Time to register national importance of Smithtown’s Trinity AME Church
By Corey Phelon Geske, Historian and Scholar, Smithtown, New York. Article reprinted with permission from The Smithtown News, July 4, 2024.
The first Black man to speak in the United States Capitol building had been given sanctuary in Smithtown years earlier, at age 14, to escape from out-of-state slave catchers. He achieved his permanent freedom and earliest education in Smithtown, a short walk from where Trinity African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church would be built on New York Avenue. This nationally significant geographic proximity and why Quakers chose Smithtown as his ‘safe house’ on the Underground Railroad has never been pointed out before. Sadly, as reported in The Smithtown News (June 20), Trinity AME Church is for sale. It faces an uncertain future, perhaps demolition, for another residential lot.
It is time to recognize Trinity’s national significance and secure its place on the National Register of Historic Places without waiting for a National Register Historic District that would generate grant money for downtown Smithtown, as recommended in the plan I submitted to the Town Board and have been emphasizing since 2016.
When he addressed members of Congress on President Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday, Sunday, February 12, 1865, the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882), a confidant of Lincoln, was invited to mark the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ensuring abolition of slavery became national law during the last months of the Civil War. The Centennial of Garnet’s sojourn in Smithtown in 1830-1831 coincides with Isadora Smith’s sale to the congregation for $1 dollar on August 1, 1931, of the land upon which Trinity’s early church was built in 1910.
In the 1970s, Trinity’s congregation, including Ms. Bertha Stevens, the daughter of one of the founders, recalled local histories that after the Civil War, the property where the church would be built was a “meeting place for a group of freed Smithtown slaves” and that the 1910 church built by their descendants, was “an old-fashioned building with brown shingles” (Linda Field, Newsday, March 26, 1979). Trinity was the first church to be built in this historic downtown neighborhood of ecclesiastical buildings where congregations worship at the Byzantine Catholic Church of the Resurrection (and Rectory, National Register, 2019), St. Thomas of Canterbury Episcopal Church, and St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church.
Trinity’s location speaks to long-forgotten proactive abolitionist efforts in nearby Hauppauge, Smithtown Landing, and Commack inspired by leading American abolitionist preachers on this circuit of Methodist church groups, often meeting in homes before their churches were built. The Rev. Freeborn Garrettson preached in the Commack area as early as 1786 and at least once at the Hauppauge Methodist Episcopal Church between 1806 and 1816 (Simeon Wood, History of Hauppauge, 53). Years earlier, Garrettson’s famous sermon delivered in Delaware led to the enslaved Richard Allen (1760-1831) arranging with his enslaver (who also heard the sermon) to work toward buying his freedom. The self-emancipated Allen became the founder and later the first Bishop of the AME Church in America in 1816.
A short journey west of Trinity’s future location, freedman Harry Hosier (c. 1750-1806), known as ‘Black Harry,’ the first Black man to preach to a Methodist congregation (1781), preached “at the invitation of Jacob Brush,” in 1791, to the Commack congregation, originally half of whom were enslaved. Hosier had begun preaching while traveling with Bishop Francis Asbury (1745-1816), who, in 1780, called on Methodist preachers to support abolition following the beliefs of John Wesley (1703-1791), founder of Methodism.
When Trinity AME Church was rebuilt in situ in 1937, history related by the Rev. Leonard M. Davis (pastor from June 1985–May 1991), importantly notes the church was constructed by Black and white members of the community with the bell given by the white community (The Smithtown News, June 20, 2024, 3). This “community spirit” was a 131-year-old Smithtown tradition of different faiths building for others, epitomized when Presbyterian Joshua Smith II (1763-1845) of Hauppauge donated the land and physically helped build the Hauppauge United Methodist Church in 1806. Visiting Methodist preachers were often welcomed at “the Old Judge” Joshua II’s home. He was known to attend services at the Hauppauge Church (Wesley Wheeler,One Hundred Years of Methodism at Hauppauge, 1906).
During Joshua’s term as a New York State Assemblyman, a letter home in 1796, writing to one of his brothers-in-law, a Smithtown Overseer of the Poor (charged with caring for those who couldn’t provide for themselves), complained of delays and the lack of progress on the State’s abolition bill (The Smithtown News, Sept. 19, 1963, p. 5). Three years later, in 1799, Joshua II was a member of the Assembly when it passed New York’s first Gradual Abolition law.
