The Abyssinian Meeting House

At seventy-three Newbury Street on Munjoy Hill stands one of the most significant African American religious buildings in the United States. The Abyssinian Meeting House, built between eighteen twenty-eight and eighteen thirty-one by free Black Portlanders, is the third oldest surviving African American church building in the country. It is also the only Underground Railroad site in Maine recognized by the National Park Service.

The story of its founding begins with a letter to a newspaper. On September nineteenth, eighteen twenty-six, six African American men, including a hackney cab driver named Reuben Ruby, published a statement in the Eastern Argus condemning the Second Congregational Church of Portland for treating its nonwhite members as second-class worshippers. They would build their own. Manuel, Ruby, and three colleagues petitioned the State of Maine for incorporation in eighteen twenty-eight. Construction followed on Newbury Street.

Reuben Ruby is central to this history. He ran a hack business, which put horse-drawn cabs and their operator in continuous motion across the city, a cover well suited to other work. Ruby used his cabs to transport people escaping slavery northward through Maine. The meeting house he helped found became a gathering place for abolitionist speakers, a site for Negro conventions, and a refuge where freedom seekers could rest and receive help.

Reverend Amos Noé Freeman later led the congregation and continued using the building as an organizing center for anti-slavery work. The first Maine Colored Convention was held in Portland in October eighteen forty-one.

The meeting house fell into disuse in the early twentieth century and deteriorated for decades. Preservation efforts that began in the nineteen nineties stabilized the structure. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand six and to the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom the following year.