Small African-American church surrounded by history near York

Cemetery markers go back to 1850s

York Daily Record

NEW PARK, Pa. — The Rev. Marlon Carter walked through the cemetery at Fawn AME Zion Church, gazing at the markers. He got chills, and it wasn’t from the cold wind coming off the corn field next door.

“The history,” he said. “It’s all around you.”

And it is. The small church cemetery has markers dating to the middle of the 19th century. One man named Tillman, according to his tombstone, lived to be 94, an extraordinary feat in the 1800s. It wasn’t easy living back then, Rev. Carter said. It was hard work. There are stones marking the graves of the 18 Civil War veterans who belonged to the church. There are markers of the founding members, dating to the late 1800s.

The church itself is a small white structure, with the requisite red door, atop a hill on Alum Rock Road in New Park, not far from the Mason-Dixon Line. It looks like a country church from a Norman Rockwell painting.

Rev. Carter looked at the building and said, “I love this church. I’m honored to be a part of this church.”

The history is a large reason for that and a large reason that Rev. Carter felt chills as he walked through the cemetery on a cold, overcast morning.

In the early 1800s, a number of African-Americans from the Aberdeen area in Maryland migrated north, leaving the slave state of Maryland for freedom in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Some of them were free; even though Maryland was a slave state, many plantation owners freed their slaves long before the state outlawed slavery after the Civil War.

Many of the African-Americans settled in southern York County, working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers for the owners of the large farms in the area. It was a way of life, and work, that they knew, many coming from the tobacco, tomato and bean fields of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

It was a hard life — and hard