nightmare that was the 1850s—a period that began in a bloody riot and spiraled through years of state-sponsored kidnappings, beatings, and legal assaults on African American rights—showed no signs of dissipating into the hope of a sunny morning. If anything, Harrisburg’s African American residents were rudely awakened from the plodding nightmare only to face the thunderclaps of a violent storm. So ended a decade that refused to pass quietly into history.
The town, which was growing large enough to be on the verge of being officially classified as a city, continued to attract attention from the movers and shakers of the anti-slavery movement. William Lloyd Garrison returned to Harrisburg during a “rapid anti-slavery tour” through Pennsylvania to Ohio, eleven years after he was greeted with a shower of rotten eggs and bricks while attempting to speak at the courthouse during his first visit to town in 1847. This trip would prove to be less confrontational.
Garrison made stops in Philadelphia, Germantown—where he stayed the night in the home of J. Miller McKim and sipped tea with Lucretia Mott and other local Quaker activists who had come to call on him—and West Chester, where he and the other guests at the McKim estate took part in a three day celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. From West Chester, Garrison and his party took the train to Paoli and then to Christiana, probably following the same route taken by Edward Gorsuch and his men six years earlier. The abolitionist editor was met at the Christiana train station by the venerable Thomas Whitson, who welcomed him into his farmhouse for the two-day stay, during which time Garrison delivered lectures on Saturday at the local schoolhouse and on Sunday at the Friends Meeting House in Bart Township.
On the way back to Whitson’s farm, Garrison and his party played the part of tourists, stopping at the William Parker farm to examine the spot where Edward Gorsuch was killed. Garrison was deeply moved as he walked up the dirt lane to the old “riot house.” Like many other curious visitors, the staid Boston newspaperman stopped to reflect on the historical events as he surveyed the front yard, then “had the satisfaction to place my foot upon the threshold” of the storied log house, dubbing the site “Bunker Hill and Lexington;”1 a highly significant metaphor for another equally venerated revolution seventy-six years earlier.
Garrison left Christiana on the Monday morning train for Harrisburg, and, as on his previous visit in 1847, was again welcomed at the Market Street depot “by my old friend, Dr. W. W. Rutherford, and cordially welcomed to his residence.” Doctor William Wilson Rutherford and his wife Eleanor again played the part of gracious hosts to the traveling abolitionist editor, opening their Front Street townhouse to him so he could rest up from his journey.
While there, Dr. Rutherford filled Garrison in on the details of the arrangements he had made to allow him to deliver an anti-slavery lecture in town later that evening, on 11 October. Despite advertisements that had been placed to promote the event, Garrison’s audience numbered only about twenty-five persons, “the smallest I ever addressed,” but he did not let the dismal turnout, or a persistent hoarseness from a week of lecturing, deter him from delivering a powerful ninety-minute oration. Garrison blamed the poor response on the fact that the next day, Tuesday the twelfth, was election day, and “political excitement was at fever heat…Besides this, a circus had come into the town that day; and a fat woman, weighing several hundred pounds, three living male skeletons, and a huge boa constrictor, were on exhibition!... Moreover, the place has a large foreign population, wholly inaccessible.”
Disappointed, Garrison bid goodbye to the Rutherfords and moved on the next day for Altoona.2 In Harrisburg, the local papers took little notice of his appearance or his speech.
Arrival of a "Most Determined Abolitionist"
Another well-known anti-slavery activist had also taken a keen interest in central Pennsylvania at about this same time. This person, however, was not looking to publicize a lecture tour, and in fact was intentionally keeping a low profile, at times even hiding out in the homes of African American sympathizers to escape federal authorities who were on his trail. The man was “Captain” John Brown, the Kansas Territory legend—“Old Osawatomie”— who was partly responsible for the blood in “Bleeding Kansas,” and he had come east again with a plan to battle slavery on its own soil.
Brown was born a Connecticut Yankee, in a fiercely religious family. His father, a tanner, held deep anti-slavery views, teaching his son that slavery was a sin against God. The family moved to Ohio when John Brown was a child, and during the War of 1812, the young man drove cattle to army encampments in Michigan. It was in Michigan that John Brown first witnessed the horrors of slavery, and from that point on, he became, in his words, “a most determined Abolitionist.”
