On Bellefonte’s Original African Methodist Episcopal Congregation and Its Long-Forgotten Log Church (in Which I Show My Research Process)

Philip Ruth, Research Coordinator

September 9, 2022

In his 1909 pamphlet titled A Brief History of the Origin and Organization of the A.M.E. Church of Bellefonte, Pa., lay leader William Hutchinson Mills reported that “the organization of St. Paul’s A.M.E church of Bellefonte is the result of a controversy which arose in the Weslayan [sic] church, located on East Logan street, about the year 1853, between the Weslayans and the Bethelites, as they were then called.”

Much could (and eventually will) be unpacked from that statement, but I cite it here for its rare reference to a “Weslayan” AME house of worship standing along Bellefonte’s E. Logan Street prior to 1853. Some Centre Countians and visitors to Bellefonte have learned through local history publications and walking tours that the frame predecessor of the St. Paul AME Church on Halfmoon Hill was erected on that site in 1859-1860 (it burned to the ground in 1910, and was promptly replaced by the present brick edifice). But what of the earlier church built across town by the “Weslayan” (or Wesleyan) congregation? As far as I can tell, that facet of Bellefonte’s development has received little-to-no attention from local historians, at least in recent decades. It wouldn’t surprise me if no one alive today can point to that building’s location and describe the circumstances surrounding its construction, relatively brief term of service, and abrupt abandonment.

Let me try to remedy that.

Another rare allusion to Bellefonte’s first AME church is found in the following passage from J. Thomas Mitchell’s 1941 biography of his great-grandfather, Quaker ironmaster William A. Thomas, the reputed abolitionist who lived in what was called the “Wren’s Nest,” 200 yards northwest of today’s Gamble Mill:

. . . The negro population of Bellefonte, which had reached a total of eighty by 1847,
encouraged by the “abolitionists,” had built a small church, that was also used as a
school house, on the hill south of Bishop Street. Having little idea of financial
matters, they ran heavily in debt and the church was sold at Sheriff’s sale. During
that year William [A. Thomas], with the aid of several of his “abolitionist friends,”
erected on his own land, west of [Spring] creek and south of a continuation of High
Street [i.e., on Halfmoon Hill], a “Meeting House and School House” for their use,
and also set aside a small tract of his land south of the new church and school to be
used as a settlement for these people.

Mitchell’s reportage reminded me of something I had seen on an information sheet prepared in 2008-09 by Sue Hannegan and Daniel Clemson as they nominated “Bellefonte’s Underground Railroad Legacy” for a Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission historical marker (the PHMC returned the nomination for further work, and it has yet to be resubmitted). Reproduced on the nomination’s “A.M.E. Church” sheet was a mechanic’s lien “entered and filed March 13, 1839” with the Centre County Court of Quarter Sessions.

A mechanic’s lien (a.k.a. construction lien) is a legal claim on a house or other property, filed by an unpaid contractor or material supplier. The lien filed in March 1839 and addressed during the Court of Quarter Sessions’ April term, appears to read as follows:

Curtin + Jonathan C. Johnson. 13 March 1.
James Johnson, John Williams, Robert Smith, trustees of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church.

Ent[ered] 50 by Curtin.
Claim under the mechanics lien law for labor and work done and materials eligible to
amount of $60.89¼. Against all that church, situate in the Borough of Bellefonte on
Logan Street in the lot occupied and owned by John Coxe, and adjoining lot
occupied by Isaac Lawson, built of hewn logs 26 feet front by 30 feet, one story
high, for materials furnished for the erection of said house within six months last
passed.
Bill of particulars,
nails and paint $11.07 and ¾.
Carpenter works, $9.15.
hinges screws and glass, $4.55.
painting, $6.65. boards, $10.97.
candlesticks, chains, and stove, $80.14.
Total $60.58¼. Entered and filed March 13, 1839.
Scire facias, April 16 term 1839.

The description of the church’s location in that document sent me to George M. Hopkins’ 1858 Map of the Borough of Bellefonte, which I have added as a layer to Google Earth for such purposes. The “lot occupied and owned by John Coxe, and adjoining lot occupied by Isaac Lawson” in 1839 were clearly labeled on Hopkins’ map. The lot attributed to “Jno Cox” was numbered 76, and the adjoining lot to the west—attributed to “I. Lawson”—constituted the eastern half of Lot 78. Those lots extended northward from E. Logan Street to Bishop Street between S. Penn and S. Ridge Streets. By the year of the map’s publication, Lawson had apparently come to own (rather than merely occupy) not only the eastern half of Lot 78, but the western half, as well.

