George Corson

by Colleen Gallagher

The struggle for human progress plays out in some unlikely places:

A peach orchard outside a small town called Gettysburg. The Montgomery, Ala., sidewalk where a seamstress boarded a bus named resistance. A defunct iron forge along the Schuylkill River whose long-ago winter of desperation lingers in the national consciousness.

We sanctify such unassuming spots with historic status to help us remember that our bold, brash society is built upon the suffering of Americans bolder and braver than we’ll ever be.

Revering these patches of ground does something else for us as a nation:Opinion

It frees us to build our McMansions and multiplexes without having to stop and think about all that.

It would surely depress the economy, not to mention everyone’s mood, if we had to be mindful every time we pulled in to the mini-mart that some tribe was forced from that land. That men, women, and children escaping enslavement could well have hidden there. That local regiments may have passed there en route to slaughter in a country tearing itself apart.

The footprints these Americans left on the bitter road to their freedom and ours may lie literally under our feet, but, well, you can’t consecrate every square inch.

At least that's how some cast the trade-off these days in Plymouth Meeting.

Lately, the fate of a hallowed antislavery site there appears to ride on the significance or lack thereof of eight or so nondescript acres of farmland beside a barn-turned-home and its attached carriage shed.

A development plan for the roughly 10-acre private estate – converted barn, shed, fields, and a circa 1767 house at Germantown and Butler pikes, all of it on the National Register of Historic Places – would put 67 townhouses on the open land and leave the historic structures untouched.

"It's not about historic preservation," Julie L. Von Spreckelsen, attorney for developer K. Hovnanian Homes, said at a July 19 public hearing, continued to August 16, on whether the plan meets Whitemarsh Township's requirements as a conditional use under the site's "village commercial 2" historic zoning district.

Opponents argue that the plan confines the historic buildings to an unfeasibly tight and visually incompatible setting, threatening their ability to remain viable as a private estate or to be repurposed for public educational or cultural use.

They point to the deliberate inclusion of the land when the site was placed on the National Register in 1971, while the developer notes that the registry nomination form submitted in 1969 was silent on any historic significance of the land.

Nobody is disputing the significance of the carriage shed.

A climate of fear

Today it's enshrined on a roadside marker as Abolition Hall, but in its day people were apt to refer to it as just "George's hall," for its owner, George Corson.

With the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in full force and venues in and around Philadelphia increasingly declining to host what were often biracial antislavery gatherings for fear of mob violence, Corson in 1856 defiantly enclosed his shed and added an upper story with room to seat 200.

Soon area activists were meeting in the new space, and the leading lights of the national abolition movement, Frederick Douglass and Lucretia Mott among them, were giving speeches there.

But George Corson's hall didn't put this then-rural Montgomery County village on the map as an abolitionist stronghold and Underground Railroad stop, because it already was. His early embrace of the cause meant the path to his door was an established one.

"The slave, fleeing his master, ever found a home with him," Philadelphia abolitionist William Still said of Corson after his death in 1860.

And George was but one of several Corsons and nearby residents, black and white, to routinely break federal law by aiding and abetting those evading the bounty hunters scouring the country in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Regardless, whether the National Register application makes it clear or not, George Corson's property wasn't just any property.

If not for the particular history and nature of his land, it's hard to see how George Corson would have been who he was, or how an Abolition Hall would have come to exist.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of prosperity

Most basically, Corson's land had the proverbial real estate trifecta: location, location, location.

His home, still standing and now known as Hovenden House, stood where the route to the Schuylkill Canal met the main drag to Philadelphia, the original 1687 cart road that by the 1850s extended to farms and mills clear to the Perkiomen Creek.

You couldn't miss it.

Which was important if you were arriving from New York or Washington or Boston.

Or trying to make your way unseen and a mistake could cost you your freedom, or your life.

But even more central to the existence of Abolition Hall than the property's visibility was its profitability.

Around the time Abolition Hall was built, George Corson's holdings extended a half-mile down Butler, past the now-reconfigured intersection with Flourtown Road.

By amassing sufficient contiguous farmland and, crucially, mineral deposits, he was able to create the scale that accelerated the evolution of the area's limestone pits and kilns from a cottage industry, to a few major players, to eventually a single dominant enterprise whose innovations under succeeding generations would advance the entire U.S. lime industry.

Even in the operation's infancy, his land's agricultural and industrial output afforded George and his wife, Martha, the means to open their parlor to out-of-town luminaries; to feed, shelter and often transport unannounced strangers; to remodel, light, heat and furnish an outbuilding and invite all who would come.

The Corsons came to acquire this productive acreage the same way they acquired their taste for universal emancipation – from the Maulsbys.

Ambition and idealism

As early landowners in Plymouth Meeting, the enterprising and independent-minded Maulsbys were key to both the Corsons' edification on abolition and to their wherewithal to act on it.

And it all started on that land.

While George's father, Joseph, was growing up in what is now Bucks County, a young Samuel Maulsby arrived from Plymouth Meeting with his sister and widowed mother, who was now married to Joseph's uncle.