Brown studied at a divinity school with an eye toward becoming a minister, but ended his studies when he ran out of money. He married and fathered seven children, with the birth of the last child leading to his wife’s early death. He remarried and fathered another thirteen children, and spent the better portion of the next two decades moving in and out of various occupations, as he moved his large family back and forth through five states in the East.
His family spent a decade in Northwestern Pennsylvania, where John Brown operated a tannery and served as the postmaster of the little town of Randolph (later renamed New Richmond), near Meadville, in Crawford County.3 Here he was a town leader, school founder and teacher, lay minister, librarian, doctor, veterinarian, and ultimately a full time caregiver to his children as his wife’s health faded and then failed.4
He kept alive his hatred of slavery, and the location became an active station on the Underground Railroad during the Browns’ tenure there. John Brown intently followed national events that related to slavery, and after the Southampton Revolt of 1831, he counted Nat Turner as one of his heroes.5 His anti-slavery beliefs soon drew him out west to Kansas Territory, where he participated in the epic struggle for control of that land, and as a result became a figure of legendary admiration, or dread.
By early 1858, John Brown had returned from Kansas Territory with an audacious and revolutionary plan that would outdo even the mini-“Bunker Hill and Lexington” at the Parker Riot House in Christiana. It seems that he had always planned to stage a showdown with the slave powers, in some form or the other. He had begun the struggle on his New Richmond farm, providing aid to a large number of fugitive slaves who passed through the area, but even then, he had larger plans, and the works of the Underground Railroad provided the inspiration for his grand scheme.
He studied southern geography with an eye toward establishing remote outposts to which slaves could flee, and in time be sent to safety. The Allegheny Mountain range stood out to him as a beacon of possibilities, and the more he studied the massive 400-mile range that extended from Pennsylvania down through Virginia, the more he realized it was exactly what he had been seeking. He told militant abolitionist and close personal supporter Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “God had established the Allegheny Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves.”6
In its final form, Brown’s plan envisioned an independent mountain fortress in the heights of western Virginia, from which guerilla operations against the local slave powers could be staged. As one of the participants, John H. Kagi, a schoolteacher, lawyer, and veteran of the Kansas bloodshed, explained it, the first stage was to appear as “a local insurrection, at most. The planters would pursue their chattel and be defeated. The militia would then be called out, and would also be defeated. It was not intended that the movement should appear to be of large dimension, but that, gradually increasing in magnitude, it should, as it opened, strike terror into the heart of the slave states.”7
The operation was, at its heart, a terrorist strike into the South. The plan assumed that local slaves, once they understood what was happening, would flock to the mountains to join in, thus strengthening their numbers and increasing their confidence, which would in turn inspire more slave “stampedes.” Additional mountain outposts and remote camps would be built, creating a chain of maroon-type resistance from the free north all the way to the swamps of South Carolina. Brown himself designed many of the planned fortresses, based upon personal inspections of the ruins of medieval fortifications in France and Germany that he made during a trip to Europe in 1849.8
In February 1858, Brown traveled to the home of Frederick Douglass, in Rochester, New York, to work on his plans and to arrange for financial support. It was at Douglass’ home that Brown composed his “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” a massive reform of the Constitution of the United States. The second paragraph of his constitution, which followed an opening paragraph that undeniably denounced slavery, stated:
We, the citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people, who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court are declared to have no rights which the White Man is bound to respect; together with all of the people degraded by the laws thereof, Do, for the time being ordain and establish ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances, the better to protect our Persons, Property, Lives, and Liberties; and to govern our actions:
