Heading: (African-American, 1835)
Author: Collins, Isaac ; Joshua Bundick, William Stevens, David Norfleet, William Cole
Title: 1835 Quaker Lease to First African Baptist Church, Philadelphia
Place Published: Philadelphia
Publisher:
Date Published: 1835
Description:

Manuscript Document Signed (most with “X” marks by the Black signators). Philadelphia, March 13, 1835 [in Quaker date format], 2pp.

Lease by Collins to six Trustees of the First African Baptist Church of Philadelphia for one floor of a brick tenement building in “Fries Court” (the second floor being used as a school) for three years, at a rent of $80 per year. They were “not to occupy said premises for any other purpose but for worship or an evening School…” The following year, the annual rent was increased to $100 after the room was “enlarged”, and the lease was then extended for another three years, from March 1838, the final rent payment noted in April 1841.

The oldest African Baptist Church in Pennsylvania – still in existence - was founded in 1809 by a small group of free Blacks (most of them women) who had come to Philadelphia “from the eastern shore of Virginia to escape the cruel treatment of slave masters”. Originally admitted to a white Baptist Church, they chose to form their own church, having a white Virginia pastor for fifteen years, until, in 1832, James Burrows, a Black Virginian, born a slave, but allowed by his master to come to Philadelphia to earn enough money to buy his freedom, became the new minister. Neither Burrows’, nor, of course, the women founders, signed this lease, which had only one Black signator – Bundick – who could write his name, rather than using “X, his mark”.  The document runs contrary to the 1922 official history which suggests that the Church had already left the Fries’ Court address “to build a new church” as early as 1825, Existing historical sources also say nothing about a school at that property.

The Quaker leasor, Isaac Collins, was apparently the son and namesake of the famous Philadelphia and New York printer of both the first New Jersey newspaper and the first family bible in the new American republic. Philadelphia Quakers had a long and close relationship to the city’s growing Black community.

Very good.