James Teboet learned the skill to be a barber and practiced his trade in the Shaper Block just down the street to the east of his home. John Cromwell, residing in the same house, learned to play the violin while enslaved in Schoharie County. His orchestra was well-known playing at many halls and events throughout the Mohawk Valley.
Susan B. Anthony first stayed at the home of her cousin Eleanor (Read) and George Caldwell during her tenure teaching at the Canajoharie Academy. As a conservative Democrat, George Caldwell introduced Anthony to local and statewide political debates, helping Anthony to define her own commitment to abolitionism.
George Gilbert was a prominent member of Canajoharie's Black community. He worked as a teamster and served as a trustee for the A.M.E. Zion Church during its incorporation and its dissolution. He was also a member of the St. Mark's Lutheran Church.
Bromley Hoke and Elizabeth Phillips Hoke represent the integral part that African Americans, descendants of grandparents who had been locally enslaved, played in the economic and social development of the Mohawk Valley, as well as the close ties of family and neighborhood that sustained African American families as they moved from slavery into freedom. They rented the house at 45 Mohawk Street and lived there when Bromley died in 1913. Lizzie survived him until 1945. Both are buried in the Canajoharie Falls Cemetery.
As a teacher and later President of the Canajoharie National Bank, Smith was one of those Canajoharie residents who, in 1850, signed and sent a petition to Congress denouncing slavery and forbade further admittance of any slave state to the Union. By 1868, Smith and his family were living on at the east end of Front Street.
Organized in 1828 in Palatine Bridge, the United Methodist Church was built on this site in 1841. A new structure was erected after the 1915 fire destroyed the original. Antislavery lectures held here including one by former slave Henry Walton Bibb. Many Black families had their children baptized here.
Like many churches in Montgomery County, European Americans dominated this congregation, but many African Americans were also members. Philip Phillips and his wife Eunice (Van Horne) Phillips were both members of this church. Philip Phillips also served as sexton.
Erected 1876 by Eliza Ehle replacing an earlier home that had burned. This building housed various businesses including Peter Skinner's barbershop and his wife Eliza Skinner's ice cream parlor.
As the headmistress of the female department, Susan B. Anthony taught from 1846-1849 in the building that stood in this spot. One cousin called her "the smartest woman in Canajoharie." Here she began her public career as a reformer, when she gave her first lecture on temperance on March 2, 1849. She resigned in 1849 to move to Rochester, where she lived with her parents and began her career in abolitionism and women's rights. The current structure was designed by Archimedes Russell and built in 1892.
As the generation of African Americans who were once enslaved, Philip and Eunice (Van Horne) Phillips represent the modest success that steady work and home ownership provided to people who spanned the experience of both slavery and freedom in the Mohawk Valley in the mid-nineteenth century.
Built sometime after 1868, this house was the home of Walter and Frances Denning, African Americans, by 1905. Walter Denning was a Civil War veteran who became a prominent mason and brick worker in Canajoharie, who most likely used limestone quarried near this house. Denning's father actively shepherded Freedom Seekers from his home near Elmira. Frances Skinner Denning grew up with her parents in a house just east on Cliff Street.
Both born into slavery, Henry and Mary (Garlock) Miller were emancipated with the 1827 New York State law. They lived on this site where they raised a large family.
Peter and Eliza Skinner represent the successful integration of many African American, born of enslaved parents, into the community life of these Mohawk Valley villages. Both Peter and Eliza became property owners and successful business people in Canajoharie.
Five men representing African Americans who had been meeting for some time in a local church, assembled to incorporate the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church at Canajoharie in 1857. They purchased a plot of land here on Cliff Street, just east of the home of Peter and Eliza Skinner. It is not likely that the congregation was able to actually build a church at this location s the trustees of the church sold the property on Cliff Street to Peter Skinner in 1874. The AME denomination is synonymous with notable abolitionists Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Rev. Jermaine Loguen. Rev. Richard Eastup, a freedom seeker himself, was appointed to oversee the Canajoharie mission church in 1862.
This Tour is a Walking Tour.
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Welcome to the Abolitionists and African Americans in Canajoharie, NY walking tour. This tour was developed by the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives. This walking tour features sites and information that tell the story of Canajoharie's role in the struggle for freedom.