And following that, under “Article I,” was listed the qualifications for full citizenship, which specified, “All persons of mature age, whether Proscribed, oppressed, and enslaved Citizens, or of the Proscribed and oppressed races of the United States.” In short, all people against whom any sort of prejudice had traditionally been manifested. John Brown scholar David S. Reynolds noted, “Brown’s main focus, then, was America’s most oppressed group, African Americans; but by implication he encompassed other maltreated groups as well, such as women, children, and Native Americans and other ethnic minorities. Brown’s constitution was unprecedented with regard to its inclusiveness with regard to race, gender, and age.”9
People of the Reliable Kind
It was also during his stay at Frederick Douglass’ home that Brown revealed his intense interest in central Pennsylvania. In a February 1858 letter to his son, John Brown, Jr., the elder Brown wrote, “I have been thinking that I would like to have you make a trip to Bedford, Chambersburg, Gettysburg and Uniontown, in Pennsylvania, travelling slowly along, and inquiring out every man on the way, or every family of the right stripe, and getting acquainted with them as much as you could. When you look at the location of those places, you will readily perceive the advantage of getting up some acquaintance in those parts.”10 In a follow up letter, written from Chatham, Ontario, in April, Brown reminded his son about “hunting up every person and family of the reliable kind about, at, or near Bedford, Chambersburg, Gettysburg, and Carlisle, in Pennsylvania, and also Hagerstown and vicinity, Maryland, and Harpers Ferry, Va.”11
The elder Brown was drafting a distinct line of support and communication from the towns west and south of Harrisburg to his target in the mountains of western Virginia. What, exactly, he had planned for this region remained to be seen. From Rochester, Douglass and Brown traveled to Philadelphia to meet with Henry Highland Garnet, Stephen Smith, and other African American leaders at Stephen Smith’s Lombard Street home.12 The plan was quickly coming together.
The meeting occurred in Smith’s house at 921 Lombard Street on 10 March, a Wednesday. With Brown and Douglass was Brown’s eldest son, John Jr., Henry Highland Garnet, and William Still. There, in the flickering lamplight, Brown laid out his invasion plan to the leaders of the local African American community. His success, the old man knew, depended upon the moral, if not financial backing, of the Northern free African American community, but until now, he had shared his plans with precious few people. For this meeting he had chosen to reveal the grand plan to those he considered not only trustworthy, but also radical enough to accept actions that would surely be considered treasonous and terroristic.
Henry Highland Garnet, though a Presbyterian minister, was already known to be in that very militant frame of mind, but the other man of God in the room, the Reverend Stephen Smith, an ordained minister in the A.M.E. church, did not have the same reputation. Smith, who had been born into slavery in Dauphin County, sold to a master in Columbia, purchased his freedom, and rose to national prominence through decades of hard work and shrewd business practices, still maintained close ties with his business partner in Columbia, William Whipper.
Despite moving to Philadelphia in 1842, Smith shared Whipper’s concern for the citizens of Columbia and for the safe conduct of fugitive slaves throughout the region. He no doubt shared Whipper’s anguish over the murder of lumber worker and fugitive slave William Smith in 1852, but whether he was so deeply affected by the incident to embrace militant abolitionism at that time is not clear. However, the presence of John Brown in his parlor in March 1858,13 explaining to Philadelphia area African American leaders his plan to establish a guerrilla resistance in the Appalachian Mountains, speaks much to Smith’s conflicted frame of mind near the end of the decade.
William Still, as head of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, was sympathetic toward John Brown’s anti-slavery work, but also, through Still’s connections, was the Bustill family. While in Philadelphia in March, Brown and his son stayed at the home of painter David Bustill Bowser, a grandson of Cyrus Bustill, Underground Railroad worker and cousin to Joseph Bustill.14 Everyone at the meeting in Smith’s home was considered by Brown to be a trusted potential supporter, if not actual conspirator and participant in the plans that he now passionately laid out for them.
There was one person in the room, however, who had known Brown’s aspirations for armed resistance for many years. In 1847, just after his speaking tour with William Lloyd Garrison through Pennsylvania and Ohio, Frederick Douglass made a trip to the home of John Brown in Springfield, Ohio. Brown had been recommended to him by his friends Henry Highland Garnet and Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen, whose voices, in speaking of Brown “would drop to a whisper.” Douglass eagerly accepted an invitation to visit Brown, at the time a successful merchant, at his home.
