Portsmouth's African Methodist Episcopal Church (Allen Chapel - AME) is the city's oldest Black religious society. In March 1837, "Father Charleston" organizd the church in the "Old Wheeler Academy," which was located on the southwest corner of Fourth and Markets Streets.
The congregation's founding reflected the growth and relative prosperity of Portsmouth's African American community, whose residences, at the time, were concentrated north of the Academy building "on the lower end of Seventh Street, around near the river banks." The original members whose names have been passed down include: “Sofaxie Keels, Marina Barley, Kitty Kanan, Emily Wood, Robert Johnson, Polly Johnson, Anthony Hall and wife, Jeremy Delay and wife, George W. Johnson, Lewis Rogers, Martha Rogers, Toles Moore, David Coles, Patsy Coles, Christina Ross, and Francis A. Vaughn.”
Some of the founders had been born free, others had been emancipated by their former enslavers, and still others had purchased their own freedom. And members of the church would have undoubtedly been involved in assisting their fellow African Americans escape their enslavement and dodge pursuing bounty hunters. Counted among these heroic members of the AME Church was Joseph Love, who assisted freedom seekers when he lived just north of Portsmouth in Huston Hollow.
The existence of such a large black religious society at the time of its founding in 1837 is particularly noteworthy as the town's black population had faced a mass expulsion only six years earlier when township officials had enforced Ohio's discriminatory "Black Laws," expelling some eighty African American residents. Notwithstanding this dark history, the town's black population appears to have quickly rebounded and contributed to the town's overall growth in the 1830s and 1840s.
In 1842, the congregation acquired their own city lot and built a wood framed church on the north side of Fifth Street, between Court and Market. Within two years this structure was replaced with a more substantial brick structure. Thanks to the reminiscences of Betty Redman, who was a longtime church member, there is a description of the church's interior in the pages of the Portsmouth Times. "An aisle was in the center of the church and the pews were on either side. The church was equipped with heating stoves and was lighted with tallow candles placed in candle holders along the walls of the church. There were eight holders and each held two candles. The men occupied the pews on one side of the church and the women occupied the pews on the other."
In 1868, the congregation would move once again, purchasing what was known at the time as Spencer Chapel on Seventh Street, between Chillicothe and Gay Streets. This church structure had been originally built in 1853 by the city's German Methodist society and was named for Rev. R. A. Spencer, who had donated the lot on Seventh Street. In 1870, this was the location of Portsmouth's celebration of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment.
In 1920, the congregation built their present structure at Twelfth and Waller streets, naming it Allen Chapel, in remembrance of Rev. Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Sources:
Evans, Nelson W., "The African Methodist Episcopal Church," in A History of Scioto County, Ohio, Together with a Pioneer Record of Southern Ohio (Portsmouth, Ohio, 1902), 529.
“Allen A.M.E. Chapel Opens Anniversary Week Sunday,” Portsmouth Daily Times (24 September 1927).
"The Fifteenth Amendment in Portsmouth: Grand Ratification and Speeches by White and Colored Speakers,” Portsmouth Times (30 April 1870).
"Pioneer Negro Resident Recalls History of AME Church," Portsmouth Times (6 August 1932).
]]>In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the congregation now known as First Presbyterian of Portsmouth, Ohio, was a nexus of the antislavery movement in southern Ohio and it’s members, elders, and ministers represented a wide spectrum of antislavery thought and action, from gradual emancipationists and colonizationists to immediate abolitionists and Underground Railroad supporters.
First Presbyterian is hometo one of the oldest religious societies in the city, with an origins dating to 1817, when fourteen area residents organized the congregation in the "the old Court House on Market Street," under the ministry of the Rev. Stephen Lindsey. The founding elders included Josiah Morton, David Mitchell, William Russell, and John Lawson.
Without a settled, permanent minister prior to 1817, local Presbyterians had welcomed visiting ministers, including the Rev. William Williamson of Adams County and Rev. James Gilliland of Brown County. These two Presbyterian clergymen were renowned emancipators, who had freed their slaves in South Carolina before immigrating to southern Ohio.
Notably, the congregation was racially integrated from an early date, with two of its longstanding African American members -- Peter and Charlotte Weaver -- being remembered fondly in the pages of local history. According to Nelson Evans, "they came to Portsmouth before the town was located and built a cabin," making the Weavers perhaps the first African American residents of the city.
