The Marietta You Cannot See: Forgotten Graves, Burning Churches, and a Hidden History

At the corner of Bridge Street and West Fairview Avenue in Marietta lies a small triangle of grass most people pass without a second look. For years, the few who did notice it took it for a forgotten corner of the large Marietta Cemetery next door, and some of them complained to the caretakers about the weeds.

It never belonged to the Marietta Cemetery. It is the burying ground of Wesley African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, whose church stood on this ground until Hurricane Hazel wrecked it in 1954. Twelve names survive there on stone. Researchers have traced six more burials through death certificates and old newspapers, and in 2026 a radar survey mapped the graves beneath the grass.

Two blocks east stands Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Its congregation dates its beginning to 1819. Free Black men and women were gathering for worship in Marietta six years before the state began digging its canal, a generation before the first iron furnace went into blast, and forty-two years before the Civil War. They are gathering still.

Nothing in the familiar story of the town would tell a visitor so. Marietta is proud of its past, and rightly. Its preservation story celebrates lumber merchants, ironmasters, and river pilots. Yet the three National Register nominations describing the town’s history name no Black resident, church, or school, and the boundaries of its historic districts stop short of both churchyards on Fairview Avenue.

This is the story of the Marietta you cannot see. It rests on deeds, newspapers, fire company minutes, church histories, the research reports of Elizabethtown College students, and the work of the Marietta African American Legacy Initiative. Where the written record and local tradition tell different stories, you will find both here, along with the plain difference between what we know and what we have only heard.

An Older, Busier River Town

The usual story runs this way: Scotch-Irish Presbyterians founded Marietta in 1812, lumber and iron made it rich, and the railroads carried the riches away. Nearly every part of that sentence needs a second look.

Start with the date. The year 1812 marks the borough’s charter, not its beginning. A land warrant of 1716 granted 600 acres at the mouth of Chiques Creek, and in 1719 an Indian trader named Robert Wilkins took up 300 acres on the future town site. A century before the charter, the French trader Peter Bezaillion kept a post at the mouth of Conoy Creek, seven miles upriver, and the Conoy people, Piscataway from the Potomac, settled beside him. A marker on a boulder in Bainbridge recalls them still.

The early surveyors left a curious mark of those days on the map. They ran their lines square to the riverbank, and when later developers laid out the villages of New Haven and Waterford with streets square to the water in their turn, the two grids collided at the edges. They left odd triangles of land. One of those leftover triangles became the Wesley burying ground.

The Scotch-Irish did not hold the ground alone, either. Christian Hershey, head of a German Anabaptist farming family, bought 430 acres at Chiques in 1768, and his descendants farmed and milled there for three generations. Henry Cassel, the lumberman counted among the town’s founders, came of a Mennonite family; Jacob Grosh, who laid out the eastern addition, of a Moravian one; the Haldemans, who built the first anthracite furnace under Chickies Rock, of Swiss German Anabaptist stock.

And lumber came before iron. A list of taxpayers from 1814 counts lumber merchants, carpenters, joiners, river pilots, ferrymen, and fourteen tavernkeepers. No furnace stood near the town until 1845. The canal came before the railroad, too: the state dug the Pennsylvania Canal through Marietta between 1825 and 1830 by the National Register’s dates (a student report has it completed through the town in 1833), and rails followed along the riverbank only about 1850.

Above all, Marietta was never a quiet Pennsylvania Dutch village. Each spring the river trade filled it with strangers: raftsmen, laborers, and later Welsh puddlers, Irish hands, Germans, and Slavs at the furnaces. The National Register nomination of 1978 calls it, in those years, “a wild and rowdy town”; the county history of 1883 lays the disorder instead to the land speculation of the 1810s. Into this restless, many-tongued, wage-earning place, free Black families had already come.

Twenty-Three Miles from Slavery

Marietta lies about twenty-three miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line. After Pennsylvania adopted gradual abolition in 1780, those miles separated a state where slavery was dying from one where it flourished, and the Susquehanna pointed the way between them.

Four miles downriver, Columbia was what William Whipper called “the great depot.” Whipper, the Black lumber merchant whose house stood at the end of the long bridge from Wrightsville, later told the abolitionist William Still how freedom seekers from Virginia and Maryland first landed there. He fed and sheltered as many as seventeen in a single night. “At this point the road forked,” he wrote. Some he sent east to Philadelphia hidden in the freight cars of his firm, Smith and Whipper. Others he sent west by boat toward Pittsburgh.

