Pandenarium — A Community Built on Freedom

In November of eighteen fifty-four, sixty-three African American men and women stepped off their journey and into a new life in the rolling countryside north of Indian Run, in what is now Wilmington Township, Mercer County. They called their community Pandenarium.

They had been enslaved on a Virginia plantation owned by Dr. Charles Everett, who began freeing his enslaved people in eighteen thirty-seven and provided for their freedom in his will. After his death, his nephew bought land in Mercer County where these families could settle and farm. Many of the Pandenarium settlers turned their new freedom outward almost immediately, pooling resources and labor to purchase the freedom of others still held in bondage.

Archaeologists have since excavated the site, uncovering foundations, artifacts, and the physical evidence of a community built by people who had earned their freedom at enormous cost and used it with extraordinary purpose. Pandenarium stands as one of the few documented freedom communities of its kind in Pennsylvania, a testament to what determination and mutual aid could build even in the shadow of the institution that had tried to erase them.