I then pulled up Centre County’s online parcel viewer in order to compare the 1858 parcel boundaries to modern boundaries, and to see what features were apparent on the former Lawson and Cox parcels. None of the building footprints denoted by the 1858 cartographer in the southern halves of the Lawson and Cox parcels corresponded with structures now standing in those areas, suggesting that all structures present in 1858 had been razed or removed.

I was particularly intrigued by a rectangular building footprint denoted on the 1858 map along E. Logan Street at the southern end of Isaac Lawson’s eastern parcel (see the 1858 map detail, above). Google Earth’s measuring tool sized that footprint at approximately 20 by 30 feet, with the longer sides parallel with E. Logan Street. Those measurements were strikingly close to the log AME church dimensions (26 by 30 feet) cited in the 1839 mechanic’s lien.

Hoping that records relating to Isaac Lawson’s occupation and acquisition of the associated parcel would shed light on that intriguing structure, I turned to Centre County’s online Grantor-Grantee Index, a compendious list of recorded conveyances of real estate in the county dating back to its establishment in 1800. When I found no entry for an Isaac Lawson either acquiring or conveying property prior to 1858, I began considering the possibility that his acquisition of the two-piece Lot 78 had not been recorded. There was always a chance, though, that the acquisition was not recorded until much later. So I continued my search, and was rewarded with the discovery that Isaac Lawson had acquired the western half of Lot 78 by a deed dated August 3, 1829, which for some reason was not recorded until May 13, 1870 (Centre County Deed Book 31:42).

After downloading a copy of that deed, I noted with some excitement Isaac Lawson’s identification as a “colored black man” residing in Bellefonte. He paid $25 to the executors of James Harris’ will for the western half of Lot 78, comprising an apparently unimproved rectangle of land fronting 30 feet on Bishop Street and extending 200 feet southward to E. Logan Street. Of all of the deeds I have examined in the course of my Bellefonte-area research, that August 3, 1829 instrument is the earliest involving someone identified as a person of color.

But what about the eastern half of Lot 78, depicted on the 1858 map with the mysterious 20-by-30-foot building occupying its southern tip? The owner of that parcel was, unfortunately, not identified in the 1829 deed. So I went looking for conveyances involving the other lot-owner identified in the mechanic’s lien: John Coxe. After some searching using various spellings of Cox/Coxe, I came across a promising entry in the Grantor Index reflecting a conveyance by John B. Cox to James Johnston, John Williams, and Robert Smith, “trustees of the coloured Weslayan Methodist Episcopal Church.” The deed was recorded in July 1841, but reflected a conveyance in 1838.

I downloaded a copy of the deed, and found that it had been composed on March 29, 1838 (Centre County Deed Book 13:232). Grantor Cox was identified only as a barber residing in Bellefonte (I banked that interesting tidbit, mindful of the many Black barbers documented in Bellefonte during the second half of the nineteenth century). The three grantees were further identified as “trustees of a congregation of people worshiping in Bellefonte, members of the coloured Weslayan Methodist Episcopal Church of North America.” The named trustees were the same three men identified in the 1839 mechanic’s lien as serving in that capacity (though James Johnston’s surname was rendered “Johnson” in the latter document). In consideration of the payment of $1 (enough to validate the transaction), the trustees acquired from Cox a rectangle of land described as fronting 30 feet on E. Logan Street and extending northward 20 feet. The 600-square-foot parcel was bounded on the west by property owned by Isaac Lawson, and its southeastern corner coincided with a corner of Lot 78. All of those details pointed to the site depicted on the 1858 map as entirely occupied by the unlabeled building standing in the southern tip of the eastern half of Lot 78. The description also seemed to jibe with the reference in the mechanic’s lien to the “hewn log” AME church standing on the “lot occupied and owned by John Coxe, and adjoining lot occupied by Isaac Lawson.”

I enjoyed a rush of discovery . . . until re-reading the opening stanza of the property description. There I found the 600-square-foot parcel, which I was locating in the southern end of the eastern half of Lot 78, characterized as a “piece or part of lot Number eighty” (my italics). That made no sense to me. The 1858 map showed Lot 80 abutting the west side of Lot 78, and further attributed the property to a “Mrs. Keech.” I pulled up the “original plan of Bellefonte” layer in my Google Earth file and confirmed the location of Lot 80. It lay 60 feet west of Lot 76, separated from the latter by Lot 78. Something wasn’t adding up. 

