Lawnside Historical Society gets $34K grant to digitize its archives

The 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 in the Camden County borough.

Shockley, a Lawnside native, said the purpose of the project is to ensure that this history is “available to help young people keep learning, remembering, and discovering their own hidden histories.”

“The reality is that if we don’t digitize our documents, our history will gradually be erased.”

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 don’t digitize our documents, our history will gradually be erased,” Jordon said. “The world needs to understand the cultural heritage of early 19th century Black life, and focusing on Lawnside helps us understand how Black people were integral to the Underground Railroad movement.”

The historical society and the IMLS, which is based in Washington, announced the grant on July 5. “The history of the United States cannot be told without the inclusion of the African American experience,” said acting IMLS director Cyndee Landrum.

Black people began settling in Lawnside, once known as Free Haven and Snow Hill, as early as 1659. The name Snow Hill began around 1791 or 1792, Jordon said. The town 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 farther north in the United States or to Canada.

One of Lawnside’s 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 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. She and Lloyd wanted to “resurface” the stories of that free Black population in Philadelphia that was active in the abolition movement and created its own organizations to help Black people arriving here after fleeing slavery.

Quinones will be program manager of the new Lawnside project. She is a member of the Lawnside Historical Society and has worked as a volunteer docent for the Peter Mott House.

The Lawnside project fits into the goals of the 1838 Black Metropolis, Ouinones said. In the 19th century, Philadelphians Jacob C. White Sr. and Ralph Smith, a Quaker, were members of the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee.

In 1839, White and Smith launched the Agricultural and Mechanics Association of Pennsylvania and New Jersey to encourage both free Black people and newly freed people to become homeowners. The association purchased land in New Jersey and sold plots at a reasonable cost in the community they called Free Haven.

Shockley noted that Mott bought his house from White in 1845.

“We’re 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 Lawnside’s 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 University’s College of Medicine in 1911. In addition to his medical practice, Moore was the school district physician for Black students in Camden for 17 years and for students in Lawnside for 60 years. 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 was donated to the Lawnside Historical Society, died in 1977 at 89 and is buried in Lawnside’s Mount Peace Cemetery, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Lawnside was also known as a popular destination to visit in the 20th century for its barbecue joints and night clubs that attracted 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 don’t preserve it now, it will be lost,” Jordon said.