However, “gradual abolition” based on a person’s birth date was not fast enough, so in 1799, the Smiths of Hauppauge developed a program to accelerate manumissions and provide education for formerly enslaved persons while protecting the very young, very old, and the infirm who could not support themselves, thus bringing an end to enslavement as soon as possible. To my knowledge, Smithtown may have been the only town on Long Island to develop such a plan, revealed when noting that town funds of $250 allocated for the Overseers of the Poor were the exact amount paid to free ‘Old Captain,’ and his motherless young children. Converting to Methodism in 1806, Captain was long remembered as “the Praying Black Methodist of Smithtown” because his prayers at services at Commack and at Smithtown Landing, where he lived, could be heard ‘almost a mile away,’ according to ministers’ accounts. Methodists first met at The Landing between 1784 and 1786; the Smithtown Landing Methodist Church was built in 1834.
On the 1820 U.S. Census, Captain and two of his children were free and living in the home the community had built for him near Adam Darling’s new dock at The Landing, where one-eighth of the dock fees were to be paid to the Town, apparently to support the efforts of the Overseers of the Poor, who required increasing amounts each year (Records of the Town of Smithtown, 125, 128, 129 (1796), 133 (1799).
Otherwise, Captain’s children, born before July 4, 1799, were enslaved for life until they might be manumitted when they could support themselves. Two of Captain’s children were placed together in the household of a Commissioner of [Smithtown] Schools, with articles of indentureship until age 21 drawn up for them by Overseers of the Poor, stipulating that young Abraham Captain receive an education. Captain’s case appears to have been intended to set a townwide example to free enslaved persons as soon as possible while ensuring each received an education and skills to be self-sufficient.
The education of Henry Highland Garnet
By 1820, there were no enslaved persons in Hauppauge, nearly a decade before July 4, 1827, the date long-awaited for statewide abolition that was legislated in 1817. Strong abolitionist sentiment in Smithtown led Quakers in Westbury (belonging to the first religious group to support ending slavery) to save the life of future pastor Henry Highland Garnet by sending him to Smithtown. Here, he lived from 1830 to 1831 in the care of (another of Joshua II’s brothers-in-law) Epenetus Smith, II, in whose home, a free Black man of Garnet’s age was included in the 1830 U.S. Census, thereby establishing his residency in the “free state” of New York. Garnet was tutored by Epenetus’s son, lawyer Samuel Arden Smith (1804-1884), the Inspector of Schools, who succeeded his father as Town Clerk in 1831 and later served as Justice of the Peace.
Samuel later acquired (1849) the Arthur House at the northern end of what became New York Avenue, where he established his law offices. Built circa 1752, the Arthur House signified “heaven-born freedom,” a phrase found in Smith family papers. It was formerly the home of Mary Woodhull Arthur, whose father Abraham Woodhull was “Culper, Senior,” President George Washington’s chief spy responsible for intelligence leading to the American victory at Yorktown. That brought a close to the American Revolution and an end to the abusive wartime British occupation of Long Island, resulting in several prominent Smithtown residents, including the Presbyterian minister, being whipped, chained, and imprisoned below decks on “prison ships” at Brooklyn.
Garnet’s Smithtown education offered him a moral North Star to guide his future, much as that asterism was followed by escaping enslaved persons who used the stars to navigate their way north to freedom on what was called an “Underground Railroad” run by guides called “conductors,” and using any manner of conveyance from trains to wagons to walking, from one “station,” or “safe house” to another, and freedom.
New York Avenue education on Smithtown’s Freedom Road
The compass points of Trinity AME Church’s location are highly symbolic. Situated on the northeast corner at the southern end of New York Avenue at Wildwood Lane, the naming of the local road network seemingly embodies Garnet’s story. Coincidentally, this year marks the bicentennial of his family’s first escape to freedom. After their self-emancipation from enslavement in Maryland in 1824, slave catchers located his family residing in New York City five years later. Although Garnet’s parents managed to evade their pursuers, his sister was captured but freed by the courts when she proved residency in the “free state” of New York. This gives a possible reason for the subsequent naming of the street between the law offices of Sameul Arden Smith, Garnet’s mentor to the north, and the woods to the south, where the freed enslaved Black community had met for years: New York Avenue.
Given that context, it is appropriate that Trinity Church is backed by Princeton Avenue, one of many neighborhood roads named for colleges and universities. Princeton Avenue was built in 1924, years before the nearby New York Avenue School, which is now marking its centennial year at the heart of Smithtown’s modern educational system.
In remembrance of times past
That Henry Highland Garnet valued his time in Smithtown is evident by his choice of words to describe slavery as a crime that “embittered the sweet waters of life.” He’d tasted that life of freedom in Smithtown and Hauppauge, the place name for ‘sweet waters’ in the Algonquin language. Garnet used the phrase in his U.S. Capitol address. He also used it in his first major speech in 1843 at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, when he gained the attention of the self-emancipated social reformer, activist, writer, and statesman Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), seen as the preeminent leader of the civil rights movement in the nineteenth-century, and William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), the abolitionist Liberator newspaper editor.