Peter Weaver worked as a shoe and boot black, as well as "an attache of the Court House," helping with various custodial duties. Charlotte Weaver, according to Evans, "was a character. She was a midwife and a factotum about town. No child could be born, no woman buried and no social function be given, without her assistance." Both had been born into slavery. Peter first bought his own freedom, then Charlotte's, but they were never able to raise the money needed to purchase the freedom of their child, who tragically remained in slavery. The Weavers, with their connections to the town's black and white communities, undoubtedly helped runaway slaves find a ride on Portsmouth's Underground Railroad.
In 1822, this congregation built their first place of worship -- what was the first dedicated religious structure in the city, as well -- on the south side of Second Street below Market. In 1849, under the leadership of Rev. Marcus Hicks, the congregation hired noted Portsmouth architect William Newman to build their current home on the southwest corner of Third and Court streets. The congregation, with some 115 members, first gathered here on April 6th, 1851, observing it as a “day of humiliation, fasting and prayer for the conversion of the world to Jesus Christ.”
In retrospect, the congregation’s most famous abolitionist minister may have been the Rev. Edwin H. Nevin, who served in Portsmouth for two years in 1837 and 1838. Afterwards, Nevin became known as the outspoken President of Franklin College in New Athens, Harrison County, Ohio. While the college lasted it would be known, like the more long-lived Oberlin College, for its support of abolition.
With the arrival of Rev. E. P. Pratt in 1852, the congregation would be led by an active supporter of the American Colonization Society, a nominally antislavery organization that promoted a federally funded gradual emancipation, which would compensate slaveowners and remove emancipated slaves to a colony on the west coast of Africa. The colonization scheme found support among Presbyterians and other evangelicals, particularly in border states of the union, like Kentucky and Ohio. The Presbyterian General Assembly had endorsed colonization as early as 1817 and its popularity as a proposed solution to the problem of slavery remained strong into the the 1860s. Its most popular expression was found in the pages of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which championed the cause of both emancipation and colonization, while also justifying the morality of the Underground Railroad.
According to oral tradition (passed down by members of the church), the storage areas under the church’s stairs were used as hiding places for African Americans who sought refuge on their way to their next stop on the network to freedom.
The congregation belonged to the Chillicothe Presbytery, one of the most radical and activist antebellum church bodies in the nation and its leaders participated in the national debates over how the church should act in regards to slavery and its perpetuation in the United States. In September 1829, while meeting in West Union, Ohio, the Chillicothe Presbytery adopted a resolution by unanimous vote that declared the "buying or selling, or holding a slave, for the sake of gain, is a heinous sin and scandal, and requires the cognizance of the judicatories of the church."
The Presbytery followed this up with two pastoral letters that explained their opposition to slavery, in general, and slaveholding by church members, in particular. They printed 1,800 copies and then mailed them out to Presbyterian churches across the nation, north and south. Therein, the Presbytery declared: "If slave-holding is a transgression of the will of God, any plea for continuing in it, is neither more nor less than a plea in behalf of serving the Devil rather than the Holy One." With fiery rhetoric like this, the Presbyterian congregations of southern Ohio (including Portsmouth) were at the forefront of the agitation of the slavery question at the state and national levels of their denomination.
With such strong antislavery sentiments originating in the region, it should not be surprising to find supporters of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society (OASS) -- the state's most radical abolition organization -- involved in the affairs of Portsmouth's Presbyterian Church. Joseph Riggs, who served as an elder in the church, also volunteered as a regional manager for the OASS and as a subscription agent for the Philanthropist, its abolitionist newspaper.
Before moving to Portsmouth, Joseph and his wife, Rebecca Baldridge Riggs, belonged to an antislavery Reformed Presbyterian church at Cherry Fork in neighboring Adams County. Riggs was a successful iron manufacturer and politician. In 1831, he was elected to the first of two terms as an Ohio Senator, representing Adams and Brown counties. In 1833, he and John Campbell, another noted abolitionist and Underground Railroad operator, built the original Hanging Rock Forge and the Lawrence Furnace for a company of investors that included James Rogers, Robert Hamilton, Andrew Ellison, and the Rev. Dyer Burgess, another abolitionist minister, who served the West Union Presbyterian Church.