Boats bound west from Columbia traveled the Pennsylvania Canal, and the canal ran up the riverbank through Marietta. The inference is strong: men and women escaping slavery passed through the town aboard canal boats in the late 1840s. No record yet shows one of them stepping ashore.

A Meeting House in the Woods

The first Black family the record names in Marietta is the Armstrongs. The county history of 1883 prints the tax list of New Haven for 1807, and there stands “Reuben Armstrong (colored).” By 1814 the list carries “Widow Armstrong, colored.” A local history makes Reuben the first person of color to settle in the town and places his log house at Market and Locust Streets about 1805. So a Black taxpayer stood on the rolls five years before the borough had a charter.

By the congregation’s own account, free people of African descent began to worship together in 1819, in a grove called Heisey’s Woods about a mile northwest of the present church. Services began at about eight o’clock in the evening, because many of the women worked as domestic servants and could not come until their day’s work was done. The handsome brick houses of Market Street, so much admired today, ran in part on the labor of these women.

In 1822 Christian and Margaret Hershey conveyed a lot on Green Lane, now West Fairview Avenue, to three trustees of the congregation: Charles Hopewell, James Law, and Joseph Williams. Each signed with an X. Another name stands on the paper as well: Stephen Smith of Columbia. If he is the Stephen Smith who built a lumber fortune downriver and sheltered freedom seekers with William Whipper, then the leadership of the Underground Railroad stood beside Marietta’s first Black church on the day of its founding. No one has yet proved he is the same man.

What stood on the lot, and when the members first worshipped there, depends on whom you ask. Barr Spangler, a banker who spent his whole life in the town, spoke in 1912 of a log meeting house built in 1819 and burned in 1861, though he was born in 1822 and had the date at second hand. The congregation tells today of a carriage house on the land of 1822, made over into a church and named Bethel. Its history of 1962 has the members buy a carriage house in 1861. The local historian James C. Landis describes a log barn or carriage house on the lot in 1822. No record made at the time has yet settled the question.

The congregation drew a famous visitor. Jarena Lee, the pioneering evangelist whom Richard Allen, the founder of the denomination, endorsed as a traveling exhorter of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, recorded in her journal two visits to Marietta in the winter of 1839 and 1840. On the second she came down from Harrisburg on a bitter day, riding now in a sleigh and now in a carriage, and preached on the Sabbath before going on to Columbia. She names no church, but Bethel was the only Black congregation the sources place in the town.

By 1853 the community had grown large enough to divide. A second congregation, Wesley African Methodist Episcopal Zion, organized in that year, by a newspaper account of 1921, and about 1857 or 1858 its church and a public school for Black children rose side by side on the triangle at Bridge Street and Fairview Avenue.

The Doctor, the Barges, and the Tunnel

Like many river towns, Marietta has its Underground Railroad stories, and they center on Dr. Samuel Huston (1792 to 1865), a physician who arrived about the end of the War of 1812 and made his home in the Federal house at 214 West Market Street, on the square. You will find his name spelled Huston on his deed, his gravestone, and in the town paper of his day, and Houston in the county history of 1883 and many later accounts. They mean the same man. He was an Anti-Mason, a friend of Thaddeus Stevens, and the town’s most outspoken enemy of slavery.

Two accounts tie him to the Underground Railroad, and both deserve a careful hearing. The first comes from Barr Spangler, who sat on the town council in 1861 and had known the town all his life. In 1912 he recalled Huston as a prominent abolitionist who had aided “some slaves in their northward flight.” The second, older and fuller, comes from the county history of 1883, printed while the doctor’s neighbors still lived. It says he “hated human slavery, and was a sincere friend of the oppressed,” “employed colored men whenever he could,” and, when danger threatened, “either concealed them in the neighborhood or sent them on the ‘Underground Railroad’ to a place of safety.” No earlier statement placing the Underground Railroad in Marietta has yet come to light. Both accounts are good evidence. Neither names a single freedom seeker, and neither is a record made at the time.

The county history also tells us what work the doctor had to give. He dealt in coal, grain, flour, and whiskey, stored them in warehouses on the riverbank, and sent them by ark to Port Deposit for Baltimore. Later accounts put him in the lumber business instead. The work he offered, so far as the oldest account shows, lay on the river.

Then come the stories the record cannot support. In the most vivid of them, the doctor built false bottoms into a fleet of barges to carry freedom seekers on the Susquehanna. Its trail runs back only to a newspaper profile of 2015 and a local history of 2012. It may preserve a true memory, or it may be Columbia’s history drifting upriver: four miles downstream, Smith and Whipper really did fit their railroad cars with a hidden compartment.