But once he came of age in 1786, Samuel headed back to Plymouth Meeting to try to make a go of it on land roughly from present-day Germantown Pike to Flourtown Road that his uncle John Maulsby had purchased in 1699 and had been worked by tenant farmers since Samuel's father's untimely death.

And he brought Joseph with him.

There, Joseph was exposed to abolitionist writings outside the mainstream of Quaker views. And in time so were his children.

And there on the Maulsby property, Joseph was able to establish himself in Plymouth Meeting – farming, working the general store and post office Samuel built (also still standing), marrying and starting a family in a house he rented there – on the same land his son George was able to acquire a half-century later through his own ties to the Maulsbys.

Though George grew up on property his father later bought at what is now the Plymouth Meeting Mall, the families' bonds continued, especially after George married Martha, Samuel's daughter.

And when Samuel died in 1843, Martha's brother and brother-in-law sold the land to George, enabling him to run a large lime business with his nephew Elias Hicks Corson, who likely jointly owned at least some of Samuel's former holdings and whose sons and grandsons kept the company growing for another 130 years.

But even before large-scale lime production was a thing in Plymouth Meeting, it's easy to imagine why the tract would have appealed to Samuel's uncle: its evident fertility given the cultivation of the area since at least the early 1680s, and its strategic position along the cart path to Philadelphia.

Yet, to English Quakers like the Maulsbys, the land's most conspicuous appeal would have been its location in a Friends settlement.

At that time in human history, Plymouth Meeting was one of the few places on Earth to which members of a persecuted Judeo-Christian religious minority could flee to worship in peace.

Soon those who had bought into William Penn's "holy experiment" were demonstrating that liberty and prosperity were a winning combination.

And by the time Abolition Hall was built some 150 years later, the Corsons had put that ethos on steroids.

Flouting respectability

To polite society, of course, slavery was officially abhorrent.

Since 1776, owning or selling slaves had meant disownment from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, and in 1780 Pennsylvania had become the first state to pass a law to end, albeit gradually, slaveholding.

But to press for immediate nationwide abolition? Few whites of any religious stripe favored it. Many considered the idea dangerous and its advocates extremists.

And when war broke out, some abolitionists' neighbors feared their communities would be targets of rebel ire and stood ready to rat out the radicals in their midst.

"The present generation," Montgomery County chronicler Ellwood Roberts wrote in 1900, "can neither understand nor appreciate what it cost to oppose the traffic in human beings, even in the free North. Only those who lived through that era can realize its bitterness."

George and his siblings didn't need to stick their necks out – their talents were such that they would've made names for themselves no matter what.

When they weren't busy breaking the law, Alan W. was building a reputation across the Philadelphia region for his mathematical and scientific acumen; Charles was farming; and George was laying the foundation of an industrial dynamo.

Hiram was attracting attention for his treatment of infectious fevers and, later, as a reformer of the care of the mentally ill and a much-vilified advocate of training women as physicians; William had a thriving medical practice in Norristown; and after raising their younger brothers after their mother died, Sarah and Mary were dutifully raising their own norm-crashers, including the first U.S. woman to complete a hospital internship.

In short, it's hard to account for how a place like Plymouth Meeting could end up making way more than its share of state and national industrial, medical, social, and human rights history without noting how the Corsons, like the Maulsbys, didn't compartmentalize their entrepreneurial, professional and moral zeal.

That sense of bold integrity is what seems to link everything that an old carriage shed has come to signify.

A little patch

Today, Plymouth Meeting's name recognition owes little to its history and a lot to its proximity to the nexus of the Blue Route, Pennsylvania Turnpike, and Northeast Extension – a major driver of its development.

Over the past several years, Alan W.'s rotting National Register-listed homestead on Butler has been replaced by single-family homes. Judge George C. Corson Sr.'s abandoned manse and once-pastoral "Corsondale" spread at Butler and Plymouth Road in Plymouth Township that three generations of Corsons had called home has been replaced by an award-winning development of homes, shops and restaurants. And last fall, Hiram's descendants sold his "Maple Hill" home on Spring Mill Road, with most of the land subdivided for new houses.

Homes and offices cover a reclaimed later-vintage Corson quarry off Stenton Avenue, a second one is being filled in, and townhouses have sprouted on the section of George and Elias Hicks Corson's holdings on Butler north of the railroad tracks.

That would appear to leave the fields beside Abolition Hall as the only undeveloped patch left of the seminal Maulsby-Corson land.

A few years ago, Whitemarsh Township offered George Corson's descendants a reported $1.3 million for the fields but got no response.

As in most places, preservation in Plymouth Meeting has about zilch to do with official historic status and everything to do with whether a historic property as such can be a viable investment for a committed owner.

By that calculus, it's unclear at this point what would spare a hemmed-in Abolition Hall from the fate of numerous other reminders of Plymouth Meeting's outsize role in history.

Colleen Gallagher is a Philadelphia area writer and editor whose interests include local history.