The historical record is silent as to whether Joseph and Rebecca Riggs ever personally assisted runaway slaves, but there is no doubt that the Riggs secretly funded local Underground Railroad operations in Portsmouth. According to Congressman James Ashley, the author of the Thirteenth Amendment who spent his childhood and early professional career in Portsmouth, Joseph Riggs once gave him a twenty-dollar coin, unexpectedly, with an approving nod, after he had successfully assisted a group of African Americans cross the Ohio River and find safe passage on the network to freedom.
Portsmouth's First Presbyterian Church, with its connections to the larger Chillicothe Presbytery, and its regional network of antislavery activists and Underground Railroad operators, played an important part in the sectional conflict over slavery and its final abolition. Looking back, there is no discounting the contributions of Joseph Riggs and other unnamed or yet-to-be-identified members of First Presbyterian Church whose unknown work on behalf of "the oppressed" made a difference in people's lives and shaped the course of American history.
]]>Ross County's Concord Presbyterian Church was home to a number of influential abolitionist activists and conductors on the Underground Railroad. Concord's congregation has its roots in nearby South Salem's Buckskin Presbyterian Church. In 1804, the new congregation established its meeting place on a hillside near the small village of Lattaville. In 1822, the original log structure was replaced with one built of red brick, now painted in classic white.
Here, in the loft of this church, fugitive slaves sought refuge on their way north to freedom in Canada. The Concord Church's second pastor, the Rev. James H. Dickey arrived in 1810 and his two decades of service in this pulpit firmly established Concord as an abolitionist stronghold and made it a station on the emerging Underground Railroad of Ohio's Scioto Valley.
Dickey first came to the area in August of 1810 as a missionary of Kentucky's West Lexington Presbytery, which had just granted the young man a ministerial license. Dickey had been a student of Barton Stone, an antislavery Presbyterian who is most remembered for hosting Kentucky's Cane Ridge Revival in the summer of 1801. Here in Ohio, the Presbyterians who had settled the headwaters Herrod's Run and Buckskin and Indian creeks, approved of Dickey and invited him to settle with them. At first, they would share his ministerial duties among three churches - Pisgah, Buckskin, and Concord, but it was to Concord that he served the longest.
Before leaving Kentucky in 1811, Dickey married into the emerging abolitionist network of Presbyterian families in south-central Ohio. He took Mary Depew of Paris, Kentucky, as his wife. The Depews were slaveowners and her dowry included five souls, which the newly weds decided to free and carry with them to Ohio. The Rev. Samuel Crothers of nearby Greenfield, Highland County, was a brother-in-law to the Dickeys. Crothers had also married a Depew, a sister of Mary.
As the Underground Railroad developed in the Scioto Valley it would run along the familial and social networks of antislavery evangelical southerners, men and women who (like the runaways they assisted) had fled across the Ohio River to escape what the oppression and moral corruption of the southern, slave states.
In April 1822, Rev. Dickey and the Concord church hosted the inaugural meeting of the Chillicothe Presbytery, which served the Ohio counties of Ross, Fayette, Highland, Pike, Adams, Brown and the eastern parts of Clermont and Clinton. The new presbytery helped organize south-central Ohio's more radical anti-slavery Presbyterians. The Chillicothe Presbytery, now led by men like John Rankin, James Gilliland, William Williamson, Dyer Burgess, Samuel Crothers, and James H. Dickey, would emerge as one of the nation's most vocal and radical antislavery church organizations.
Dickey would serve as the first Corresponding Secretary of the Abolition Society of Paint Valley, which he helped organize in 1833. Dickey would give up his position at Concord and resettle further west in Illinois in 1837. By then the Rev. William Gage had already been installed as their next minister.
Gage, a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Andover Theological Seminary, shared Dickey's antislavery faith. He too was a dedicated abolitionist, who attended the business of the Paint Valley society and helped fugitive slaves along the route of the Underground Railroad.
]]>Coming soon! The story of Red Oak Presbyterian Church and the Rev. James Gilliland, who helped establish the Underground Railroad in southern Ohio. Gilliland moved to southern Ohio when church authorities in South Carolina banned him from preaching against the sin of slavery.
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