Black settlement near Hopewell Furnace played crucial role in Underground Railroad

The story of the Underground Railroad is well-known to many Americans.

Not an actual railroad, it was an intricate network of individuals and families who worked to move enslaved people from the South to the North until the end of the Civil War.

But older accounts of the effort often overlook the intense involvement and importance of rural Black communities such as the Six Penny Creek settlement near Hopewell Furnace, Dr. Benjamin Carter said.

Carter, an associate professor of anthropology and department chair, and coordinator of the sociology/anthropology lab at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, wants to change that.

He spoke recently at Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site.

Carter’s program, “The African American Settlement of Six Penny Creek: Charcoal, Iron and the Underground Railroad,” was presented by the Friends of Hopewell Furnace in recognition of Black History Month.

The Friends help support the historic site in Union Township and assist with park programs.

“It’s weird that I’m here presenting for Black History Month,” said Carter, who is white. “I get the disjuncture there. But I also want to stress that one of the things that I’ve learned in my journey to today, to this point, is that Black history is all around us. Black history is American history.”

Unexpected link

He and his students were not looking for a link to the Underground Railroad when they began a study of the lands formerly used to produce the charcoal that fueled iron furnaces such as Hopewell in the 18th and 19th centuries. But they discovered Hopewell’s charcoal forests have a strong connection to the rural Black community at nearby Six Penny Creek and its role in the Underground Railroad.

The Black settlement at Six Penny Creek has long been recognized by local historians as a station on the Underground Railroad, Carter noted.

It was founded in 1842, and at its peak was home to about 40 to 50 people who lived in a cluster of about nine houses on 40 acres of land owned by community members, he said.

Black families, several of them related, included those of Isaac and Anna Cole, Aquilla “Quilty” and Catherine Bodley, Jehu Nixon, the Butlers, Jacksons and others.

The settlers at Six Penny were skilled laborers and artisans who worked at Hopewell or in jobs that supported the surrounding community, Carter said.

Cole worked as a laborer and stone mason and most likely built Mount Frisby African Methodist Episcopal Church.

His descendants still own the land in Union Township on which the remains of the church and its associated cemetery stand.

They and other Cole family members attended Carter’s program.

Role of the church

A free Black man, Cole moved his family from Maryland to Pennsylvania and was instrumental in establishing the village and the congregation.

Three of his brothers also moved from Maryland and established communities and associated AME congregations in Pennsylvania, Carter said.

As AME churches are strongly associated with the Underground Railroad, Carter hypothesizes the brothers may have moved expressly to establish waystations for those fleeing slavery.

Black communities, like the one at Six Penny, supported the freedom seekers who sometimes were able to temporarily disappear into the population, Carter said. But the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required that enslaved people be returned to their owners even if living in a free state, forced many to continue north to Canada.

The charcoal lands of Pennsylvania provided routes for their escape and places to hide along the way, Carter said.

Providing shelter

To understand how, he said, a brief explanation of charcoal making is necessary.

Charcoal makers, called colliers, began by tightly stacking wood in domed piles up to 50 feet in diameter and 10 feet high, he said. These stacks, called melliers, were covered with a layer of leaves and soil and then ignited.

Rather than burning, the wood was distilled as its gases escaped, Carter said. The finished product, which burned hotter and longer than wood, was taken to furnaces and used as fuel to smelt iron.

Because colliers had to tend the melliers for extended periods and often tended eight or more at a time, they stayed in the woods for months, taking shelter in conical huts made of logs and covered in sod.

These huts, mostly used for sleeping and weather protection, were abandoned yearly as colliers moved to the next charcoal hearths.

Often well hidden by dense woodland, the vacated huts were used by conductors on the Underground Railroad to shelter freedom seekers.

Carter found references to this activity in old newspaper stories and an article written by the late Berks County historian Wayne E. Homan and published in the fall 1958 edition of the Historical Review of Berks County.

The author interviewed elderly residents of the area who recalled tales of slave hunters a few miles from Six Penny Creek, Carter said.

“The slave hunters ranged that valley, too,” Homan wrote, and when pressed too hard, runaways were taken into the woods to charcoal burners’ huts.”

Homan also wrote of Underground Railroad activity in the vicinity of nearby Joanna Furnace in Robeson Township, Carter said, where colliers’ huts also were used to hide fugitive enslaved people.

‘Reservoirs of history’

There also is evidence of some Black Pennsylvanians using colliers’ huts for longer periods and of building them, he said. This hints at the importance of these structures as places of refuge that could be built easily and enable people to move when necessary, he noted.

Using a technology known as light detection and ranging, or LiDaR, Carter and his team identified 26,000 relict charcoal pits in and around state game lands across Pennsylvania. They also identified the archeological sites of thousands of associated colliers’ huts.

His team found archeological evidence of charcoal making, stone cutting and other activities.

These state lands are reservoirs of history, he said. They hold evidence of the important, yet rarely told, story of Black settlers who used the charcoal landscape to aid those fleeing slavery.

“I think that it’s particularly important to recognize that this is, in some ways, an ideal landscape to move people across,” Carter said.

Other landscapes, such as the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, also served this purpose for the Underground Railroad, he noted.

Carter posits that the charcoal lands of Pennsylvania, including those around Hopewell Furnace, contributed equally to the story of the Underground Railroad, and the inhabitants of small, rural Black communities, such as Six Penny, played a large role that story.

“The Six Penny Creek story, to me, is a classic American story,” he said, “but it is often not told that way. We need to start thinking of Black history as American history, as wrapped in and all around everything.”