When I first heard of the efforts by Whitemarsh residents and other local historians to preserve Abolition Hall, I thought that true villainy was afoot. Who would build town homes on what might be the most significant civil rights landmark in the state?

The truth, of course, is not nearly as bad as that first impression. The home builders of K Hovnanian, the sixth largest builder and seller of homes in the United States, does not plan to level Abolition Hall or any of the other historic properties on the already crowded corner of Germantown and Butler pikes.

Instead, they want to build nearly 70 homes on the sizeable chunk of undeveloped former farmland that once belonged to the Corson family. The Corson home and Abolition Hall are to be parceled off and sold, one hopes to an entity that would guarantee their preservation.

Many of our readers probably drive by Abolition Hall regularly, perhaps without any awareness of its significance. It was a hall built by Quaker activist George Corson in 1856 and served as the location for rousing speeches against slavery by many notable figures of the time. It held 200 people and was visited by Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Corson’s property was also a stop on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves seeking their freedom in the northern United States.

In addition to its Civil Rights significance, it was later the home of Corson’s son-in-law, the Irish American painter Thomas Hovenden. Hovenden replaced Thomas Eakins as a professor at the Philadelphia Academy of the Arts and counted among his students the sculptor Alexander Calder.

The only way the passerby would be clued into this rich history is a historical marker along the driveway leading up to the hall on East Butler Pike. There is no museum, visitors’ center or even a place to park for the curious. It’s been private property until Corson’s heirs sold it to K. Hovnanian in 2012.

Many of the historians who spoke with our writer Elizabeth Coady agreed that the property should remain free of development – that the farmland to the northeast was essential to the context of the site. It’s too difficult, they argue, to imagine what it would have been like for visitors to the site 150 years ago when a row of new town homes is built a stone’s-throw from Abolition Hall.

1. Hovnanian will likely try to strike a compromise, which is understandable given the fact that they bought the parcel fair and square and have every legal right to pursue developing it.

I tend to agree more with the historians. The Corson home and Abolition Hall are part of a remarkable collection of old buildings in Plymouth Meeting that includes the campus of Plymouth Meeting Friends. Having some open space to preserve even a modest amount of what Abolition Hall and the rest of the Plymouth Meeting homestead was like when it was settled in 1686, would be a good thing.

Another development will erase nearly every trace of that history.

Pete Mazzaccaro