Abraham Pennock, Abolitionist of Hoodland

The estate called Hoodland, near Media in Delaware County, was home for decades to Abraham Pennock, one of Pennsylvania's most prominent abolitionists. Pennock was a leader in the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and a committed Quaker who believed in linking the causes of racial equality, women's rights, and temperance together. His home became a gathering place for reformers.

Visitors to Hoodland are said to have included John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet whose verses became anthems of the abolitionist movement, and James Russell Lowell, the Harvard poet and essayist. Pennock lived here until his death in eighteen sixty-eight, the year Congress was debating the Fourteenth Amendment. The house itself had been built by his father-in-law, John Sellers the Second, and stood as a quiet center of moral seriousness in the Philadelphia Quaker tradition.