The tunnels stand on weaker ground still. A paper filed with the National Register describes an underground room and a passage to the river at Colonel James Duffy’s mansion on West Market Street. It offers no evidence, and a student’s study of the house records a basement with neither. The same study dates the house to 1863, late in the day for a new station on the road to freedom. Another tale tells of tunnels beneath the brewmaster’s house at 141 East Market Street, and even the Candlelight Tour digest recording it says “there is no evidence to substantiate such claims.” Tunnels are the favorite furniture of Underground Railroad folklore. They seldom survive a visit with a flashlight.

What befell the doctor in 1861 is no legend. When the war came, Spangler remembered, a mob followed Huston into the country with a rope and threatened to hang him. He turned on them with such threats of punishment they slunk away. Later tellings reverse the ending and have the doctor leave town until tempers cooled. A local historian reports the borough council offering a reward of twenty-five dollars, on 10 May 1861, for the persons who entered the doctor’s house, ordered him to leave it, and threatened to destroy his property.

Fire

The same anger fell on the Black churches. Fort Sumter surrendered in the middle of April 1861. At eleven o’clock on the night of Friday 19 April, the Pioneer Fire Company answered an alarm, and its secretary wrote the result in the minute book: the African Church on Fairview Street had burned to the ground, “supposed to be the work of incendiary’s,” and the other church was also on fire.

The second church, apparently Wesley, survived that night. It did not survive the war. About three o’clock on the morning of 7 August 1862, the firemen turned out again and found the upper African meeting house entirely consumed, along with the schoolhouse for Black children and the small home of Peter George Sebastian, a Black neighbor. No water lay near, and the company had too little hose to reach any. The Mariettian called it “unquestionably, the work of an incendiary.”

No record names the arsonists. The sequence speaks for itself: within a week of Sumter, someone set fire to two Black churches on a single night, in a town where a mob was hunting its leading abolitionist. The inference of political and racial motive is as strong as an inference can be.

Bethel’s people began rebuilding that fall on the same ground. A cornerstone dated 1861 stands in the church wall today. Wesley’s people rebuilt as well, and the county atlas of 1875 shows a church and a school again on the triangle at Bridge Street.

In June 1863, as Lee’s army neared the Susquehanna, Spangler watched the town hide its merchandise and brace for shelling. The Black residents above all, he recalled, feared enslavement, packed their trunks, and hurried north. Others went south in uniform. By Michael Gentry Sweeney’s count, thirty-six veterans lie in Bethel’s churchyard, about twenty of them from the Civil War; other counts run a little lower. Wesley Armstrong of Marietta served in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the regiment of the film Glory, and took a wound in the assault on Fort Wagner on 18 July 1863.

Lodge, School, and Camp Meeting

In 1883 the county’s standard history gave Marietta’s two Black congregations a single paragraph. Its authors could learn nothing reliable about them, they wrote, though they understood both to be flourishing. Two thriving churches stood in a town of a few thousand people, and the historians of the county could not find them. The churches were already unseen.

Yet seven pages earlier, the same book lets the community speak for itself. Joseph M. Stafford, a barber on Market Street, reported on Cassiopeia Lodge of the Black Odd Fellows: founded on 8 November 1875, thirty members strong, meeting every Tuesday evening in its own building on Fairview Street, with a Household of Ruth, forty-three strong, for members’ wives, mothers, widows, and daughters. Where a member of the community held the pen, the record is full.

The school for Black children outlived the law. Pennsylvania forbade segregated public schools in 1881, but Marietta’s African School stayed open until 1888, when the building had decayed so far the authorities judged integration cheaper than repair. “Marietta has, at last, by accident, got into line with the law,” a Lancaster newspaper remarked. The marker at the Wesley ground tells the change as a decision of the township and the borough.

No family shows the reach of this small community better than the Fairfaxes. The Reverend John Wesley Fairfax took the Wesley pulpit in 1890; his brother Chanceford served congregations in York, in New York State, and in Boston. Josiah Fairfax kept a bakery and a barber’s chair in Marietta and died in 1929, the last charter member of Cassiopeia Lodge. Tradition says Josiah once shaved Ulysses S. Grant. Grant’s visit, at least, is on record: President Grant, his Secretary of War, and General William T. Sherman spent a day with Colonel Duffy in the summer of 1876. The shave rests on memory and an obituary.

