Abolition Hall, Plymouth Meeting

The ground beneath Plymouth Meeting held antislavery convictions long before the Civil War. The Corson family homestead, built around seventeen ninety-five, served as a stop on the Underground Railroad for decades, sheltering freedom-seekers moving north. In eighteen fifty-six the family added a dedicated meeting hall above their carriage shed, large enough to seat two hundred, where leading abolitionists came to speak to Montgomery County audiences.

After the war the hall found a second life. Thomas Hovenden, who married into the family, used it as his painting studio from eighteen eighty-one to eighteen ninety-five. There he completed his most celebrated canvas, Last Moments of John Brown, depicting the condemned abolitionist pausing on the steps of the gallows to kiss an enslaved child, a scene that moved viewers across the country after the painting was finished in eighteen eighty-four.