Hovenden House, Barn and Abolition Hall is a group of historic buildings in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, United States. In the decades prior to the American Civil War, the property served as an important station on the Underground Railroad. Abolition Hall was built as a meeting place for abolitionists, and later became the studio of artist Thomas Hovenden.
The house is located at the northeast corner of Germantown and Butler Pikes, diagonally opposite the Plymouth Friends Meetinghouse. Northeast of the house is the stone barn, and behind and attached to the barn is the former carriage house, above which was built Abolition Hall. The three buildings are part of a 10.45-acre farm, and are contributing properties in the Plymouth Meeting Historic District. ()
In 2016, the property was threatened by a proposal to divide Butler Pike and reroute the northbound lanes between Hovenden House and its barn. Preservation Pennsylvania opposed this plan and added the property to its 2017 Pennsylvania At Risk list.Press release: "2017 Pennsylvania At Risk Announced" (PDF) , Preservation Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, PA, February 2017. In 2021, it was announced that Whitemarsh Township and the Whitemarsh Art Center would jointly buy the property for $3.95 million, and preserve it for use by the art center.
History The village of Plymouth Meeting was founded by a group of Quakers who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1686. The Maulsby family, which later attained local prominence, arrived in Pennsylvania in 1698, and came to Whitemarsh Township in 1705.Ella K. Barnard, Early Maltby, with Some Roades History, and That of the Maulsby Family in America (Baltimore: Ella K. Barnard, 1909).
On June 20, 1767, Merchant Maulsby Jr. purchased a 100-acre farm with frontage on the "Whitemarsh great road" (Germantown Pike) and the "Plymouth line" (Butler Pike), for £651. Merchant and his wife Hannah Davis built a two-story stone house at the north end of the property. They had two children: SamuelMaulsby-Albertson Family Papers, from Swarthmore College. and Elizabeth. Merchant Maulsby Jr. died in February 1772 at age 34.
During the early morning of May 20, 1778, ten-year-old Samuel Maulsby watched as British troops marched down Butler Pike to the meetinghouse, part of an unsuccessful attempt to surround the Marquis de Lafayette and 2,100 Continental troops at the Battle of Barren Hill. Maulsby's recollections, including his description of Redcoats looting his widowed mother's house, were recorded by John Fanning Watson in his Annals of Philadelphia (1830).John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, Volume 2 (Philadelphia: 1830), pp. 61–62.
Widow Hannah Davis Maulsby married David Marple in 1781, and was soon widowed again.Cora M. Payne, Genealogy of the Maulsby Family for Five Generations (Des Moines, IA: George A. Miller Press, 1902). She married Richard Corson in 1784, with whom she had two children, Richard Jr. and Hannah II. Richard Sr. and Hannah Corson occupied her two-story stone house in Plymouth Meeting for a period, but settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Samuel Dean farmed the Maulsby-Corson property in 1781; Enoch Marple farmed it in 1783; and seventeen-year-old Samuel Maulsby and his former schoolmate Joseph Corson, a nephew of Richard Corson, farmed it in 1785. Joseph Corson married Hannah Dickinson in 1786, and the young couple rented the two-story stone house until 1789. Like Samuel Maulsby, they became abolitionists, and decades later one of their sons would marry one of his daughters.
On 3 February 1794, Samuel Maulsby purchased the 8.25-acre plot at the northeast corner of Germantown and Butler Pikes, for £137.Norristown Deed Book #9, page 180, transcription in Barnard, p. 146. The 1794 deed mentioned "a messuage" (house) on the property, but did not describe it. Maulsby later purchased adjacent plots at the north end of the farm, which expanded it to 128 acres (51.8 hectares) and extended it to Flourtown Road.
Samuel Maulsby was the owner of a large and fertile farm at Plymouth Meeting... It included the whole north east corner of the two roads, the Germantown turnpike, its south boundary, and the Plymouth and Broad Axe turnpike, along which it extended for half a mile, its western boundary. [I]n addition to the farming operations the burning of lime was extensively carried on by him.
Sometime around 1795, Samuel Maulsby built a three-story, fourteen-room, Federal-style dwelling on the northeast corner of Germantown and Butler Pikes, diagonally opposite the meetinghouse. He seems to have incorporated an earlier stone building into his new house. He built the stone barn, perhaps around the same time, and is presumed to have built the carriage shed. In 1799, he married Susanna Thomas (1780–1818), and they had seven children.Ellwood Roberts, Plymouth Meeting: Its Establishment, and The Settlement Of The Township, (Norristown, PA: Roberts Publishing Company, 1900).
Maulsby altered the Cater-Corner House (1802), at the southeast corner of Butler Pike and Flourtown Road, possibly as housing for Thomas Davis, a free-Black limeburner recorded as living on Maulsby's property. Note: This includes At 3-5 Germantown Pike, just east of his house, Maulsby built the Plymouth Meeting General Store and Post Office (1826–27). His son Jonathan (1801–1845) managed the store and served as Plymouth Meeting's first postmaster.Maulsby-Albertson Family Papers, 1763-1884, RG 5/099, Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College.
