John Brown Raid

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.

Shippensburg, PA · est. 2007

Since the early 19th century, Locust Grove Cemetery has been the resting place of enslaved and free Black residents of the Shippensburg area, and the site of the town's first African American church, founded in the 1830s. In 1842 Edward Shippen Burd granted the land to the local Black community, and for well over a century it remained the only public cemetery in the area open to African Americans. Among its graves are twenty-six Civil War soldiers, alongside veterans of every American conflict through Vietnam.

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.

Mont Alto, PA · est. 2003

A member of the State Forest Academy's original class of 1906, Ralph Elwood Brock became the school's first African American graduate and a protégé of the pioneering forester J.T. Rothrock. He ran the Mont Alto State Forest Nursery until 1911, then built a career as a consulting forester shaping gardens and landscapes in New York City and Philadelphia. His work opened a professional field that few Black Americans had yet entered.