Such property-identification confusion can usually be resolved by consulting the section of a deed in which the property’s prior conveyance is recited with an associated date and deed book reference. That recitation steers the researcher to the previous deed and all of its (potentially) clarifying data. Alas, the deed from Cox to the AME Church trustees omitted that vital information, forcing me to go searching for it in Centre County’s Grantee Index. There I found an entry reflecting an 1834 conveyance of real estate by “Abraham S. Valentine et ux.” (and wife) to John B. Cox. That sounded promising, as Quaker Abram S. Valentine had been identified in William Mills’ history of St. Paul AME Church as one of the “tried and true friends” who, “for the reason that they were men of high character, noble principles and aversion to human slavery, [were] directly or indirectly connected with what was known in those days as the ‘under-ground railroad.’”

I downloaded the referenced deed, and found it was more precisely an “assignment” of property by Bellefonte ironmaster Abram S. Valentine and his wife Clarissa to John B. Cox. Abram had acquired the property from Dennis McCafferty in 1832, and by this subsequent assignment—dated October 18, 1834—he and his wife conveyed it to Cox in consideration of $140 (Centre County Deed Book D10:251-52). As I had hoped, the property was described in the 1832 deed as “all that messuage [i.e. dwelling house] tenement and lot of land situate in Bellefonte on the south side of Bishop Street and being the eastern half of Lot number 78 in the general plot or plan of said town” (my italics).

Bingo! The assignment document provided solid evidence of Cox’s ownership of the eastern half of Lot 78 as of March 29, 1838, when he conveyed the lot’s southernmost 600 square feet to the AME Church trustees as a building site for their planned house of worship. It also put to rest any doubts arising from the site’s apparent mischaracterization in the associated deed as being “part of lot Number eighty.” That mischaracterization had frustrated me initially, but, in trying to clarify the matter, I had delved deeper into the property’s history and found there a potentially important connection between John B. Cox and one of Bellefonte’s noted abolitionists. Together with Cox’s identification in the 1838 deed as an AME-supportive barber, that association made me wonder if Cox was himself a person of color.

Such is the hard-earned fruit of historical research.

Having pinpointed the location of the log church constructed by the Wesleyan AME congregation over the course of six months ending in March 1839, I began compiling a timeline of its subsequent service. As noted earlier, Thomas Mitchell claimed the church “on the hill south of Bishop Street” was “also used as a school house.” He further maintained that the resident congregation “ran heavily in debt, and the church was sold at Sheriff’s sale,” implying that the sale occurred in or around 1847, the same year in which William A. Thomas, “with the aid of several of his ‘abolitionist friends,’ erected on his own land [on Halfmoon Hill] a ‘Meeting House and School House’” to be used by the area’s growing Black population. William Mills, for his part, believed that the log church on E. Logan Street was still in service “about 1853” when a “controversy arose” between the resident “Weslayans and the Bethelites.” The apparent discrepancy between those accounts remains to be sorted out, which I hope to do in the coming months, and explain in a future blogpost. 

I will note in closing that the site of the log church is now structure-free. As I learned when I visited the site recently, it serves as a two-car parking area between a residence at 217 E. Logan Street and a garage at the rear end of a lot whose house stands 140 feet to the north, at 222 E. Bishop Street. I was startled by the difference in elevation (maybe 40-50 feet) between the Bishop Street end of the lot and the E. Logan Street end, where the log church had stood. E. Logan Street forms something of a ridge line overlooking E. Bishop Street in this vicinity, as anyone climbing either S. Penn Street or S. Ridge Street to E. Logan Street can attest. Hence Thomas Mitchell’s reference to the AME church-and-school “on the hill south of Bishop Street.”

As I also learned recently, Bellefusians applied some ugly nicknames to that hill and the black community that formed in the vicinity of the log AME Church during the 1840s (predating the black community on Halfmoon Hill). But that is a grim topic for a future post.

Update, October 26, 2022: While researching the life of Rev. Charles Garner Sr.—a prominent member of Bellefonte’s black community from the late 1860s through his 1890 posting to the AME chapel in Tyrone—I came across the following article in the October 31, 1879, edition of the Democratic Watchman, reporting the fiery destruction of the “old colored church building, a log structure” on E. Logan Street (the annotations are mine):

Yesterday, Thursday afternoon, fire broke out in a frame building on East Logan street, owned by Thomas R. Reynolds and occupied by the Garrett and Bennett families [at the southern end of Lot 80]. A high wind sent sparks everywhere and the rotten old hose the fireman had to work with bursted almost as fast as they could get it connected up. The result was that the flames spread to the newly completed house of Charles Garner, then to the old colored church building, a log structure [at the southern end of the eastern half of Lot 78], and a frame house owned by Win Montgomery [at the southern end of Lot 76] and occupied by a Mrs. Holly. All were totally destroyed.