In 1832, Maulsby's daughter Martha (1807–1870) married George Corson (1803–1860), a son of Joseph and Hannah Corson, and a former clerk in the general store.Hiram Corson, M.D. "George Corson," The Corson Family: A History of the Descendants of Benjamin Corson, Son of Cornelius Corssen of Staten Island, New York. (Philadelphia: H.L. Everett, 1906), pp. 112-17. Samuel Maulsby died on July 12, 1838, and was interred beside his wife in the meetinghouse's burial ground. George and Martha Maulsby Corson purchased the farm from her father's estate on April 6, 1839.Norristown Deeds Book 66, page 341. George and his brother Walter purchased the Maulsby limestone quarries, and founded G. & W. H. Corson Company – Lime Merchants in 1843."... G. & W. H. Corson Lime Merchants, dates from 1843; as of 1983 it was reputed to be the oldest continuously operated lime business in the U.S.” Ralph W. Richardson, Historic Districts of America: Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia (Heritage Books, 1991), p. 251.
Abolitionism
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 made it a federal crime to give assistance to someone escaping enslavement.
The earliest and only abolitionists in Plymouth and Whitemarsh townships were Samuel Maulsby, Joseph Corson and [his son] Alan W. Corson. Away back before 1820 they had been stirred by the scathing denunciations of slavery, and the horrors of the slave trade, made by Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce and Thomas Fouell Buxton, before the Parliament of Great Britain, to an intense hatred of slavery and the slave trade, and the abominations of slavery in our own country.
Maulsby and the Corsons co-founded the Plymouth Meeting Anti-Slavery Society in 1831, which initially had seven members and met at the Plymouth Friends Meeting House. They also were founders of the Montgomery County Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, which initially had about twenty members and met at various locations in Norristown.Hiram Corson, M.D., "The Norristown Group," The Abolitionists of Montgomery County, (Norristown, PA: Historical Society of Montgomery County, 1900), pp. 29–36. Frederick Douglass, a fugitive slave and a prominent abolitionist, was the keynote speaker at an August 1847 anti-slavery convention hosted by the First Baptist Church of Norristown. His lecture was disrupted by roughly sixty pro-slavery activists outside the church pelting its windows with rocks. A plot to abduct and lynch Douglass that night was thwarted.Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass, (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1899), p. 18.
Both George Corson's and Martha Maulsby's parents had sheltered fugitive slaves. But it was the couple's close friendship with Benjamin Lundy – publisher of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society's weekly newspaper, The National Enquirer (1836–1838) – that inspired them to fully engage in the cause. They turned their property into a major station on the Underground Railroad, providing food and shelter to hundreds of escaping slaves.Thomas Hovenden: American Painter of Hearth and Homeland, Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, 1995. . Daniel Ross, a free Black man in Norristown, Pennsylvania, often acted as "conductor",William Still, The Underground Rail Road (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), p. 723. leading the fugitives by night to the next stationRon Avery, "Plymouth Meeting Quakers Hid Slaves – It's A Shrine Of The Underground Railroad," The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 19, 1995. — north to the house of William Foulke at Penllyn, Pennsylvania; or northeast to abolitionists living around the Quaker meetinghouses in Upper DublinAnnette John-Hall, "An underground story no more," The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 14, 2012. and Horsham, Pennsylvania.Hiram Corson, M.D. "Upper Dublin and Horsham," The Abolitionists of Montgomery County, (Norristown, PA: Historical Society of Montgomery County, 1900), p. 44. The Underground Railroad route continued east through Bucks County, then north through New Jersey and New York, and to eventual freedom in Canada.William J. Switala, Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania, (Stackpole Books, 2001), pp. 160–61. In at least one instance, George Corson hid fugitives under a wagonload of hay and drove them to the next station.
The greater burden of the work [of sheltering runaways] was borne by George and his wife, Martha Maulsby Corson. Their residence in the old Maulsby home, right in front of the Friends' Plymouth Meeting-House, was so prominent a place, known by everybody for miles around, made it easy for slaves to find the place, when sent by those from a distance to "George Corson's at Plymouth Meeting." He it was who forwarded fugitives to Mahlon Linton, at Newtown, or to William H. Johnson, at Buckingham, or to Richard Moore, at Quakertown, Bucks county, time after time, during the whole period of the great struggle from 1830 to 1850.Hiram Corson, M.D. "The Plymouth Group," The Abolitionists of Montgomery County, (Norristown, PA: Historical Society of Montgomery County, 1900), pp. 41–43.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 increased the penalties for giving assistance to someone escaping enslavement to six months in prison and a $1,000 fine. It allowed slavecatchers to pursue a fugitive across state lines into every U.S. state and territory. George Corson was involved in hiding Jane Johnson, whose escape to freedom exposed a loophole in the federal law.Phil Lapsansky, "The Liberation of Jane Johnson," The Library Company of Philadelphia, 2003.
Jane Johnson
On the morning of July 18, 1855, Jane Johnson (1822–1872) and her two sons, Daniel (age 5 or 6) and Isaiah (age 11 or 12), arrived in Philadelphia by train with their North Carolina enslaver, John H. Wheeler, and his wife and three children.Jane Johnson, from American National Biography. President Franklin Pierce had appointed Wheeler U.S. Minister to Nicaragua in 1854, and the group was en route from Washington, D.C. to New York City, from which they would board a ship to return to Central America. At Philadelphia, they had to switch to a ferry to cross the Delaware River. Wheeler locked Johnson and her sons in a hotel room while he and his family took the afternoon to visit his wife's relatives.