Pennsbury A.M.E. Church

The earliest church in Pocopson Township actually pre-dates the township.  In 1827, a stone church was built on Denton Hollow Road by the Trustees of the African Union Church of Wilmington, Delaware, in a place referred to as “Raccoon Hollow” or “Cooney Hollow.”  The trustees that purchased the land were John Malden, James Ramen, David Hockins, John Williams and Richard Brown.   That area was part of Pennsbury Township at the time, so the church is often referred to as the Pennsbury A.M.E. Church, as well as the African Union Church and the African Union Meeting House.  Newspaper reports in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries support the idea that the building was used regularly for worship.  In addition to locals, worshipers from Wilmington and Coatesville would take the train to Pocopson Station and then walk down Street Road to the church. As many as 700 worshipers attended services there in the 1880’s and it was still active at least 30 years later.

Services also apparently drew other, less welcome, crowds.  Newspaper notices around 1860 warned suttlers, “under penalty of the law,” not to approach the church grounds. And another much later report noted that the woods near the church saw “crap, poker and other games in progress in the shade of the trees, and much intoxicating liquor seemed to be in evidence.”

There were also published stories of other-than-religious activities—fighting, rioting, heavy drinking—associated with these Quarterly Meetings.  But it is difficult to interpret these reports since even casual skimming of the newspaper clippings of the times will give strong hints of the anti-“colored” feelings of the white community.  In the 1890’s, local reporters regularly portrayed African-Americans as mischievous children who were prone to cause trouble. They cited a “plague” of rowdy “colored” loiterers, and the “mulatto drunks” who spent their nights in jail. They told what they considered an amusing story of a crowd of several hundred bystanders who “laughed heartily” when a local paving contractor whipped his horse without warning and forced a “colored lad” into a snow drift.

The church grounds were also used as a cemetery to mark the final resting place of dozens of colored troops who had served the Union during the Civil War. The church building itself has fallen down, but the adjoining cemetery still has a few standing stones. The site has been cleared by volunteers, and plans are in place to identify some of those buried there.

Partial List of Pastors

1879 D.D. Tillman

1880 D.D. Tillman

1885 L.C. Chambers (quarterly)

1888 J.W. Clemens

1892 Wm. H. Guy

1897 John Clements

1904 Wm. H Trusty - circuit preacher

1938? Brinton H. Barkley (Memorial VA ME Mission- Pennsboro)

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