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Founding population

African Americans in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania

A small community, disproportionately significant — anchored by Nicholas Biddle, Bethel A.M.E. Church, and Charles H. King Jr. Every claim is sourced; tradition is flagged; common errors are corrected. Markers: ★ verified · ✔ confirmed · ✎ corrects a common error · ⚑ open/caution.

Overview

African Americans were never numerous in Schuylkill County — they hovered around one percent of the population and, crucially, were almost never coal miners in a county defined by coal. Yet the community’s history is disproportionately significant, carrying one of the most-cited episodes of the entire Civil War and producing a nationally known civil-rights figure. Three pillars structure the story: Nicholas Biddle, by tradition the first man to shed blood for the Union; Bethel A.M.E. Church in Pottsville, the continuous communal institution from the 1840s to today; and Charles H. King Jr., the Pottsville-born civil-rights leader. The community was church-centered, employment-constrained, and — because it was so small — woven into integrated schools and neighborhoods rather than a separate institutional world.

The leading modern authority on the subject is public historian Jake Wynn (Wynning History), often working with National Park Service ranger John D. Hoptak, whose 2008 article is the foundational research on Biddle.

Sources: Wynn — Black History in PA’s Coal Region; Hoptak — “Nicholas Biddle: The Civil War’s First Blood” (HistoryNet).

The numbers

The county’s Black population, by decade (PHMC / PA SHPO and the U.S. Census):

YearBlack population
1860357
1870384
1900252
1930583 (Black); 613 BIPOC total — the all-time peak

The 1930 peak coincided with the county’s overall population peak (235,505); the dip to 252 in 1900 and the rebound toward 583 by 1930 reflect a modest Great Migration-era influx (the King and Benn families arrived in this window). In Pottsville specifically, the Pottsville Republican counted about 1,100 African Americans in 1940 — the community’s center of gravity throughout. ★ ⚑ (A childhood recollection of “fewer than 300 blacks” in 1930s Pottsville conflicts with that contemporaneous newspaper count; prefer the newspaper figure.)

Sources: PA SHPO — Schuylkill County Census Sheet (PDF); U.S. Census 1930, Pennsylvania volume (PDF); Wynn — Benn editorial, 1940.

Nicholas Biddle (c. 1796 – August 2, 1876)

Born into slavery in Delaware about 1796, Nicholas Biddle escaped and eventually reached Pottsville. The documentary record of his early life is thin; even his name is a matter of two traditions — that he had been a servant in the Philadelphia household of the financier Nicholas Biddle (president of the Second Bank of the United States) and took the name, or that he was already a servant at the Mountain House hotel when the financier dined there in 1840 and “something of [him] rubbed off.” By 1840 he lived on Minersville Street in Pottsville and had attached himself to the town’s militia — serving as orderly to Captain James Wren of the Washington Artillery, whose members “considered him one of their own and issued him a uniform.” ★

When Lincoln called for troops after Fort Sumter, Pottsville’s two companies joined the five Pennsylvania units — the “First Defenders” — that were first to reach Washington. They were sworn into U.S. service at Harrisburg on April 18, 1861, “all of them except Nicholas Biddle,” who as a Black man was legally barred from mustering into the Army (Black enlistment was not permitted until 1863). ✔ He marched anyway, in uniform.

The Baltimore incident — April 18, 1861. Crossing Baltimore on foot between rail stations, the Pennsylvanians were attacked by a secessionist mob of roughly two thousand. The sight of a Black man in uniform, treated as an equal, enraged the crowd; a hurled brick struck Biddle in the head, knocking him down and opening a wound said to have exposed bone. ★

✎ A correction worth keeping straight: the president who took notice of Biddle the next day, April 19, 1861, was Abraham Lincoln, not Buchanan (who had left office in March). Lincoln, visiting the militiamen billeted in the Capitol, was caught by the sight of Biddle with his blood-soaked bandages; Biddle declined Lincoln’s advice to seek medical care, preferring to stay with his company. ★ Any “Buchanan met Biddle” claim is an error.

✎ “First blood” — tradition, not settled fact. Hoptak frames it carefully: “Many of the Pennsylvanians present that day believed Biddle was the first man to be struck down by an enemy combatant in the Civil War.” The first U.S. military death was Private Daniel Hough, killed at Fort Sumter on April 14, four days earlier. The right language is “widely credited” or “by tradition the first to shed blood” — first blood by mob violence in transit, not the first death. ⚑

Poverty and death. Because he had never legally mustered in, Biddle was denied a federal pension despite his wound — institutional discrimination with lifelong consequences. He did odd jobs until rheumatism disabled him, and the Miners’ Journal appealed to the public on his behalf. He died in his Pottsville home on August 2, 1876, with “not a penny to his name.” Surviving First Defenders paid for his funeral and, at a dollar apiece, a tombstone proclaiming “the proud distinction of shedding the first blood in the late war for the Union.” A procession led him up Minersville Street to the colored burying ground beside Bethel A.M.E. Church. ★ ⚑ (The original tombstone has since been destroyed by vandals.)

