John Brown

Chambersburg, PA · est. 2003

In the years before the Civil War, the mountainous country around Chambersburg sheltered a network of Underground Railroad stations where people fleeing slavery could pause on their journey north. One local agent was Henry Watson, a free Black barber who helped guide fugitives past the slave-catchers and bounty hunters hunting them. His work turned an ordinary trade into a lifeline to freedom.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1994

In the tense summer of 1859, two of the era's towering opponents of slavery met secretly at a stone quarry outside Chambersburg. John Brown laid out his scheme to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and spark an armed uprising against slavery; Frederick Douglass, hearing the plan, judged it doomed and would not join. Weeks later Brown's October raid failed exactly as Douglass feared, and Brown was captured and hanged that December — an act that inflamed the nation on the eve of civil war.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 2003

Educated in Chambersburg as the son of a free mother and an enslaved father, Martin Delany became one of the most formidable Black voices of his century. He published the antislavery newspaper The Mystery, joined Frederick Douglass in the abolitionist cause, and in 1865 became the first African American commissioned as a field officer in the United States Army. Physician, editor, and activist, he pressed for freedom on many fronts.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 2003

Founded in 1867 by the Sons of Good Will, Lincoln Cemetery gave Gettysburg's African American citizens and soldiers a dignified resting place they were otherwise denied. Roughly thirty veterans of the United States Colored Troops lie here — men who fought for the Union but were barred by segregation from burial in the town's famous National Cemetery. Later generations of Black veterans from the Spanish-American War through Korea joined them in ground first known as Good Will Cemetery and renamed for Lincoln in 1920.