The History of Abolition Hall

Prior to the 2022 purchase and preservation of the Corson homestead, Roy Wilson and his wife Ann lived there for more than 40 years.  They used Abolition Hall as their painting and sculpture studios during all that time.  While working to maintain the property, Roy gave tours and lectures in Abolition Hall to anyone who requested it, both to individuals and large groups.


This Historical Summary, prepared by Roy Wilson, was presented to the Steering Committee at their first meeting in July 2024:

Beginnings

The ancestral home on the corner of Germantown and Butler Pike in Plymouth Meeting dates back to 1767, and the family witnessed the passage of both Patriot and British forces down Germantown Pike during the Revolutionary War.  But it is in the decades leading up to the Civil War, for which this site is most significant.  At a time when America was grappling with the question of whether a free society would allow slavery to co-exist with the concept of "all men are created equal", the Maulsby and Corson families living here in Plymouth Meeting were active participants in the cause of Abolition - the Anti-Slavery Movement.  They were founding members of the Plymouth Meeting Anti-Slavery Society and the Montgomery County Anti-Slavery Society.  George Corson and Martha Maulsby-Corson, living in the home now referred to as the Hovenden House, were closely allied as well with Anti-Slavery activists in Philadelphia, and elsewhere in the region.  Two of their colleagues were Quakers James Mott and Lucretia Mott.  Lucretia Mott in particular was a powerful speaker in the cause of Abolition and Women's Suffrage. Sadly, the Mott home no longer exists, as it was torn down a century ago.  

The Abolition Hall site, however, has survived. 


Anti-Slavery Hall & The Underground Railroad

George and Martha Corson welcomed many traveling speakers to their home to bring the word of Abolition to the community.  The Corson and Maulsby families also held public meetings in the Meetinghouse across the street.  But this was a time when abolitionists in general were hated by many Americans - certainly by Southerners, whose economic system was closely tied to slavery, but also by many Northerners, both because of racial animus, but also because Abolitionists were seen as dangerous agitators, threatening to tear apart the young nation of America over the question of slavery.  At a time when Abolition meeting halls in our region were being attacked by mobs and sometimes burned down, the Quaker Hall was closed to George Corson's meetings.  So, George Corson, in 1856, built a meeting hall on his own farm.  Then known as 
Anti-Slavery Hall, it was built as a second story over an existing carriage shed, behind the Maulsby Barn.  Corson wanted this to be a public venue, and he hosted speakers that espoused not only Abolition, but the Temperance Movement (George Corson did not allow drinking on his farm), and the Suffrage Movement - women's right to vote.  

In addition to these public advocacy efforts, the home here was for many years an active stop on the Underground Railroad.  Black Americans seeking to escape slavery in the South "rode" this imaginary railroad through a series of conductors such as the Corsons, moving from one stop to the next to a place of safety in the North.  In this work, the Corsons handed off their escapees to other conductors, some of which were free black conductors in Norristown such as Daniel Ross.  The family stories recall the Corson children sometimes coming down to breakfast to find several black men, or a black family, eating breakfast at the kitchen table while they rested to go on to the next leg of their journey.  Black historian Charles Blockson said of Abolition Hall, "it was a place where slaves could be housed and cared for." 

One of the nationally known Abolition trials was that of escaping slave Jane Johnson and her children in 1855.  The story is too long to recount here, but ultimately when Jane Johnson needed to be spirited away from Philadelphia and concealed from slavecatchers, she was brought here to the Corson home.  In a letter to George Corson in 1855, James Mott notes that Jane Johnson's appearance in court as a witness "caused no little excitement and it was thought best to bring her away out of reach of the slave catchers, as they threatened to take her up.  For this reason, we send her to thee;" and he goes on to write, "We don't know what her enemies may do, if they should know her whereabouts."  In discussing this celebrated case in his book, The Underground Railroad, William Still, the prominent black leader in the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, notes that George Corson, as one of Jane Johnson's escorts after the trial, was "one of our most manly and intrepid police officers ... and thus escorted she was taken back in safety to the house from which she was brought."  That was here, to George Corson's home.  

George Corson was a small man and died of consumption in 1860. One of his last acts was to make another donation of personal funds to the Anti-Slavery Society.  His obituary in the Anti-Slavery Standard in New York on November 24, 1860, noted: 

"There are many who are more widely known but it falls to the lot of few in private life to be more sincerely loved ... Gentle to the erring and full of pity for the outcast he had but little to say about religion ... he showed his appreciation of it by deeds rather than words." "George Corson was a consistent Abolitionist, and one of the most efficient ... in our cause. A member of the Pennsylvania Society from its origin, he was to the last one of its most cordial and ungrudging supporters ... The memory of one so good cannot fail to incite those who loved him to emulate his virtues."

The Civil War was such a titanic struggle that much of the evidence of the Underground Railroad was washed away in the tide of national exhaustion after the war.  

Thomas Hovenden

One of George and Martha's children was Helen Corson, who trained as an artist in Philadelphia, and subsequently in the 1870's studied art in France.  There, she met her husband-to-be, the painter Thomas Hovenden, an Irish orphan whose patrons also enabled him to study in France.  They married and moved back into Helen's family home here in Plymouth Meeting in the early 1880's.  Hovenden was inspired by the aura left by the Abolitionist spirit of his new home in Plymouth Meeting.  He was already an accomplished artist when he arrived in Plymouth Meeting, and he embarked on one of his iconic paintings "The Last Moments of John Brown" in 1882.  He researched his subject carefully, but the painting is an allegorical one; it depicts John Brown being led to the gallows in 1859, surrounded by US Army soldiers, disdainful Southerners, and a black woman holding up her baby as if to be blessed by the Messiah.  Now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the painting was widely praised at the time and is often found in history books as an iconic image of the Anti-Slavery Movement.  Hovenden loved his Plymouth Meeting home here - his wife's ancient home, as he called it - and he loved his American citizenship.  Thomas Hovenden became a nationally known artist and painted many important works, including "In the Hands of the Enemy" in 1889, depicting a wounded Confederate soldier, after the battle of Gettysburg, being cared for in the home of a Union family.  

One of his most famous paintings is here in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  "Breaking Home Ties", dated 1890, depicts a young man preparing to leave his family home, to go off into the world.  At a time when the rural traditions of America were being absorbed into the urban industrial landscape, his painting created a sensation around the country, when it was exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.  The central focus of the painting is the mother, holding on to her young son's arms, perhaps for the last time, as he prepares to leave.  The painting was so popular it was reproduced nationwide and Hovenden was inundated with requests from publishers and etchers to make reproductions of the work.  In addition to his more famous works, Hovenden painted many scenes of black families in domestic life.  At a time when some artists were depicting black Americans in a less-than-flattering light, Hovenden, as well as his colleague Thomas Eakins, painted black subjects in a generally respectful manner.  Hovenden's painting "Bringing Home the Bride" showing a white family welcoming the new bride into the family, has a companion painting titled "Their Pride'' depicting a black family as the daughter is dressed in her wedding gown.  Hovenden was heroically killed in a train accident just down the road from his home in 1895.

Later Years

The Hovenden's daughter, Martha, pursued a career in sculpture, also using the first floor of Abolition Hall as her sculpture studio.  Her best-known work is a stone tablet for the Washington Memorial Chapel in Valley Forge.  The Maulsby Barn was reconstructed into a family home in 1952, in the form as you see it today from Butler Pike.  Abolition Hall, behind the Maulsby Barn, remains substantially as it was, evoking the spirit of those who came before.

VIEW AN 11-MINUTE VIDEO, PRODUCED BY THE FRIENDS OF ABOLITION HALL, HERE.