Joseph Maze came north the hard way. Born enslaved in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, he rode as a jockey for the man who held him and hauled supplies for the Confederate army until Union soldiers captured him. He settled in Marietta, worked the canal boats, and drove Colonel Duffy’s coach. The sources disagree on his age: the marker at Bethel gives his birth as about 1844, his death certificate as 1853.

Then, for a few summers, the unseen community became impossible to miss. From 1908 through at least 1914, African Americans gathered by the thousands for camp meetings lasting two weeks and more. The Legacy Initiative places them in Heisey’s Woods, the grove where Bethel’s founders first worshipped; the newspapers of the day set them in Heisey’s grove at Rheems, some five miles north of Marietta. Marietta’s people took a prominent part. In 1910 the Reverend Harrison Fairfax of Marietta led the afternoon services. On a Sunday in August 1914, Andrew McCurdy and George Brown of Marietta led the singing, and a Lancaster paper put the crowd at fully five thousand. Love feasts, jubilee songs, testimony, and preaching filled the days. In an age of segregation, such gatherings gave Black Pennsylvanians a place to meet on their own terms.

Leaving and Staying

The camp meetings ended on the eve of the Great Migration, when Black Americans by the millions left the rural South and the small towns of the border for the cities. Marietta felt the current both ways. The Fairfax sons had already gone to the cities. Albert Rogers Smith Senior, a native of West Virginia and a veteran of the First World War, came north, worked as a chauffeur in Lancaster, and dug graves at Wesley. His daughter Catherine came to Marietta in the 1930s at the age of six and would one day become the keeper of the town’s Black history.

Harvey George Knight traveled farthest of all. As a young teenager, he went to a New Year’s Eve service at Bethel with friends, meaning to make sport of it, and came away converted. By Michael Gentry Sweeney’s account, he studied at Lincoln University and went as a missionary to Arthington, Liberia, where he married Penelope, the daughter of a local chief. In July 1919 the couple’s nine-month-old twins, William and Etta, died a week apart. They lie in Bethel’s churchyard, in graves no one can now point out.

The balance ran against the small congregation at Wesley. By 1937 it had dissolved. A Baptist congregation used the building for two years. The empty church then housed workers from out of town, a last echo of the transient Marietta of the raftsmen. Hurricane Hazel wrecked it in 1954, and the remains came down about 1960. The lots passed through tax sales, and the graves disappeared under brush. No one decided to erase Wesley. Closure, storm, demolition, and paperwork did the work a piece at a time.

Bethel held on. Its pastor in 1962, the Reverend William S. Patterson, drove from Philadelphia every Sunday and often two or three more times in the week. In 1969, with a gift from the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Resch, the members remade their church. Here again, two accounts have come down. The Legacy Initiative’s report says the members took down the building of 1861 and raised a larger one; James C. Landis calls the work a complete renovation of the old church. On either telling, the cornerstone of 1861 stayed in the wall, and it stands there today beside a second stone reading “Rebuilt 1969.”

In those same years Marietta discovered historic preservation, and the movement saved a remarkable town. Yet the borough’s three National Register nominations, of 1978, 1984, and 2005, wrote its history without the Black churches. The work of keeping the other record fell to the community itself. In 1992 Catherine Jane Smith Tucker and Thelma Mae Waters won a grant to restore the Wesley ground but could not spend it, because no one could establish who owned the land. When a party claiming the ground proposed to clear the stones for a house, Waters called the historian Leroy Hopkins, who stepped in and stopped it. In 2008 Tucker secured new government headstones for seven veterans of the Civil War. “My church is the longest continuing church in Marietta,” she told a reporter in 2015.

In July 2025, a group of residents led by Michael Gentry Sweeney, a member of Bethel whose father lies among the veterans in its churchyard, formed the Marietta African American Legacy Initiative. Working with the African American Historical Society of South Central Pennsylvania, LancasterHistory, and the borough, they cleared the Wesley ground, straightened its stones, arranged the radar survey, and gathered the research of several generations of community historians. On 19 September 2026 they dedicated four historical markers on West Fairview Avenue, two at Bethel and two at the Wesley ground. Sweeney put the purpose plainly: the community wants its history to stand with the rest of the town’s, “not above and not below, but with it.”

