September is International Underground Railroad Month and this week’s post features the story of Robert Purvis and Byberry Hall.
In 1844, Robert Purvis, a prominent Black abolitionist and leading figure in the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, moved with his wife Harriet and their children to Byberry, a rural village in the far northern part of Philadelphia County.
For the next 27 years, they helped make Byberry a center of abolition and Underground Railroad activity. In 1847, Robert and two others built Byberry Hall as a meeting place for discussion of anti-slavery and other social issues. The building is now a key site on the Poquessing Trail of History.
Robert Purvis
Robert Purvis was born in 1810 in Charleston, South Carolina, to a white father who was a wealthy Scottish-born cotton broker and a mother of African descent who was a free woman of color. In 1819, the family moved to Philadelphia, where Robert would emerge as a leader of the city’s Black community. Wealthy, educated, and charismatic, Purvis was light skinned and could have easily passed for white, but chose to identify with his African heritage and work tirelessly for his people. In 1831, he married Harriet Davey Forten, daughter of James Forten, who owned a successful sailmaking company and was one of Philadelphia’s most respected Black residents.
In 1837-1838, Purvis helped launch Philadelphia’s first Vigilance Committee to “aid colored persons in distress,” raising funds for their legal defense, transport, food, lodging, and medical care. (The work of a later iteration of the Committee in the 1850s is well-known through a surviving journal kept by celebrated Underground Railroad leader William Still.) In 1838 Purvis wrote the influential pamphlet Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens Threatened with Disfranchisement, which urged the repeal of a new Pennsylvania constitutional amendment that removed the right to vote from free Blacks. He served as president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society from 1845-1850 and chairman of the General Vigilance Committee for the Underground Railroad from 1852-1857.
The executive committee of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in 1851. Robert Purvis, president of the society from 1845 to 1850, is third from right in the front row. To his left is noted abolitionist Lucretia Mott. Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College.
Purvis and his family were threatened in what came to be known as the Lombard Street Riots in Philadelphia in 1842. For several days in August, white mobs attacked Black people, homes, and institutions in the vicinity of the Purvis home in the city. Robert himself was a target of the rioters at one point, prompting him to send Harriet and the children to safety in Bucks County and to sit on the stairs of his home at night with a rifle on his knees in case of attack. A year later, Robert and Harriet purchased a home and 105 acres of land in rural Byberry Township and moved there with their children in 1844. While some historians have interpreted the move as the Purvises fleeing the violent city for safety, in fact, their new home allowed them to expand their Underground Railroad and abolitionist activities. Purvis later estimated that they helped some 9,000 freedom seekers over the years.
Detail from 1849 Plan of the Townships of Byberry & Moreland by James C. Sidney. Robert and Harriet Purvis purchased 105 acres near Byberry Friends Meeting (the concentration of buildings in the center) in 1843 and moved to Byberry the following year. Their home became a stop on the Underground Railroad and in 1847 Robert and two local men formed the Trustees of Byberry Hall and built Byberry Hall as a place for discussion of anti-slavery and other social issues of the day. Historical Society of Frankford Map Collection.
Byberry Hall
Three years after settling in Byberry, Robert Purvis and two others formed the Trustees of Byberry Hall “for the purpose of having a hall erected . . . to be dedicated to free discussion, to be independent of, and untrammeled by, any sect or party, . . . but in the fullest and freest sense to give ample scope and a fair field for the utterance of free speech.” The first meeting in the new hall was held on July 18, 1847. As reported in the abolitionist newspaper The Pennsylvania Freeman, the opening event featured several speakers who “gave variety and life to the meeting. The various branches of moral reform were touched upon, but anti-slavery claimed especial attention.” Byberry Hall would host many well-known abolitionist speakers in the years that followed, including Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, and Purvis himself.
A spirited meeting was held at Byberry Hall on October 18, 1850, to discuss community response to passage a few weeks earlier of the federal Fugitive Slave Act, a new federal law that required citizens to aid the recapture of emancipated people, even in states where slavery was illegal. The Pennsylvania Freeman published Purvis’ report on the meeting, at which 38 local residents signed a strongly worded denunciation of the new law, vowing to “utterly disregard [its] monstrous and inhuman requirements.” During this period, Robert and Harriet were helping freedom-seekers at their home in Byberry, an important stop on the Underground Railroad.
c. 1895 photo of Byberry Hall, the earliest known image of the building. Byberry Library, Byberry Friends Meeting.
Byberry Hall went through a series of ownership changes in the mid-1850s, and in 1854 a new group, the Byberry Hall Association, replaced the Trustees of Byberry Hall. Purvis remained active in the Hall through 1871, but by 1872 he and Harriet were living in Washington DC, where he was serving as a commissioner of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company. In 1873 they sold their main property in Byberry and moved back to downtown Philadelphia. Harriet died in 1875 at age sixty-five and Robert in 1898 at age eighty-seven.
The Byberry Hall Association managed the building into the late 20th century, making it available for public meetings, elections, and community events. In 1980, the Association officially dissolved and transferred ownership of the Hall to Byberry Friends Meeting, which rented it out to a martial arts studio. The studio closed in 2021, at which point the Meeting engaged the services of a preservation architect to develop a restoration plan for the building and help secure grants to begin a multi-stage process of renovating it. As a stakeholder in the Poquessing Trail of History project, Byberry Friends Meeting is helping to shape public programming around the rich history of the Byberry Hall and developing plans to have it serve as a local history center and community meeting place once again.
Byberry Hall in 2024. The original stone building was completed in 1847. The rear and front wooden additions were added in the late 19th and early 20th century, respectively. Photo by Jack McCarthy.
For information on the Poquessing Trail of History project, visit the project website: Poquessing Trail of History. Many thanks to the staff of The Philadelphia 1838 Black Metropolis for their input on this article. See their blog What Resistance looked like in 1838.
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Today’s post is written by guest author Jack McCarthy, Project Director for the Poquessing Trail of History.
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