New museum will showcase Gettysburg’s rich Black History

A week before she died in 1980, Verlyn Mason’s grandmother, who was originally from Gettysburg, sat down at the kitchen table, tore a piece of paper off a five-pound bag of sugar, and wrote down a list of family names. That list would put Mason on a journey into her own past.

“She had never written down anything about her family,” said Mason of her grandmother, Ellen. “It was always verbal. She told us stories about how her mother had 12 children. And how she and her siblings all went to the colored school there in Gettysburg. They were all good writers and good spellers, she always said. She had a sense of pride of who she was and where she came from.”

After years of research, including visits to Gettysburg, Mason, who grew up in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Severn, Md., discovered that her great-aunt Margaret, her great-grandmother’s sister, had married a man named Edward Hopkins. This was further confirmed when “I found a will where a man named Harrigan, which was my great-aunt’s maiden name, had left in his will $25 for Margaret and Edward,” said Mason.

And on a sunny day this past October, Mason’s journey took her to a gathering at the front of a house at 219 S. Washington St. where Edward and his parents, John, known as Jack, and Julia, once lived. The event she was attending was the launching of a capital campaign to establish a new Black history museum in Gettysburg at what had been the Hopkins home.

“My grandmother would have been thrilled to see what’s happening,” said Mason.

Gettysburg Black history, long pushed aside, is revealing itself in a powerful way. And those like Mason are there to witness it. The new museum, slated to open in 2027, will tell the stories of the Black community, said Andrew Dalton, president and CEO of Gettysburg History. Gettysburg History is working with the Lincoln Cemetery Project Association to create the museum.

“There’s more to the story of Gettysburg that has yet been told,” said Dalton. “We’re shining a light on a community that hasn’t always been front and center in terms of the way that history is presented in Gettysburg.”

Jean Green, president of the Lincoln Cemetery Project Association, added “Our history has almost been obliterated. So, saving this home and being able to tell the whole story through this Black -built home is just incredible,” she said.

The 1840s log home will be restored to its original state. “We were excited to learn that it remained intact,” said Dalton of the house structure buried beneath years and layers of additional construction.

The museum, with its emphasis on an immersive, multi-media experience, will also include a visitor space for exhibits and a shared office space for two nonprofits working to preserve Black history in Gettysburg.

The S. Washington St. home was purchased by Jack and Julia in 1857 from then-owner, Abraham Brian, believed to have been a conductor for the Underground Railroad. Jack was a long-time respected janitor at Gettysburg College. And his son Edward, the husband of Mason’s great-aunt Margaret, served during the Civil War in the United States Colored Troops and became Gettysburg’s first Black elected official.

Despite its rich history, though, over the years, the home had gone into disrepair. “It was a hoarding situation,” said Dalton. “All the utilities had been turned off and there was flooding in the basement. And mold, asbestos, bedbugs.”

However, the home’s historical significance made it too important not to rescue and preserve. “We believe it’s the only standing structure in Gettysburg from the Civil War era that was built by Black laborers and owned by a Black family,” said Dalton.

Gettysburg History and the Lincoln Cemetery Project Association are working to raise $2 million to transform the house and construct the museum. Half of that money had already been raised prior to the official launch of the campaign. “This has been the easiest money I have ever raised,” said Dalton, who spearheaded and oversees the new Beyond the Battle Museum in Gettysburg.

Green said she thinks she understands why the museum has been so eagerly embraced.

“The Hopkins family represents the strength and determination of Gettysburg’s Black community,” she said. “But this museum is about more than one family, or even one community. It is about all of us. Because Black history is American history. When we honor one another’s stories, we can find strength in what we share.”

Long an advocate for local Black history, Green has focused many of her efforts on Lincoln Cemetery, the only surviving Black cemetery in Gettysburg, and its care and preservation. The cemetery, which was recently placed on the National Register of Historic Places, has more than 450 individuals buried there. “Veterans from every war, slaves and freedom seekers,” said Green.

So, it is not surprising that when the original logs of the Hopkins House were revealed Green felt a powerful connection to those who had lived there long ago. “I had to touch it,” she said of reaching out to an exposed log on a recent visit. “I put my hands on it. And I whispered, ‘I am here.’ I wanted to communicate to the Hopkins family that we are doing something to preserve our history. That Blacks that lived here were not here in vain. And they will not be forgotten.”