The abolitionist lecturer expected to find “a fine residence in an eligible location,” but instead found that the earnest Brown and his family inhabited “a small wooden building on a back street, in a neighborhood chiefly occupied by laboring men and mechanics.” It was there, in an abode in which “everything implied stern truth, solid purpose, and rigid economy,” that Douglass first heard the entire ambitious plan that was John Brown’s vision. It was a secret that Douglass carried with him for eleven years, until this meeting in the home of Stephen Smith, when Old Osawatomie carefully expanded his pool of African American men “to whom he could safely reveal his secret.”15
Brown made other important Pennsylvania connections during this time, writing letters to Martin R. Delany while staying with Frederick Douglass, visiting with other Philadelphia area black leaders while at the Bowser household in Philadelphia, and finally, firming up his network with a visit to the free African communities in Canada.
His first destination north of the United States-Canada border was significant: Brown traveled with Reverend Jermain W. Loguen to St. Catharines, the site of a settlement populated by a large number of fugitive slaves, including many who had passed through central Pennsylvania. One prominent resident in particular intrigued John Brown, and he had Loguen take him straight to her door. Harriet Tubman welcomed John Brown into her home on North Street, in St. Catharines, Canada West on 7 April 1858.
She had established herself in a small community of former slaves from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the area from which she herself had escaped nine years prior, and the area to which she had heroically returned time and again to retrieve members of her family from bondage.16 Once settled in St. Catharines, Tubman formed alliances with local and regional anti-slavery organizations, both black and white, to form a network of relief agencies for the support of newly arrived fugitives. She worked among the local African American residents, helping them to find homes and work, a vocation that suited her nickname among the immigrant community there as “Moses.”
John Brown came to her house and spoke to an assembled group of local African American residents, most of them escaped slaves, about his visions of resistance, and in short order he had won over not only many of the assembled people, but Moses herself, whom Brown dubbed “General” Tubman.17
On Saturday, 8 May, Brown “quietly” convened a convention of African American leaders, ostensibly at the First Baptist Church on King Street (but held at various nearby buildings), under the ruse that they were organizing a Masonic Lodge, in nearby Chatham, Canada West. At this convention, he presented his provisional constitution for ratification by the delegates present and had it printed by newspaperman and printer William Howard Day. Brown had corresponded with Day the previous month, exchanging information about Harriet Tubman’s activities, and the newspaperman maintained a close working relationship with Brown while the activist was in Canada West.18
Brown also made personal contact with, and secured cooperation from, Martin R. Delany while in Canada, another significant accomplishment for the self-appointed resistance commander. One other Pennsylvanian was recruited during this time: Osborne Perry Anderson, a free born African American resident of Chester County, Pennsylvania was working in Chatham as a printer on the staff of the Provincial Freeman, Mary Ann Shadd’s newspaper, and attended Brown’s convention.19 Anderson had moved to Canada West to manage the farm of Mary Ann Shadd’s uncle, Absolom Shadd, and became involved with the newspaper as early as 1856. Anderson had previously studied at Oberlin College, knew William Howard Day, who had moved to a farm in Dresden, Canada West, in 1857, and worked closely with him in various anti-slavery capacities while in Canada.20 Brown’s groundwork to establish connections in Pennsylvania, a vital part of his planning, was almost finished.
The Chambersburg "Mining" Operation
More than a year of preparations passed between the secret Chatham convention and the establishment of a forward base of operations at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In that town, John Kagi, one of John Brown’s lieutenants, operating under the pseudonym J. Henrie, had opened a false Virginia mining business named Isaac Smith and Sons.
In June 1859, at Chambersburg, Kagi received a shipment by rail of fifteen crates, shipped by John Brown, Jr. from Ohio. The crates, which were stenciled with the words “mining equipment” on the outside, were delivered to Kagi’s fake business storefront. Actually, the crates contained enough weapons to equip about two companies of men: 198 Sharps rifles and 200 Maynard revolvers.
