In far northwestern Cecil County, two miles below the Mason-Dixon Line, a small, free African American community, Mount Zoar, was settled in the mid-19th century. The village included about a dozen homes, a church, a school, and a cemetery.
It thrived for generations, and today, traces of this once-resilient hamlet remain. These include the AME Church, which was built around 1870, replacing an earlier house of worship that had been in the area since 1859. Plus, there is a 19th-century frame schoolhouse with a projected entrance and bell tower. The “school is one of the more unusual of its type in the entire county,” a Maryland Historical Trust report noted.
Through this region passed “the mysterious underground railway, which carries to the north so many fugitives from labor. Here is a stopping place for those noiseless invisible trains . . .,” the newspaper added (Cecil Whig, March 26, 1859). Also, the paper noted that there was “a dense population of free negroes in this part of the country,” near the Susquehanna River and the Canal.
One of the residents of Mt. Zoar was John Berry, Jr who purchased a large parcel of this land. He died in July 1879 at the age of 66, the Cecil Whig noted on July 26, 1869. He owned 75 acres of land, and the editor commented on the challenges in this era for a Black man to own that amount of good land in an “intelligent neighborhood.” It was accumulated by his own labor and this was difficult for “a colored American citizen, the Cecil Whig wrote on March 2, 1878. Mr. Berry had been instrumental in establishing the school and much more in the area.
Mount Zoar is a community that warrants further research, but for now, we wanted to share these notes about the surviving traces from another era.
For additional photos from Mt. Zoar AME Church and Cemetery, see this album on Facebook. — Mt. Zoar – The Family Resting Place for Many USCTs
(Photo Credit: Maryland Historical Trust)