Hidden History
Volunteers preserve site of abandoned African Union Church of South Coventry with deep roots in American history
Two Africans captured by force and carried against their will across the Atlantic, escaped slavery thanks to an abolition-minded U.S. Navy commander and helped establish a small church off Coventryville Road.
Like much of AfricanAmerican history, much of the church’s past, and particularly its people, remain something of a mystery, but what is known about one family carries a truly significant American pedigree.
And what is known of that history is being preserved, explored and hopefully expanded thanks to the efforts a group of volunteers peopled by the family of a former Owen J. Roberts School District administrator.
The Friends of African Union Church of South Coventry was founded in 2010 with the help of Dick Flickinger, an OJR assistant superintendent who retired in 1985, and his three sons, Bruce, Todd and Daniel.
‘A family operation’
The Flickinger boys and their childhood friends stumbled upon what looked like a foundation and some gravestones while playing in the woods near their home. That experience ultimately evolved into a lifelong fascination and effort to restore and learn more about the long-neglected church and cemetery.
“It’s really a hidden gem,” Bruce Flickinger said of the site. “A lot of what we’re doing is trying to find out more about the site and the people who built it.”
“It’s kind of a family operation,” Bruce Flickinger, who now lives in New Jersey, said of non-profit group organization. He sits on the nine-member board of directors with his father, two brothers and several others.
“It’s been a good thing for the family,” said Dick Flickinger, 87. “It’s kept our family working on something together for a lot of years.”
“Anyone who grew up within a mile of there knew about it, but as we got older, we thought it deserved more respectful treatment than just being left there to decay,” said Daniel Flickinger.
So he began to research the site and the people who used it and found at least one fascinating story that can be traced back to a soldier who fought with both George Washington and Benedict Arnold, once owned Pottsgrove Manor, and later took in Africans rescued from a slave ship.
Surprising connections through history
One of the things that makes African-American history hard to research is the absence of good records, particularly of the earliest days.
But Daniel Flickinger found some at the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in Philadelphia, particularly the records of the an American ship’s capture of three French slave ships in the waters off Cuba in 1800, a time that the U.S. was teetering on the brink of war with France.
In command of the American ship, the Ganges, was a man named John Mullowney, an abolitionist who brought the ships the Prudent, the Dispatch and the Phebe, and the more than 100 captured Africans, back to a prize court in Philadelphia where he hoped a similarly abolitionist-minded federal judge would set the captives free.
They were set free but as Africans with no possessions, money or knowledge of the culture, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, to which they had been released, indentured them for a period of several years to people who would teach them a trade and help them adjust to life in America.
Taken in by a hero
Among those so indentured were Joseph and Faltimir Ganges, so named by the court after the ship that had rescued them.
The pair were taken in by Francis Nichols, an Irish immigrant and Revolutionary War hero who served with George Washington during the siege of Boston; spent a famous winter at Valley Forge; survived Benedict Arnold’s failed attack on Quebec — where he was captured and nearly died of illness — and scouted the British position prior to the Battle of Monmouth.
Nichols came to Pottstown from Philadelphia in 1783, on the same day the Treaty of Paris was signed, officially ending war with England.
“Nichols bought the home of John Potts Sr. — known today as Pottsgrove Manor — and 200 acres of the estate that included orchards and fields, farm buildings, a grist mill and a saw mill,” according to a 2014 Mercury article about his life.
Nichols was 67 when he took in Joseph and Faltimir, who took the name of Smith after completing their term of service, most likely in a house at the Southwest corner of High and Hanover Streets where the former Security Trust Bank building now stands.
Ironical ly, in 1819 Mullowney, the captain of the Ganges which rescued John and Faltimir from slavery in Cuba, moved into that same house that Nichols had owned and in which Joseph and Faltimir Smith had lived.
Building a life
After they completed their apprenticeship, Joseph and Faltimir married. They were eventually able to buy land in Douglass (Berks) Township, west of Pottstown, and turn it into a prosperous farm.
According to an 1880 remembrance in The Pottstown Ledger uncovered by Daniel Flickinger, Joseph Smith “drove team for Joseph Potts and his sons, the proprietors of Glasgow Forge.”
After the trees on Poole Hill above Pine Forge were cut to make charcoal for the forge, Smith purchased between 16 and 18 acres and founded a farm known for the sweetness of the fruit grown there, according to the Ledger article.
