Eusebius Barnard (1802-1865)
Pocopson Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Born a Quaker, Barnard became a member of the Progressive Friends movement and upheld its active affirmation of the ideals of temperance, equality of women, and abolition of slavery. His farm became a station on the Underground Railroad. He and his family, at great risk to their own lives, provided shelter to freedom seekers and then escorted them to their next safe haven. He was a founding member of the Longwood Progressive Meeting.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Eusebius Barnard was a Chester County Quaker who took the radical path of the Progressive Friends, embracing temperance, women's equality, and the abolition of slavery. His farm became a station on the Underground Railroad, where he and his family sheltered freedom seekers and guided them toward the next safe house — dangerous work in the tense decades before the Civil War. He helped found the Longwood Progressive Meeting, a hub of reform in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Why it matters
Barnard's home stands for the ordinary families who risked everything to defy the Fugitive Slave laws, embodying the Quaker conscience that made Pennsylvania a vital corridor of the Underground Railroad.
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Related people
- · Eusebius Barnard
Related events
- · Underground Railroad
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Isaac & Dinah Mendenhall (1806-82 / 1807-89)
Kennett Township, PA · est. 2018
Isaac and Dinah Mendenhall were Quaker abolitionists whose Chester County home, Oakdale, sheltered freedom seekers moving north on the Underground Railroad. When their Old Kennett Meeting split over slavery, they helped found the reform-minded Longwood Progressive Meeting in 1853. Dinah joined a delegation that pressed President Lincoln in 1862 to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and the couple championed women's right to vote as well.
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Abraham L. Pennock lived at Hoodland, a house built by his father-in-law in 1823, until his death in 1868. A leader in the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, he lent his energy to abolition alongside the causes of woman suffrage and temperance. Reform-minded visitors, including the poets John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, passed through his doors.
Crystal Bird Fauset
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Crystal Bird Fauset lived here when, in 1938, she won a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and became the first Black woman elected to any state legislature in the United States. A gifted organizer and speaker, she later advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt on race relations within the wartime Office of Civilian Defense. Her career opened doors in electoral politics that had long been barred to Black women.
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