Longwood Progressive Meeting and 1862 Visit with President Lincoln

Longwood Progressive Meetinghouse is located across from the entrance gate to Longwood Gardens, today it’s the Brandywine Valley Tourism Center.

The encounter at the 1852 Marlborough Riot further escalated and the following year, in May 1853, fifty-eight women and men temporarily left their original meetings, many “read out” or disowned and not accepted back until many years after the Civil War ended. They created the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends based on “moral accountability” and “practical righteousness”. They built and dedicated the Longwood Progressive Meetinghouse in 1855 just in time for the Third Annual Session of the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends. It was opened for “religious, moral, scientific and literary” purposes and activities. It always had a Quaker core but it invited membership to all interested in supporting various reform topics. Founding members included Eusebius, his brother William and their cousin Simon Barnard, all three were also prominent stationmasters and conductors on the UGRR.

Longwood Progressive Meetinghouse was a beacon of reform. Anti-slavery, women’s rights, capital punishment, prison reform to name a few.
• Speakers included Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott to name a few. Several became close friends of the Barnards and often stayed at their houses, particularly that of Simon Barnard in Newlin Township.
• Harriet Tubman came to the Kennett area on occasion and in her famed 1854 Christmas Escape she led 3 of her brothers to freedom with a stop over the DE border into the free state of PA at the Pennsbury home of Longwood Progressive members Allen and Maria Agnew.

Longwood Cemetery was established across the road around the same time as the meetinghouse. It is the resting place for many of the abolitionists involved with the Longwood Progressive Meeting and it was set up declaring that there be “no unchristian distinction on account of color or condition”. Eusebius Barnard and many of his family are buried there. His first wife Sarah had passed away in 1849 and buried at Marlborough Burial Grounds but she was later moved and placed at Longwood Cemetery next to her husband Eusebius and daughter Elizabeth, who had sadly died at age 26.

1862 Visit with President Lincoln

Six delegates from Longwood Progressive Meeting met with President Abraham Lincoln in June 1862 to present a memorial (petition) for widespread emancipation. The delegates were: Thomas Garrett, Alice Hambleton, Dinah Mendenhall, Oliver Johnson, Aliza Agnew and William Barnard.

Three months later on September 22, 1862 President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation which declared that as January 1st 1863, all enslaved people in the states currently engaged in rebellion against the Union “shall be then, and thenceforward, and forever free.” William Lloyd Garrison hailed this proclamation as "a great historic event, sublime in its magnitude, momentous and beneficent in its far-reaching consequences.”

Eusebius’ brother William Barnard was in the group meeting with Lincoln in 1862. Likely neither of them knew they were actually Quaker cousins, third cousins once removed to be exact. Abraham Lincoln’s 3rd Great Grandparents were Richard and Frances Barnard, Quakers who arrived in America from Wiltshire England in 1682 and settled in Chester County Pennsylvania. The Barnards of Chester County are Abraham Lincoln’s Quaker Roots.

December 1865 the U.S. adopted the 13th Amendment to the Constitution which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime.

Years of effort and conviction from abolitionists like many in the Barnard family, including their cousin Abe in Washington D.C, were of significant contribution during this historic period.