Hosanna Meeting House

Founded by free Black residents of this rural Chester County community, Hosanna Meeting House began as the African Meeting House before being formally organized in eighteen forty-three as an African Union Methodist Protestant congregation. It also served as a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers on their way north. Among its notable visitors were Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, two of the most powerful voices in the abolitionist movement. The congregation's existence in this rural corner of Pennsylvania is a reminder that free Black communities were not confined to cities, and that the networks of resistance to slavery were woven through the countryside as much as through any northern port.