John Brown, Sr., under the pseudonym of Doctor Isaac Smith, and several other conspirators posing as his mining venture associates, joined Kagi briefly in Chambersburg that June before heading further south to Hagerstown, and then to Harpers Ferry by early July.21 While in Chambersburg, Brown and his men stayed at the East King Street boarding house of Mary Ritner, the widowed daughter-in-law of former Pennsylvania governor Joseph Ritner. Mary Ritner’s husband Abram had supposedly been an abolitionist, which may have led John Brown, Jr. to her while he was scouting the town for people “of the right stripe” for his father the previous year.
While working in Chambersburg, Kagi had the help of local Underground Railroad agents Henry and Eliza Watson, who provided him with intelligence and extra help to watch for arms shipments. Henry Watson was a forty-seven-year-old African American barber, born in Maryland, and Eliza, at age forty-three, worked as a washerwoman in town. They owned a small property in the town’s South Ward 22 and were probably the agents who helped forward fugitives Owen and Otho Taylor, and their families, to Joseph Bustill in Harrisburg in 1856.
On Friday evening, 19 August 1859, Henry Watson was working in his barbershop when two African American men walked through his door. One of the men was a stranger to him, but the other was instantly recognizable as Frederick Douglass. The presence of the abolitionist orator in Chambersburg was a surprise to many of the local residents, as the appearance of a nationally known figure of his prominence would normally have been well advertised in advance, but Watson was not caught off guard. He had recently been asked to keep a watch for Douglass by none other than John Brown himself, in the character of Isaac Smith, who was again in town.
Brown had sent word to Douglass in Rochester, New York, that he needed to see him as soon as possible, and he directed him to find him at an abandoned stone quarry in Chambersburg. Douglass, accompanied by Shields Green, a young man that Brown had met at his house in Rochester the previous year, left Rochester on Tuesday the sixteenth for Chambersburg and upon arrival immediately sought out their contact, Henry Watson, who “dropped all and put [Douglass] on the right track” to meet Brown.
Watson directed the men to a secluded area west of town, at the Conococheague Creek, where they found Brown and Kagi waiting in the old quarry. Brown was disguised as a fisherman and did not immediately recognize Douglass, but even after they recognized and greeted each other, Douglass recalled that the old man “wore an anxious expression,” the stress of planning the operation obviously wearing on him.23
Douglass reported that “We—Mr. Kagi, Captain Brown, Shields Green, and myself—sat down among the rocks and talked over the enterprise which was about to be undertaken,” discussing the details, the purpose, the vision, the problems, and the moral issues involved, spending “the most of Saturday and a part of Sunday in this debate.”
Douglass tried his best to dissuade Brown from the venture, arguing that he was going into “a perfect steel trap” and that “once in, he would never get out alive.” Brown, he noted, listened to his views with respect, but countered each point with his own, and could not be shaken from his plan.
As darkness approached on Saturday evening, Douglass returned to town, where, to cover his real reason for being in Chambersburg, he delivered a speech in favor of immediate emancipation and equality of the races. The Valley Spirit newspaper reported that his “discourse was well received by a large and attentive auditory [sic],” and that the speaker was “impressive” in his elocution.24
On Sunday, he and Green were again at the quarry, meeting with Brown and Kagi. The discussion on the Sabbath was not as extensive, and after a short session, Douglass decided that he had no more arguments for Brown, and that the old campaigner would not heed them anyway. He told Shields Green that he had heard what John Brown had to say, that he disagreed with the changes in the plan and that he planned to return to Rochester and that Green was welcome to come with him. Brown rose and clasped Douglass on the shoulders, urging both him and Green to join him in Virginia, telling Douglass, “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.”
Douglass was affected by Brown’s depth of affection for him, but believed nothing good could come from the raid on a federal arsenal, believing it to be not only foolhardy, but futile, and he refused the offer, later candidly recalling that he was not sure if his choice was motivated more out of discretion or cowardice. He prepared to leave Brown in the quarry, and, turning to Green, asked what he had decided to do.
Shields Green was in his twenties, and had escaped slavery in Charleston, South Carolina some years before. Douglass was therefore surprised to hear the former slave tell him, “I believe I’ll go with the old man,”25 understanding full well that he was dooming himself either to death, or a return to slavery. Douglass returned to town, leaving Green, Brown, and Kagi in the quarry. It was the last he would see any of them.
