Emanuel A.M.E. Church (Aboard "the great Underground Railroad") - Portsmouth, Virginia - Civil War Discovery Trail Sites on Waymarking.com

The church behind you was in the center of Portsmouth's Underground Railroad activity late in the 1850s. Built in 1857 and first called the African Methodist Society, both the building and several members of the congregation mostly free Blacks -- likely sheltered self-liberating enslaved persons and smuggled them aboard ships and boats bound for the North.

Originally located in the Glasgow Street Methodist Church sanctuary and then moving to its current North Street location, the congregants were supportive of Underground Railroad activities. The neighborhoods around the two churches were especially active at night, with escaping persons slipping in and out of buildings, headed for the docks, while white "patrollers" roamed the streets and guarded the vessels.

Jane Pyatt (b. ca. 1849), enslaved in Portsmouth as a child, recalled in 1937 that some escaping persons hid in the cellar of "an old brick building" in the same block in which the church was built. Nearby were located the Elizabeth River ferry, as well as wharves and ships. A writer to the American Beacon (Norfolk) newspaper in April 1854 believed that most of those escaping avoided the docks and large ships, which were well patrolled, and instead slipped aboard "oyster vessels and the like" that plied the "adjacent rivers and coves ... day and night," and which together comprised "the great Underground Railroad." Subsequent church members claimed that small groups concealed themselves in a crawl space behind the organ as well as in the cellar, and used the attic as a lookout post.

Today, Emanuel A.M.E. Church stands as a memorial to the enslaved who passed this way as they freed themselves, and to those who helped them on their way.

Type of site: Church Address: 637 North Street Portsmouth, Virginia United States of America 23704 Phone Number: 757-393-2259 Admission Charged: No Charge Website: [Web Link] Driving Directions: Not listed

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