Bethel’s congregation is small today, and most of its members, like its pastor, the Reverend Dr. Charley Mae Thomas, travel in from elsewhere. There is an old Marietta pattern in that. The raftsmen came with the spring floods and left; the canal hands and furnace men came for wages and moved on. The people of Bethel are travelers in a more faithful sense. For more than two hundred years, through arson, flight, migration, and neglect, someone has come back to West Fairview Avenue to open the church.

Seeing It for Yourself

You can walk most of this history in an afternoon. Several of the houses are private homes, so please view them from the sidewalk.

• Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 128 West Fairview Avenue. Look for the cornerstone of 1861 and the stone of 1969 beside it, the two new markers, and the veterans’ stones in the churchyard.
• The Wesley burying ground, at Bridge Street and West Fairview Avenue. The triangle of grass beside the Marietta Cemetery holds the graves of the Wesley congregation and two of the new markers.
• The Huston house, 214 West Market Street, on the square. Home of Dr. Samuel Huston, the abolitionist physician of the county history.
• The Duffy mansion, 320 West Market Street, at North Bridge Street. The home of Colonel James Duffy, whose guests for a day in 1876 included President Grant and General Sherman, and the setting of the tunnel tale.
• The Railroad House, 280 West Front Street, at Perry Street. Here the canal and the ferry met in the 1830s and 1840s, the years when freedom seekers very likely passed by canal boat.
• The Fairfax house, 132 West Front Street. Josiah Fairfax, baker, barber, and the last charter member of Cassiopeia Lodge, bought the west half of this brick house in 1925, four years before his death.
• Furnace Row, Donegal Place. Henry Musselman and Henry Watts raised this row for the families who worked their iron furnaces.
• The Conoy marker, South 2nd Street and Locust Grove Road, Bainbridge. The bronze tablet of 1933 recalls the Conoy people and the trader Peter Bezaillion.

To Read More

• LancasterHistory, “African American Heritage Markers,” with the text of the Marietta markers: https://www.lancasterhistory.org/learn/learning-tools/aah-markers/
• Elizabethtown College Honors student research on the historic properties of Marietta: https://www.etown.edu/programs/honors/student-scholarship.aspx#marietta
• Leroy Hopkins, “The Underground Railroad in Columbia, Lancaster County,” Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office: https://pahistoricpreservation.com/the-underground-railroad-columbia-lancaster-county/
• William Still, The Underground Rail Road (1872), with William Whipper’s account of Columbia.
• Franklin Ellis and Samuel Evans, History of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (1883), with its chapter on Marietta.
• FOX43, “Tiny Marietta Church Is Last Trace of Once-Thriving Black Community” (Hidden History, 8 October 2026): https://www.fox43.com/article/news/history/tiny-marietta-church-is-last-trace-of-once-thriving-black-community-hidden-history/521-a4849d84-987c-4fc5-8cda-777b0b4648f6

About the Author

Jean-Paul Benowitz is a historian on the faculty of the School of Arts and Humanities and the Honors Program at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he is Director of Public Heritage Studies and Director of the Office of Prestigious Scholarships and Fellowships. An award-winning author, editor, and filmmaker, he writes and speaks on twentieth-century American political history, with an emphasis on the presidency and particularly the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. His work also embraces domestic and foreign policy since 1928, historical biography, American studies, local and regional history, public history and historic preservation, place-based and community-engaged learning, and the influence of religion on the nation’s culture and politics. He is the author of William Wilbur Miller Barbour: A Faith Full Witness for Human Rights (Santos Books, 2026), and he wrote and directed its companion documentary, The Prospect for Freedom: W. Miller Barbour’s Human Rights Journey. In recognition of his dedication to local history and heritage, the Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County honored him with the Smedley Award, given to an educator who has shown extraordinary support for preservation in the county. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Underground Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.

Also by Jean-Paul Benowitz

• William Wilbur Miller Barbour: A Faith Full Witness for Human Rights (Santos Books, 2026): https://santosbooks.org/shop/ols/products/william-wilbur-miller-barbour-a-faith-full-witness-for-human-rights-
• Sarah Tyson Rorer, The Pure Food Movement & Mount Gretna’s Rorer Hall of Cookery (Mount Gretna Area Historical Society and Lebanon County Historical Society, 2026): https://mtgretnahistory.org/shop/sarah-tyson-rorer-the-pure-food-movement-mount-gretnas-rorer-hall-of-cookery/
• Elizabethtown (Arcadia Publishing, Images of America, 2015): https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/elizabethtown-9781467123556
• Elizabethtown College (Arcadia Publishing, Campus History Series, 2014): https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/elizabethtown-college-9781467120838