Commemoration. The famous carte-de-visite of “‘Nick Biddle’ of Pottsville… the first man wounded,” by Pottsville photographer W. R. Mortimer, survives at the Library of Congress. On the 90th anniversary, April 18, 1951, Pottsville citizens dedicated a bronze plaque on the Civil War Soldiers’ Monument (West Market Street) “In Memory of the First Defenders and Nicholas Biddle… First Man To Shed Blood In The Civil War.” “First Defenders Day” was once one of Pottsville’s major holidays; the tradition faded after the Civil War centennial, though Wynn and Hoptak revived public commemoration on the 160th anniversary in 2021. ★ ⚑ (A “commemorative cap/medal” sometimes attributed to Biddle is not corroborated in the authoritative sources — only the militia uniform and the Mortimer photograph are documented.)

Sources: Hoptak — HistoryNet; Wynn — Nicholas Biddle; HMDB — First Defenders & Nicholas Biddle monument; Library of Congress — Biddle carte-de-visite; Irish Central — Daniel Hough, first death.

Bethel A.M.E. Church: the community’s anchor

The continuous thread of the county’s Black history is Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Pottsville. It existed by 1876 — Biddle was buried in its adjoining “colored burying ground” — making it the oldest documented Black institution in the county. ⚑ Tradition places its founding in the 1840s (a secondary source implies ~1844, fitting Biddle-era Pottsville), but this is not primary-sourced. Online research could not document a founding date; it can only be settled by the church itself, the Historical Society of Schuylkill County, or the AME Philadelphia Annual Conference minutes. ✎ (Do not confuse it with the “Bethel A.M.E., founded 1808 / chartered 1818” historical marker — that is the Pittsburgh congregation, not Pottsville.)

Its locations trace the community: the original burying ground near Minersville Street (1876); the church at Laurel and 9th Streets by 1940; and today an active congregation at 816 Laurel Boulevard. Documented clergy include Rev. James Solomon Benn Jr. (a South Carolina-born, second-generation AME minister who led Bethel around 1940–41) and Rev. Charles H. King Sr. The church functioned as the community’s principal communal and benevolent institution — and, tellingly, no separate Black fraternal lodge or segregated Black school is documented in the county. The Black population was simply too small to sustain a denser institutional network; children like Charles King Jr. attended integrated Pottsville public schools. That absence is itself characteristic of the community’s scale. ★

Sources: Wynn — Benn editorial; Wynn — A Black childhood in 1930s Pottsville; House Divided (Dickinson College) — Bethel AME Cemetery.

Black Civil War service

Beyond Biddle, the county sent Black men into the United States Colored Troops once enlistment opened. The clearest case is Private John C. Cole, a Black shoemaker from Pottsville of fifteen-plus years’ residence, who enlisted in the 43rd U.S. Colored Infantry in March 1864. He was wounded at the Battle of the Crater (Petersburg, July 30, 1864) — a battle launched by the 48th Pennsylvania, his fellow Schuylkill County men — survived the field (where many wounded Black soldiers were murdered by Confederates), and died of his wounds on August 4, 1864, leaving a wife and five children. His Miners’ Journal obituary, “Death of a Patriotic Colored Man,” called him a respected workman who enlisted “in defense of the great principle of human freedom.” He lies in City Point National Cemetery, Virginia. ★

Sources: Wynn — John Cole, USCT, Battle of the Crater; Hoptak — “A Good Man Gone: Private John C. Cole”.

A revealing piece of white allyship sits beside this service: the Pottsville Freedmen’s Relief Association, organized in December 1866 as a branch of the Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief Association, sent two Pottsville public-school teachers — Fannie A. Couch and Hannah M. Streeper — south in 1867 to open a “Pottsville School” for freedpeople in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. ★ (This was a white community’s relief effort for Southern freedpeople, not a local Black institution — an important distinction.) The era’s ambivalence is captured in an 1865 Miners’ Journal letter arguing Black men had “earned citizenship on the battlefield” while denying it “places the negro upon an equality with the white man” — and in the county congressman Myer Strouse’s vote against the 13th Amendment.

Sources: Wynn — Pottsville Freedmen’s Relief Association; Wynn — Black voting rights, 1865.