Green will be making contributions of her own to the museum through her historical research. Recently, she solved a mystery in the Gettysburg Black community. According to Dalton, there are only two firsthand battle accounts by Gettysburg Black residents. These accounts appear in the book Battleground Adventures published in 1915. One person was described as a “colored farmhand,” while the other was described as a “colored servantmaid.” The farmhand would be eventually identified as Isaac Carter, a Virigina slave who came to Gettysburg seeking his freedom. The “colored servantmaid,” however remained a mystery.

That is until recently when Green was researching local newspapers and uncovered an article that named the woman. She was Charlotte Carter, Isaac’s wife. The discovery, she says, was made even sweeter by her own family ties to the couple. “My grandfather’s sister married their son,” she says.

Charlotte Carter’s name and her story will now be part of the museum, including her recollections of the battle, such as, “We got down in the cellar, and I crawled way back in the darkest corner and piled everything in front of me. I was the only colored person there, and I didn’t know what might happen to me.”

Charlotte Carter isn’t the only one making herself known. During renovation, the letters W.D. were found inscribed on the outside wall of the Hopkins House, dating to around 1843. According to Dalton, it is believed that the first owner and perhaps the builder of the home was a free Black man named William K. Dennard. “It was an exciting find,” said Dalton. And one hidden no longer.

But there would be more discoveries. Among the items found by archaeology student James Duke, as he excavated, was a buried chipped teacup. A small item with much to say about the Hopkins family.

“We traced the cup back to the 1830 to 1860 era,” said Duke, a graduate of Gettysburg College who is now attending graduate school at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “It’s a pattern called Lucerne. It is a symbol of middle-class identity. It shows status. It is something they would have used when they were entertaining people in the home, having a tea party or having guests over for tea.”

Besides the teacup, oyster shells were also found. “Oysters were a social food,” said Duke.  

Furthermore, according to Duke, Edward owned an oyster parlor, giving him easy access to this sociable treat.

These finds, said Duke, are a testament to a family who was doing well for themselves and enjoyed gathering with friends and family. The teacup and what it said about the family will find its place in the museum.

But before the work on the current museum began and items collected, there was a handmade kitchen table built in 1863 and still in use today where the dream of such a museum first took shape. Sitting around that table with her daughters, Jane and Mary Alice, Margaret Nutter would talk about how proud she was of her community and its history.

“She would always say there’s a lot of Black history here in Gettysburg. Important Black history,” said Jane Nutter.  “She would tell us, ‘You need to do something about it. Get on it.’”

The two sisters would take that advice to heart. Mary Alice, especially, worked for years to create a Black history museum for the Gettysburg community. A one-room museum was finally established several years ago in the United Lutheran Semienary’s Valentine Hall with photos, mementos and even personal diaries. Those items will now become a part of the new museum. Nutter said she has no qualms about doing so and is in fact delighted with the project. “We knew this would be a place that would be permanent and forever,” she says.

And as she stood at the podium on that October day when the campaign was launched, Nutter was not alone, she said. “I feel the ancestors here with me,” she told the packed audience. “They all lived up and down this street. And they are here.”

Mary Alice passed away before the new museum’s announcement. Nutter felt her there too. “This was Mary Alice’s dream to have a Black history museum in the Third Ward,” said Nutter. “But I know she is standing right here with me and smiling. This is a culmination of a dream.”

Nutter would not be the only one to speak of the importance of preserving Black history in Gettysburg that day. Actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith was there to lend her support to the museum. “I grew up coming to Gettysburg as a child and seeing my Aunt Hannah Biggs whose house is not far from here,” Smith told the crowd gathered before the Hopkins House.

However, she added that it wasn’t until 2014 when she was on the television series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard historian, that she leaned about her great-great-grandfather, Basil Biggs. A local veterinarian and participant in the Underground Railroad, Biggs helped oversee the disinterment and removal of dead soldiers from their battlefield graves and their reburial in the new Gettysburg National Cemetery.

“I never had heard that story,” said Smith. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Smith is currently working on a play about her family member Basil Biggs. “Let’s embrace our history,” she told the audience.

As Mason listened to those like Jane Nutter and Anna Deavere Smith speak, she was surrounded by her own family, including her great-granddaughter, Luca, who was three months old at the time. New generations bearing witness to the Black history of Gettysburg.

“We took a picture of my great-granddaughter in front of the Hopkins House that day,” said Mason, smiling. “That way when she grows up, she will know that she was there. And that’s how you do it. You record your history.”