Historic Hosanna church in Chesco to be honored with a bench

Even on a gray and rainy morning last week, the big history behind the small Hosanna A.U.M.P. Church is distinctive.

There is the tiny secret chamber beneath a restroom floor that hid runaway slaves.

There is the cemetery that holds the graves of Civil War soldiers and that era's social elite.

And there is the church itself, on Baltimore Avenue, just seven miles above the former Mason-Dixon Line, in Oxford, Chester County.

Standing at the entrance to Lincoln University, the one-room, one-story chapel with wooden steps and a wraparound porch is the last standing remnant of Hinsonville, a historic free black farming community.

Built entirely of bricks and wood, Hosanna, with its white interior, eight windows, and compact sanctuary, has stood at the forefront of black history and African independent churches since its founding in 1843.

And the African Union Methodist Protestant (AUMP) church is due for another distinction Friday. A memorial bench is to be presented at noon at Hosanna's cemetery.

According to Craig Stutman, assistant professor of history and policy studies at Delaware Valley University and cochair of the Bench by the Road Project, the benches are meant to be public memorials that commemorate people, places, or events connected to African American history.

"The criteria for selecting such sites are based upon the level of African American historical significance," said Stutman. He said all sites, including one at Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Delaware County, share common ground as places where people struggled in the fight for equal rights.

Friday's ceremony is to be hosted by Lincoln's Friends of Hosanna and the Toni Morrison Society, which sponsors the Bench by the Road project.

"This history is embedded in our community," said Hosanna Pastor Thoman Warren. "It's in our DNA to keep the spirit and the history of Hosanna alive."

Church member Edith Jones - one of about 12 members still active - is a descendant of one of Hinsonville's original settling families. But she didn't hear about the church's historical significance until later in her life.

"People didn't talk about it much," said Jones, "and I would find out my ancestors used to come here. There would be signals people give to let [slaves] know when it was safe to come."

To keep its history alive, church members offer tours and lectures every semester to both students at Lincoln and the general public. Lincoln is the first degree-granting historically black university in the United States and boasts such graduates as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, poet Langston Hughes, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria.

According to Cheryl Gooch, the dean of the Lincoln College of Arts, members and visitors fill up the eight or so pews of the church every Sunday for worship at 9 a.m.

It was James Ralston Amos, a founding trustee at Hosanna, who persuaded a white Presbyterian minister to create the Ashmun Institute in 1854 to train black men to serve as missionaries in Liberia. The institute later changed its name to honor President Abraham Lincoln but remained linked with Hosanna.

Jones, whose family reunites at the church every year, said visitors helped shape her views of the church.

"A lot of the people who were telling Hosanna's story had passed," Jones said. "There were outsiders who came in and told us stories about the church that we should have known coming up as kids."

kwilliams@phillynews.com

@KRWilliams610

This article has been corrected from a version that misspelled the name of James Ralston Amos.