Star of the West, Tent No. Six
West Chester, Chester County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
An African American women's community service organization, chartered 1865. A part of the United Order of Tents, J. R. Giddings and Jollifee Union, founded in 1847 and named for abolitionist Congressman Giddings and his law partner.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Star of the West, Tent No. Six was a local chapter of the United Order of Tents, an African American women's mutual-aid and community service organization. Chartered in 1865 as the Civil War closed, it belonged to the J. R. Giddings and Jollifee Union, a benevolent society founded in 1847 and named for the abolitionist Congressman Joshua Giddings and his law partner. Groups like this provided care for the sick, burials for the dead, and support networks for Black communities in an era when few other institutions would.
Why it matters
The United Order of Tents is one of the oldest surviving African American women's organizations in the country, rooted in the abolitionist movement and the self-help traditions that sustained Black communities through slavery's end and beyond.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Star of the West, Tent No. Six, was chartered in 1865 — a year that fell at the very hinge of American history, as the Civil War came to its close and the enormous, uncertain work of Reconstruction began. For Black Americans, freedom was arriving, but the institutions to support new lives of freedom largely had to be built from within their own communities.
That is exactly what organizations like this one did. As a local chapter of the United Order of Tents, an African American women's community service organization, it belonged to a tradition of mutual aid — neighbors banding together to care for one another when few outside institutions would.
In West Chester and towns like it across the country, such groups formed a quiet backbone of Black community life in the difficult decades after slavery, when self-reliance was not a slogan but a daily necessity.
People & events
The order to which this chapter belonged carried a name rooted in the abolitionist cause: the J. R. Giddings and Jollifee Union, founded in 1847. It was named for Joshua Giddings, the antislavery Congressman, and his law partner — a lineage that tied the women's work directly to the political struggle against slavery itself.
The work these women took on was the essential, unglamorous labor of holding a community together. Groups within this tradition cared for the sick, saw to dignified burials for the dead, and built networks of support that individuals alone could never sustain — the practical machinery of mutual aid in an age with little public safety net.
Chartered in 1865, Tent No. Six carried that mission into the Reconstruction years and beyond, one local expression of a movement of Black women determined to look after their own and to endure.
Its place in the American story
The United Order of Tents stands as one of the oldest surviving African American women's organizations in the country, and that longevity is itself remarkable. Founded before the Civil War and sustained across generations, it embodies a continuity of Black self-help that stretches from the era of slavery into the present.
Its story also corrects a familiar oversimplification of American history. The advance of Black freedom was not achieved by famous leaders and landmark laws alone; it rested just as heavily on countless local institutions — benevolent societies, mutual-aid tents, church and community groups — built and run by ordinary people, many of them women whose names rarely reach the history books.
Rooted in the abolitionist movement and carried forward by the traditions of care and self-reliance, an organization like this one links the fight to end slavery with the long, patient effort to sustain Black communities through everything that came after.
If you visit
A marker like this rewards a slower kind of attention. There may be no dramatic monument, but the story it tells is one of the most important and least told — the everyday institutions that let a community survive and support itself in the hardest of times.
Standing here, consider the women behind the name: organizers, caregivers, and neighbors who, in 1865 and the years that followed, built something that has outlasted them by well over a century. The dates on the marker — 1847 and 1865 — anchor you to the exact moment when abolition gave way to the struggles of freedom.
West Chester and Chester County hold a deep vein of African American history, and this site fits naturally into a thoughtful day of exploring it. Let it broaden your sense of who made history here — not only the celebrated few, but the organized many who did the daily work of community and care.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Joshua Giddings
Themes & tags
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