According to Samuel Arden Smith, Garnet would preach for three years in Europe, traveling to England, Scotland, France, and Germany, “speaking to them in their languages” (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 7, 1911, p. 5), before the United Presbyteries of Scotland sent him during the 1850s as a missionary to Jamaica where enslavement had been abolished.
Samuel Arden Smith and the Rev. Garnet continued corresponding. In 1879, half a century after leaving Smithtown, Pastor Garnet of New York City’s Shiloh Presbyterian Church invited his old tutor Smith to attend a service in his church wherein he delivered a sermon, saying, “There is a gentleman here with us from whom I have received great kindness, and if I have ever been useful to you or the world, it was greatly owing to him; and I desire those of my friends who feel so disposed to come up to this stand and be introduced to him” (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 7, 1911, p. 5).
One Black man who then lived near Garnet’s New York City church and appears to have met Smith was U.S. Navy veteran Alfred Griffin (c. 1828-1897). Enslaved on a plantation when the Civil War began, Griffin self-emancipated off Mobile, Alabama, on July 5, 1861, and enlisted in the Union Navy, taking part in one of the War’s most internationally known naval victories. After the War, he became a self-employed master brick mason in Brooklyn.
At about the time President James A. Garfield appointed Garnet to serve as U.S. Minister and Counsel General (ambassador) to Liberia in 1881, Alfred Griffin moved his family to Smithtown, where he was a member of the fraternal organization of Free and Accepted Masons. He was “highly respected . . . in the community” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 13, 1897, p. 5). Like the building of Trinity A.M.E. Church by the children of the enslaved near Samuel Arden Smith’s Arthur House offices on New York Avenue, Alfred Griffin built his brick home on the road from Hauppauge near the home of Samuel Arden Smith, who lived just south of Main across from the original location of his father Epenetus Smith II’s old tavern, where the future Rev. Garnet was given sanctuary.
Garnet’s legacy in town appears to have been remembered when Trinity AME Church was first built in 1910 because months later in 1911, Garnet’s Smithtown story was published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (May 7, 1911, p. 5) recounting his years of sanctuary in the old Epenetus Smith Tavern, leading to one of Smithtown’s earliest preservation efforts by Mary Miller (mother of the future Captain James Ely Miller), who saved from demolition the old vacant home in which Garnet had lived in Smithtown. It would be saved and moved three times, the first two locations on the Hauppauge Road. Today, it is farther east on Main Street on the grounds of the Smithtown Historical Society.
Fast forward to today
According to the 1880 U.S. Census, Alfred Griffin‘s wife, Mary Dixon Griffin’s father, was born in the West Indies, perhaps Haiti. This would be appropriate for the Haitian Independent Methodist Church, led by Pastor Onick Bouquet, which has been renting Trinity AME Church for the past six years.
Alfred’s story and that of his son George Griffin, who became a carpenter, exemplify the stories of the children of the enslaved who built Trinity AME Church. Born and raised in Smithtown, George moved to Bay Shore, where his wife Minnie was a founder of today’s First Baptist Church (dedicated 1921), which he helped build.
Alfred Griffin’s funeral was held at the 1845 Smithtown Branch Methodist Episcopal Church (demolished in 1962), and he was buried in the Cemetery adjacent to the Hauppauge United Methodist Church (National Register, 2020). Thankfully, Methodist church oral history remembered his last name and cemetery trustees asked me to find his identity. Alfred Griffin’s new headstone was inscribed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs with his full name and service record and dedicated at a ceremony conducted by the Church and the Society of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) to mark Juneteenth 2023.
Looking past the changes in Smithtown’s streetscape and reconstructing the sense of place for why Trinity AME Church was built where it stands today tells a story deserving of national recognition. It’s the story of freedom in America. It’s Garnet’s story. It is Alfred Griffin’s story. And, it is our story that must honor the previously unrecognized linkages to Henry Highland Garnet and Smithtown’s long-overlooked past that calls for recognition on the National Register of Historic Places and the continued preservation and use of Trinity AME Church as a sacred place of religious observance.
Illustrations:
Trinity AME Church, New York Avenue at Wildwood Lane, Smithtown, New York, was proposed for a National Register Historic District in 2017. Photo by Corey Geske.
To whom it may concern,
The Smithtown News gives permission for the article “Time to register the national importance of Smithtown’s AME Church,” by Corey Phelon Geske, published July 4, 2024, to be reprinted in The Christian Recorder.
David Ambro
The Smithtown News
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