Lived experience: work, place, and exclusion

Black residents clustered in Pottsville, around Minersville Street and later the Laurel/9th Street neighborhood near Bethel A.M.E. Their documented occupations were servants, shoemakers, laborers, teamsters, and ministers — essentially never miners. ✔ The lone well-documented case of Black anthracite miners, the Tarr brothers (one killed, one injured “robbing pillars” at the Burnside Colliery in 1922), is just over the county line in Northumberland County (Shamokin) — and is cited precisely because it was so rare.

Discrimination was concrete. Biddle’s race barred him from mustering in and thus from a pension. In 1940, Rev. J. S. Benn documented that Pottsville employers refused to hire Black workers — some 240 Black adults were seeking work — and campaigned through Pottsville Republican editorials (“Is the Negro an Entity or Nonentity?”) until the paper’s editorial board endorsed the cause. ★ Yet the small numbers also produced a comparatively integrated everyday life: Charles King Jr. recalled enduring his Pottsville childhood “without any notable traumas induced by my blackness,” feeling sheltered from Southern Jim Crow until the segregated wartime Navy radicalized him — though he also remembered a white shop teacher kicking at him, and his father’s furious response. ★

Sources: Wynn — Benn editorial; Wynn — A Black childhood in Pottsville; Wynn — Donald Tarr, Black miners.

Charles H. King Jr. (1925–1991): the county’s national civil-rights figure

Among the 20th-century figures from the county’s Black community was Charles H. King Jr., born in Pottsville in 1925. His father had fled Louisiana under an assumed name after a near-lynching — a Great Migration refugee who became a Pottsville minister. King Jr. grew up in integrated Pottsville schools, graduated Pottsville High, and served in the segregated U.S. Navy in World War II (confined to kitchen duty), an experience that radicalized him. He became a nationally known civil-rights leader and conductor of racial-attitudes seminars, and author of the 1983 memoir Fire in My Bones; his death in 1991 drew a New York Times obituary. ★

Sources: Wynn — “Fire in My Bones”; New York Times — Charles H. King obituary (1991).

A note on the Underground Railroad

✔ There is no documented Underground Railroad station, conductor, or route in Schuylkill County. The frequently-cited “Schuylkill Township” UGRR site — Elijah Pennypacker’s White Horse Farm — is in Chester County, not Schuylkill County; Wynn’s coal-region UGRR research centers on Lackawanna County, not here. This negative should be stated plainly to forestall a common confusion. ⚑ (A truly definitive negative would still warrant a check of the NPS “Network to Freedom” database and the county historical society.)

Legacy

A community of a few hundred produced an outsized historical footprint: a Civil War symbol commemorated in bronze on Pottsville’s main monument, a USCT soldier who died at the Crater, a freedmen’s-relief effort that reached Tennessee, and a national civil-rights voice. Its enduring institution, Bethel A.M.E. Church at 816 Laurel Boulevard, still links the Biddle-era 1840s to the present. Jake Wynn’s ongoing public history keeps the story visible — including the honest, harder parts: the pension denied, the hiring refused, and the “first blood” rightly told as tradition.

Open questions

  • The founding date of Bethel A.M.E. Church (verify the ~1840s tradition with the church / Historical Society of Schuylkill County).
  • A fuller roster of county USCT enlistees beyond John Cole (e.g., the unverified “Martin Snowell/Snowden” lead).
  • Whether any Biddle artifact (the rumored cap/medal) exists in a local collection.
  • The 20th-century community in detail — businesses, families, and the civil-rights era locally — via newspapers.com and oral history.

Sources

Frequently asked

Were African Americans coal miners in Schuylkill County?
Almost never. The community hovered around one percent of the population and its documented occupations were servants, shoemakers, laborers, teamsters, and ministers. The lone well-documented case of Black anthracite miners, the Tarr brothers, was just over the line in Northumberland County (Shamokin), cited precisely because it was so rare.
Who was Nicholas Biddle?
Born into slavery in Delaware about 1796, he escaped and reached Pottsville, where he served as orderly to Captain James Wren's militia. Marching with the Pennsylvania 'First Defenders,' he was struck by a brick from a secessionist mob in Baltimore on April 18, 1861 — by tradition the first man to shed blood for the Union, though the first U.S. military death was Daniel Hough at Fort Sumter four days earlier.
Was there an Underground Railroad station in Schuylkill County?
There is no documented Underground Railroad station, conductor, or route in Schuylkill County. The frequently-cited 'Schuylkill Township' UGRR site — Elijah Pennypacker's White Horse Farm — is in Chester County, not Schuylkill County.

Towns: Pottsville

People: Nicholas Biddle (c. 1796–1876), John C. Cole (died 1864), Charles H. King Jr. (1925–1991)

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