Despite its celebrated role with the Underground Railroad, Centre County’s history with slavery was not always something to brag about.
Most Centre Countians are probably aware — and, rightfully, proud — of the area’s role in the Underground Railroad. Much of this history is celebrated in Bellefonte, where Quakers and a robust community of free Blacks are known to have welcomed and protected freedom seekers from south of the Mason-Dixon Line from the 1820s through the 1850s. Halfmoon Township is also known to have been home to Underground Railroad “conductors” like Henry Hartsock, Samuel Henderson, and the Way family.
But one aspect of local history that often goes unrecognized is the fact that prominent early settlers and iron masters for whom many Centre County townships, roads, and landmarks are named — Benner, Harris, Miles, Patton, Potter — all were known to have enslaved people.
Also, according to Philip Ruth, local historian and research coordinator for the Black History in Centre County Project, aside from the Quakers dedicated to ending slavery, it is rarely acknowledged a sizable segment of the area’s white residents vocally opposed abolition during the years leading up to the Civil War.
History at the Courthouse
To get a fuller glimpse into the region’s complicated history with slavery, the Centre County courthouse is a good place to start.
The courthouse is a stop along Local Historia’s self-guided Underground Railroad tour in Bellefonte, in part because of a statue of Civil War-era Pennsylvania Gov. Andrew Curtin that stands outside, and a related anecdote about Henry Thomas.
Thomas had escaped from slavery in Maryland or Virginia and was working at Bellefonte’s Pennsylvania Hotel (now the Brockerhoff House) in 1856, when two Southern agents tracked him down, tied him up, and put him in their carriage to return him to his enslaver, which was allowed under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
Curtin, a local lawyer at the time, put together a team to try to follow the kidnappers and rescue Thomas. This attempt was unsuccessful, but the story illustrates the dedication of Curtin and other local residents to anti-slavery causes.
Thirty years prior, slave catchers from Virginia had seized in Bellefonte two people who had escaped slavery farther south. According to John Blair Linn’s “History of Centre and Clinton Counties,” they “were paraded through the streets, bound hand and foot with ropes,” before being remanded back into slavery by a local judge — presumably in the Centre County courthouse.
Linn also shares the 1841 account of an unnamed man representing Pennsylvania’s Liberty Party, the active pro-abolition political party in the years leading up to the Civil War. The man was pelted with eggs as he stood on the steps of the courthouse giving a speech in favor of abolition, demonstrating that not everyone in Bellefonte was on board with the idea of ending slavery. (In fact, in the election held later that same year, Julius Lemoyne, the Liberty Party candidate for Pennsylvania governor, received only one vote in Bellefonte, according to election results printed in The Miners’ Journal in Pottsville.)
Today, the office of Prothonotary Jeremy Breon in the courthouse houses the original, handwritten petitions from prominent local iron masters and farmers seeking to register babies born to women enslaved in their household between 1803 and 1820. These registrations were in response to Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. The first act of its kind in the United States, the act stated that every “negro or mulatto child” born to an enslaved mother after the bill’s passage and registered within six months of birth would remain in bondage as an indentured servant until they turned 28, at which point they would be free.
The petitions are some of the only official local documents linking residents to those they had enslaved and include the following examples:
- “Philip Benner, Iron Master from Spring Township … enters his negro child, Kiz, a female … born in his house in said Township” on April 30, 1803.
- “John and Joseph Miles, Iron Masters … enter as their property, the right to the service of a Negro boy named Jerry, born on the first day of February 1809 at Spring Township.”
- A petition from “Frederick Augustus Richards, Farmer” says, “A black woman named Phillis, a slave of mine, was delivered of a male mulatto child named Simon, in residence at my farm in Bald Eagle Township” in September 1819.
Another document housed in the prothonotary’s office, “A History of the Centre County Bench and Bar,” describes what is believed to have been the first capital murder case in Centre County, which occurred in 1802 and involved Dan Byers, a person enslaved by James Smith. Byers was sentenced to hanging for killing another enslaved person, John Barrows, in a dispute over a woman.
The record goes on to describe a disturbing scene: “The rope broke on the first test and the mob surrounding the scene demanded the negro’s freedom. However, after an actual struggle had ensued, the sheriff got another rope and the man was properly hung.”
Piecing together the past
The records in the prothonotary office are some of the only official documents we have about local slavery. Beyond these official records, historians must rely on a variety of sources to try to stitch together an accurate picture.
