Lawnside Historical Society gets $34K grant to digitize its archives
Summary
In this file photo from 2022, Ellen Benson, a Lawnside s resident since the age of 7, had just spoken with summer campers about the Underground Railroad history of Mt. Read moreThe Lawnside Historical Society has received a grant of $34,180 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to digitize its collection of documents, deeds, photos, and other materials.The organization will use the money to organize, digitize, and preserve its catalog of letters, handbills, posters, fraternal lodge records, videos and audio recordings, and oral histories, in addition to donated personal collections, said Linda Shockley, president of the historical society.Shockley, a Lawnside native, said the purpose of the project is to ensure this history is available to help young people keep learning, remembering, and discovering their own hidden histories.Shamele Jordon, former president of the African American Genealogy Group in Philadelphia, who also grew up in the South Jersey town that is about 14 miles east of Philadelphia, will be chief curator of the project.The reality is that if we dont digitize our documents, our history will gradually be erased, Jordon said. It was renamed Lawnside in 1907 to match the name of the nearby train station.In the 1840s, Lawnside became known as a free haven, for freed or escaping people and part of the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses and trails where people fleeing from slavery either settled in the town or passed through on their way further north in the United States or to Canada.One of Lawnsides most famous residents was Peter Mott, a free Black farmer whose house was a hiding place for freedom seekers.In 1926, Lawnside became the first self-governing incorporated Black municipality north of the Mason-Dixon line, Jordon said.The digitizing project is a partnership between the Lawnside historical society and 1838 Black Metropolis, a public history nonprofit organization that documents the history of the free Black population in Philadelphia before the Civil War.Michiko Quinones, a public historian and tech consultant, and Morgan Lloyd, the public programming coordinator at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, cofounded 1838 Black Metropolis, and used the 1838 Census funded by the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society as its foundation.In the 1838 Register of Trades for Philadelphia, Quinones found more than 600 Black-owned businesses listed. The association purchased land in New Jersey and sold plots at a reasonable cost in a community they called Free Haven, now Lawnside.Shockley noted that Peter Mott, the Lawnside preacher and agent on the Underground Railroad, bought his house from Jacob White Sr. in 1845.Were really interested in Lawnside as an outgrowth of the Underground Railroad movement and helping to tell those stories, Quinones said.Shockley said she fell in love with history, and Lawnsides history in particular, as an elementary school pupil growing up in the town.Every year during Black History Week, Roscoe L. Moore, the school doctor for Black schools in Camden and Lawnside starting in 1912 and 1913 respectively, would come out of his office to the school and tell us the history, Shockley said.Moore, born in nearby Magnolia, graduated from Howard Universitys College of Medicine in 1911. That was long enough to have infused Shockley with a love of history.As a little kid, to hear about someone who drove his horse and buggy around town to visit his patients was exciting, she said.Moore, whose own collection of documents were donated to the Lawnside Historical Society, died in 1977 at age 89 and is buried in Lawnsides Mount Peace Cemetery, which is on the National Historic Register.Lawnside was also known as a popular destination to visit in the 20th century for its barbecue joints and night clubs that brought such artists as Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Nat King Cole.The history in Lawnside is so deep and so vast, if we dont preserve it now, it will be lost, Jordon said.