Notes
1. “Letter From the Editor,” Liberator, 22 October 1858.
2. Ibid.
3. John Brown’s Raid, National Park Service History Series (Washington, DC: NPS Office of Publications, 1973), 2-5.
4. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Knopf, 2005), 44-52.
5. Ibid., 54-55.
6. W. E. B. DuBois, John Brown (1909; repr., New York: Modern Library, 2001), 117. Higginson was one of Brown’s “Secret Six,” financial backers of his revolutionary plans. The others were Samuel Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith and George Luther Stearns.
7. Ibid., xxviii, 117, 133.
8. Ibid.
9. Reynolds, John Brown, 249-252. Brown’s Provisional Constitution, after it was ratified at the African American convention in Chatham, Canada West (Ontario) in May, was printed for private distribution by Oberlin College graduate and Aliened American newspaper publisher William Howard Day. Day maintained close ties with John Brown, exchanging correspondence with him in the spring of 1858 as an intermediary between Brown and Harriet Tubman. Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land. Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Random House, One World, 2004), 160.
10. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown: Liberator of Kansas and Martyr of Virginia, 3rd ed. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1885), 450.
11. Ibid., 452.
12. Ibid., 451.
13. DuBois, John Brown, 147. The murdered fugitive William Smith was no relation to the philanthropist and businessman Stephen Smith.
14. Like his Harrisburg cousin, David Bustill Bowser worked to aid fugitive slaves, and even used his home to provide shelter. During, or shortly after the time that Brown stayed in the his home, Bowser produced a painting of Brown showing the old man with his full gray beard—an image that would become known throughout the world following his 1859 raid and trial. Eric Ledell Smith, “Painted with Pride in the U.S.A," Pennsylvania Heritage 27, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 24-31.
15. DuBois, John Brown, 56-59.
16. Harriet Tubman made about thirteen trips to the Eastern Shore of Maryland between 1850 and 1860, leading away about seventy persons, mostly family members and friends. This astounding record of rescues in the face of certain re-enslavement, had she been caught, was what brought John Brown to her door in Canada West in April 1858. She was known for her planning, caution, intuitive sense of impending danger, and her strong command of those in her charge while on the road—all qualities needed and sought by Brown. Harriet Tubman favored following the waterways of the Eastern Shore of Maryland—an area with which she was intimately familiar—for her escape routes to the north, and therefore she never brought fugitives through central Pennsylvania, preferring instead to go through agents Thomas Garrett in Wilmington, Delaware and William Still in Philadelphia. The town of St. Catharines, however, was home to hundreds of other fugitive slaves who had passed through central Pennsylvania—people like Owen and Otho Taylor—who received resettlement aid from Tubman once in Canada West. Larson, Bound for the Promised Land, xxii-xxiii, 157-160, 302.
17. Ibid., 158-160.
18. Ibid., 160; DuBois, John Brown, 152-153.
19. Jean Libby, “Osborne Perry Anderson (1830-1871),” at “John Brown Research,” Allies for Freedom, http://www.alliesforfreedom.org/opa.htm (accessed 28 December 2009).
20. Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 114, 118, 130-132.
21. Reynolds, John Brown, 294-295; Alexander K. McClure, Old Time Notes of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1905), 360.
22. Bureau of the Census, 1860 Census, South Ward, Chambersburg, Franklin County, PA.
23. Frederick
Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881;
repr., New York: Pathway Press, 1941), 350-354; Sanborn, Life and
Letters, 538.
The site of the old quarry and the meeting is marked by a PHMC historical
marker. It is located on West Washington Street, in Chambersburg, behind
the Southgate Mall, near the bridge over the creek and just east of the
intersection of Franklin Street and Route 30.
24. Douglass, Life and Times, 351-353; Valley Spirit, 24 August 1859.
25. Douglass, Life
and Times, 353-354.
Caution: Copyrighted material. Published September 2010.
© 2010 George F. Nagle
This is the first in a series of books from the Afrolumens Project. Drawing on a large number of sources, and making good use of the treasure trove of information on the pages of the Afrolumens Project, this is the first truly comprehensive history of Harrisburg's African American community.