Trailblazers

The second Bethel AME Church opened on Short Street on November 24, 1839. Its early pastors, Reverend Levin Lee, Reverend T.M.D. Ward, and Reverend Abraham Cole, each helped increase interest in the church, which operated a Sabbath school and a library in its basement. In August 1847, Bethel’s men helped inaugurate the Brotherly Love Lodge of the Odd Fellows, and on September 29, 1858, the Brotherly Love Lodge became the first Odd Fellowship in the United States to apply for and receive a Ruth Degree Warrant, granting the colored women of the Miriam Household of Ruth, No. 1. The church endured difficult times at this location. In 1847, Bethel brethren protected Frederick Douglass while a mob hurled stones at him after he spoke at the Dauphin County Courthouse with abolitionist William Lloyed Garrison. During the 1840s and 1850s, church members formed a vigilance committee against kidnappers of runaway slaves. On February 22, 1861, Bethel member Jacob T. Cumpton used his horse-drawn carriage to take President-elect Abraham Lincoln out of Harrisburg after news of an assassination plot became known. On January 15, 1863, the men and women of Bethel met at the church to draft a public statement explaining the Black community’s position on President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, expressing both a preference for a general rather than partial proclamation and an endorsement of citizenship with its responsibilities.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania · United States