Joe and “Faltie,” as she was called, raised three sons and a daughter there.
The couple and their family were among those “members of the congregation who walked to the church from Pottstown every Sunday,” said Bruce Flickinger.
Building a congregation
In 1834, according to the deed, Joseph Smith was one of the trustees who purchased the half-acre of land off Coventryville Road for the African Union Church of South Coventry.
The lot was purchased for $15 from George Chrisman by a board of trustees that, in addition to Smith, included John Williams, John Thomas, George Brown and William Hinson.
Hinson eventually left the area and founded a town in southern Chester County near Oxford called Hinsonville in 1843. That town eventually became Lincoln University, one of the nation’s first black colleges, said Daniel Flickinger.
Although the African Union Church is the oldest black denomination in America, said Daniel Flickinger, they joined with the African Methodist Episcopal denomination in 1856.
“A lot of people don’t know this but at one point in the later 1800s, the Methodist Episcopalians used to hold ‘camp meetings,’ like revival meetings, up on that hill that would attract 15,000 people,” Daniel Flickinger said. “Trains would come into Pottstown full of people and carriages would ferry them up there.”
“The African MethodistEpiscopal church used to hold camp meetings there on the same hill, but not at the same time, and they would attract as many as 2,000 people,” Daniel Flickinger said.
Restoring that history
That’s quite a bit of history to be connected to a long-neglected site on a quiet country road.
And that’s where the Friends of African United Church of South Coventry enter the story.
“It was on the tax records as tax-exempt for a long time and there was no owner listed, just the four trustees who are long gone,” Dick Flickinger said.
The fieldstone foundation on the site is only 15-feetby-15-feet “and we think it was made of brick, because we’ve found one brick, but the rest were probably taken by other people to reuse as building materials,” said Dick Flickinger.
There are only three gravestones with names in the burial ground, although it is estimated that as many as 20 are buried there, marked with simple, unadorned, headstones and footstones.
The area in which those people are buried is now better defined thanks to an Eagle Scout project by Jonathan Westlake. For his project, he erected the posts and black chain that now surround and delineate the graveyard.
“I probably had driven by the site hundreds, if not thousands of times and never knew it existed,” Westlake wrote in an email response to a MediaNews Group inquiry about why he selected the site for his project. “So I thought this could actually be a meaningful way to bring awareness and respect to the history in South Coventry’s backyard.”
One legible headstone at the site marks the final resting place of Emma Johnson, who died in 1882 at the age of 18, six months and three days. Her three-sentence obituary in the Aug. 15 edition of the Montgomery Ledger indicated that her father’s name was Joseph and that she died of “consumption.”
The community there
“A lot of people have asked me ‘what was an African-American congregation doing in the middle of South Coventry?’” said Bruce Flickinger.
The apparent answer is, living their lives and worshiping as best they could.
“There was not a lot of record keeping for African-Americans at the time, but we do know there were some African-American land owners here,” said Bruce Flickinger.
Dick Flickinger said census records, and even some older maps, indicate a small African-American community on the hillside along Coventryville Road, with some small farms.
“One of those farms, according to the 1850 Census, was located right where the township building is now,” said Daniel Flickinger.
“Were any of them exslaves? There’s really no way of knowing,” Dick Flickinger said.
Some might have been workers at the forges in the area, but Daniel Flickinger said the book “Forging America,” indicates most black labor at area forges was temporary. “Most of them stopped, worked for a while to make money, and then continued on their way north,” he said.
Around 1870, there was a “big drop-off in (AfricanAmerican) population” in the area, said Dick Flickinger. There is no clear indication why.
April 10 presentation
More research and more restoration work will continue at the site.
“The township has been very cooperative,” said Dick Flickinger. “Understandably, they don’t want to be in charge of this, but they have helped out in many ways.”
In addition to helping obtain the historical marker for the site, South Coventry Township has put up a small display in the lobby of the township building about the site in celebration of Black History Month.
That display contains a drawing of how the group would like the final restoration to look, as well as Tshirts whose purchase helps fund their efforts.
And on Wednesday, April 10, a presentation on the site’s history will be held at 7 p.m. at the South Coventry Township Building, 1371 New Philadelphia Road, right off Coventryville Road and just a short distance from the church and burial site.