Chapel Hill Citizens Association

Chapel Hill Citizens Association

An Historic Community

Chapel Hill is a small rural African-American community which grew up near the intersection of the old roads connecting Fort Washington, Fort Foote and the village of Piscataway. This was loand which before the Civil War had been the large plantations of the Hatton, Edelen, Thorne and Gallahan families, located on tracts known as "Boarman's Content" and "Frankland." The community probably took its name from the ancient private Catholic chapel erected for the Digges family on their Frankland tract; by the end of the 19th century the chapel was gone, but gravestones marking a group of burials can still be seen on its site.

And so it Began

The Chapel Hill community began with the establishment of a Freedmen's Bureau school and a Methodist meetinghouse. By the 1880s several families of free blacks and freedmen began to settle and establish farms on land which they purchased from the families of former plantation owners. Descendants of these forst African-American families still live in the commuinity today.

A School And A Church

A FFreedmen's Bureau School was established here in 1868; following an established pattern, it served also as a place of worship before the construction of a Methodist meetinghouse was constructed probably by 1880 and certainly before 1883, when the two-acre parcel immediately north of the schoolhouse (on which the Methodist meetinghouse had already been constructed) was legally conveyed to the church trustees. By this time, the two buildings, church and school, had become the focal point of what was to become the Chapel Hill community.

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The Gazette

About our association

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