Last year, Ken Johnston walked to Canada tracing Harriet Tubman’s ‘walk to freedom.’ This week, he set out to explore Chester County’s sites

Ken Johnston, the Philadelphia “walking artist” who hiked from New York City to Canada last year to honor Harriet Tubman’s 200th birthday, started a new walk across southern Chester County earlier this week.

The goal is to walk 10 to 15 miles a day this week on a 75-mile walk from Hinsonville to Phoenixville, exploring places where free Black communities lived in the early 19th century before the Civil War.

“Most of the stories about Chester County are about how the Quakers helped Black people fleeing oppression who came across the Pennsylvania border,” Johnston said. This walk is meant to “re-center and recognize the free African American communities that were here, and the lives they lived.”

“These are stories that are not frequently mentioned when people talk about the Underground Railroad,” he said.

“They were farmers. They were entrepreneurs. They had small businesses and they built churches that were strategically located on the southern border of Chester County to help those escaping from Maryland and Delaware.”

Johnston, 62, who lives in the Cobbs Creek section of Philadelphia, blogs about his walking adventures on his “Our Walk to Freedom” website.

He began his latest walk on Monday morning at the Hosanna African United Methodist Protestant Church, also known as the Hosanna Meeting House, a stop on the Underground Railroad in a Black community known as Hinsonville. It is on Baltimore Pike in the shadow of Lincoln University, in Oxford, Pa.

The Hosanna Meeting House has been described as “the last building in Hinsonville.” The village was named after Emory Hinson, the first Black man to buy property and settle in the area, a mere six miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Records show that Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth visited the Hosanna Church, but it is not certain whether Tubman stopped there, Johnston said. The church had a trap door underneath the pulpit that led to a basement hiding area.

The original church was established in 1843 and built in 1845. However, the church that stands now is a replica that was rebuilt in the late 1890s or in the early 1900s, said Bernard Lambert, a descendant of Edward Walls, the free Black prosperous landowner who donated a half-acre to the church trustees in the 1840s.

Lambert, 52, who lives in Germantown, met Johnston at the Hosanna Church on Monday morning and walked the first mile with him.

Lambert is a Civil War reenactor who said he only recently discovered that his third great-grandfather, William Jay, was among six Black Chester County cousins who served in the Civil War.

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The cousins — three Jay brothers, two Cole brothers, and one Walls cousin — served with the 54th Massachusetts Regiment whose story was told in the movie Glory.

“They all left from Philadelphia to train in Boston and then they took the ferry down to the South to fight,” Lambert said.

Of his six family members, all but one survived the war, he said. The cousin who died, Albert Walls, was killed at Fort Wagner, South Carolina.

On Monday, Johnston walked 12.5 miles in about six hours from Hinsonville to Bucktoe Cemetery in Kennett Township.

The cemetery is owned by the New Garden Memorial UAME (Union American Methodist Episcopal) Church, established about 1715. Although the original church no longer exists, stones from the church at Bucktoe were used for the foundation of the relocated New Garden Memorial church now in Kennett Square.

On Tuesday, Johnston started at the Chandler Mill Nature Preserve in Kennett Square, where he met with Lynn Sinclair, founder of the Kennett Heritage Center. She walked about three miles with him.

He ended Tuesday, after a more than five-hour, 11.2-mile walk, at Barnard Station, in Pocopson. Barnard Station was a Quaker-owned farm that served as an Underground Railroad station.

» READ MORE: Philly ‘walking artist’ arrives in St. Catharines, Ontario, where Harriet Tubman once lived

“These are old horse and carriage roads that have been paved over,” he said. “They are old country roads with very narrow passageways.”

On Wednesday, Johnston started his walk at Pocopson about 8:30 a.m. and toured historic sites, including the ruins of the Pennsbury African Union Church, built in 1827.

“We don’t know if it was an active Underground Railroad station stop,” said Don McKay, chair of the Pocopson Township Historical Committee.

The area likely served as a way to hide people escaping from slavery because they may have mixed in with Black hired farm workers or among the free Black laborers, who worked alongside white employees, at the grist mills, saw mills, and cotton mills near Pocopson Creek.

“They could have been hiding in plain sight,” McKay said.

Johnston and McKay planned to walk nine miles on Wednesday — from Pocopson to Unionville High School in Kennett Square, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in 1967.

On Thursday, Johnston plans to walk from Kennett Square to Valley Township, to explore a Black community called Hayti; on Friday, he will walk from Coatesville to Downingtown.

On Saturday, the walk will be from Downingtown to West Chester. There, Johnston plans to interview Mayor Lillian DeBaptiste, the town’s first Black female mayor, whose family has deep roots in the county.

On Sunday, he will walk from West Chester to Phoenixville, the end of the 75-mile trip. Phoenixville had a 19th-century Black community that developed around the iron forge industries.

Along the way, Johnston hopes to meet other descendants of these old communities. He will also look at how some communities evolved in the 20th century.

“I will be zig-zagging along the way,” he said, “kind of carving out a Black heritage trail across the county and seeing our history over time,”