Tolson's Chapel

In September 1862, soldiers fought the Battle of Antietam in the fields around Sharpsburg, the deadliest battle the nation had yet seen. Four years later, African Americans there erected a simple log church where they would exercise their hard-won freedoms. In 1868, the chapel also housed the American Union school with help from the United States Freedmen's Bureau, and twelve of its students had been enslaved only four years earlier. Maryland had abolished slavery in October 1864 through its Declaration of Rights, bringing freedom to 90,000 people, and President Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation after the battle, freeing enslaved people in states in rebellion. Black citizens erected the chapel in 1866, and the Sharpsburg Colored M.E. Church was later renamed for its first minister, John L. Tolson. A school for African American students opened there on April 6, 1868, operated for 31 years, was supported by family tuition, and included night school for adults. The chapel closed in 1998 after the congregation's last member, Virginia Cook, died in 1996, and ownership passed in 2002 to the Save Historic Antietam Foundation to begin restoration, which continued in 2008 with transfer to the Friends of Tolson's Chapel.

Sharpsburg, Maryland · United States