Many historians rely heavily on Linn’s “History,”published in 1883, in which enslaved people are often casually mentioned as an aside to other narratives.
Also, because of the necessity of secrecy during the time period, a lot of the evidence of Bellefonte’s role in the Underground Railroad comes from deduction, as well as from William H. Mills’ written history of St. Paul AME Church from 1909.
Sometimes evidence pops up in wills. When Gen. James Potter died in 1789, he bequeathed not only his 9,000-acre Penns Valley estate, but also “a negro slave Daphne, and Daphne’s daughter Sal and son Bob” to his daughter Martha and her husband, Andrew Gregg.
Historians like Ruth glean more information from census records.
Some of what Ruth has picked up through his research is slightly contradictory to some of Linn’s accounting.
For example, Linn’s “History” says that as of 1830, Centre County still recorded five enslaved people in Potter Township. After studying the census records of the time, Ruth believes this was an error on the part of the census-takers.
“I went back and looked at the sheets for every household in Potter Township, and in none of those households were any slaves enumerated,” he says. “I think [the census-taker] took five free Black people and accidentally put them in slave columns.”
As a result, Ruth believes that slavery was entirely phased out of Centre County by the 1820s. (The last recorded enslaved person in the state of Pennsylvania was freed in 1847.)
Old newspapers are also a good resource for historians trying to document slavery in Centre County.
In a 1799 ad in the Lancaster Journal, Centre Furnace iron master John Patton offers a $20 reward for the return of two runaway enslaved people — a 22-year-old male named John and an 18-year-old female named Flora, described as “slender made, speaks bad English, and a little French, has a scar on her upper lip, and letters branded on her breast.”
This description tells an intriguing story, according to Philip Jenkins, a history professor at Baylor University in Texas who taught for many years at Penn State. Based on the portrayal of Flora as a French speaker, he says, it is likely that she came from Haiti, and the fact that she had been branded with letters means she most likely had attempted to escape before.
Newspaper ads also show that Philip Benner, a local iron master who built the Linn House — now the home of the Bellefonte Art Museum, which, somewhat ironically, houses the first stop on the self-guided Underground Railroad trail — seemed to have a particularly hard time with people he had enslaved who escaped. He placed an ad in the Lancaster Intelligencer in 1803 offering a $30 reward for the return of escapee George Pencil, and a similar ad in Chambersburg’s The Franklin Repository in 1805 for the return of “runaway” Jack Robinson.
Reading old newspapers can also help to gauge the political sentiments of the population. One of Bellefonte’s popular newspapers before and after the Civil War seems to indicate a local sentiment that ran counter to the Quaker and AME religions’ welcoming stance toward freedom seekers from the South.
“The Democratic Watchman newspaper here that got going in the 1850s was very heavily anti-abolitionist, and it was probably the most prominent newspaper here,” explains Ruth. “It was just brutal towards Black people and anyone who sympathized with them.”
Interpreting history
This is part of what leads Ruth to conclude, “There is this idea that somehow Bellefonte was a bastion of abolitionism, and it was not, at all, in terms of the population. … Aside from a few Quakers and some pastors, it was the Black community here that was the main magnet for fleeing slaves to come here. … That is really the story that is emerging from the records that I see, more so than Bellefonte being this beacon of welcome.”
Ruth believes it is important to acknowledge that the local anti-slavery movement managed to persist and succeed in the face of opposition, and that this history can even serve as inspiration, as “things are polarized in some similar ways today.”
Although some local residents supported the idea of slavery right up to the Civil War, the actual population of enslaved people was always relatively small in Centre County and Pennsylvania, Jenkins says.
“It was a society with slaves, as opposed to a slave society as you’d find in the South. If you took these slaves away, it wouldn’t affect the economy,” he says.
Jenkins does not lean toward vilifying the area’s post-Revolutionary War slaveholders whose names now define Centre County.
“During that time period, it was hard to find anyone who would say a bad word against slavery,” he says. “We have to put things into the context of the time.”
Jenkins knows that acknowledging Centre County’s less saintly relationship with slavery might be controversial to some, but, he says, “It’s important, because we tend to think we know everything when it comes to history. We assume certain things. Then something like this comes up and it makes us ask questions, and that in turn might lead us to ask more questions about other things that we think we know everything about.” T&G
Karen Walker is a freelance writer in State College.
