| Notes |
- GRAVE SANCTUARY
FROM the graves of three slaves in Paxton Presbyterian Church graveyard come many interesting sidelights on local and Pennsylvania history, writes Dr. Hubertis Cummings.
Terming the graveyard a "sanctuary of patriots and pioneers," Doctor Cummings writes of the graves of Lucy and George Lorrett and Dinah, slaves buried there along with the remains of John Harris, II; United States Senator William Maclay and the Rev. John Elder, all famed in Pennsylvania's early life. Doctor Cummings writes:
STORY IN STONES
THEIR stones suggest a very old era in the County, before 1800 and closing in the early Nineteenth Century, when slave-selling and slave-holding became illegal in Pennsylvania, and when slaves, whether of the household or the field, were legally freed in the Commonwealth and when eminent families like the Harrises, the Burds, the Coxes, the Crouches, and the Elders no longer in law owned slaves. But political freedom was to the Lorretts and Dinah one thing, and loyalty to a master was another.
These three: Lucy and George Lorrett, owned by Captain James Crouch of "Walnut Hill," an officer in the American Revolution; and Dinah, owned by Associate Judge James Cowden, one of John Harris' commissioners at the founding of Harrisburg in 1785, would never leave the service of the families in which they had once been owned as chattels.
ALWAYS A SLAVE
Dinah was the beloved Mammy to three generations of children descending from James. Cowden. Lucy and George her son, continued on at "Walnut Hill" in the service of Edward Crouch, son of James Crouch, and himself an associate judge and congressman, and with the latter's daughter Mary, wife of Benjamin Jordan, and mother of Gen. Thomas J. Jordan, of Civil War fame.
The time came when George owned a small tract of land near Walnut Hill, in the country back of Highspire. But George, commonly called King George by old Paxton folk', considered himself still a slave. When Mr. Jordan would call him a free man and a freeholder, the former servant' would argue thus of his freedom and his plot of ground:
> *"Massa, dis I'se got today-tomorrow it may be gone, den I'se can go back to my Massa; but if I'se free you not take me."*
PAXTON MEMBERS
George died just a month before Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862. How he would have received that famous document no one knows.
The two Lorretts and Dinah were, like their one-time owners, faithful Presbyterian communicants of Paxton Church.
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