Tag Archives: Jacob Compton

At a Crossroads: New monument to commemorate Harrisburg history, struggle for voting rights

Lenwood Sloan, with members of the Harrisburg Past Players, spoke on Tuesday at the unveiling of the pedestal portion of the monument, “A Gathering at the Crossroads.”

If you were passing through Strawberry Square late Tuesday afternoon, you may have been surprised to see the following: several gentlemen in top hats and tails, a big red ribbon and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman.

If you had stuck around, you would have learned what connected these very different things.

A crowd had assembled to watch the unveiling of the first portion of a monument that, around this time next year, is slated to be dedicated at N. 4th and Walnut streets in Harrisburg, on the lawn of the Capitol’s Irvis Office Building.

The monument, called “A Gathering at the Crossroads,” commemorates the Old 8th Ward, the densely populated warren of streets and alleys demolished a century ago to vastly enlarge the Capitol Complex. The expansion of Forster Street some 40 years later destroyed the final part of the working-class area, a largely African-American neighborhood that also housed much of the city’s immigrant and Jewish populations.

“The more you hear, the sadder you become,” Fetterman said during his remarks, referring to the destruction of hundreds of buildings and the displacement of thousands of people. “But all you can do is celebrate and promote the efforts to remember.”

Indeed, yesterday’s two-hour ceremony was a celebration, led by local arts activist Lenwood Sloan, who is spearheading the project. It featured speeches, songs and dramatizations by the Harrisburg Past Players, a group that represents figures from local history.

Sloan said that the monument has a dual purpose. While it honors the Old 8th, it also is designed as a tribute to voting rights—specifically, the U.S. Constitution’s 15th and19th amendments, which secured the vote for African Americans and for women, respectively.

Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment and the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, making the monument a timely endeavor.

“This project is about vigilance, about being vigilant about the blood, sweat and tears it took to advance these things,” Sloan said.

The monument’s Orator’s Pedestal in Strawberry Square, where it will be displayed through the summer.

The statue depicts four figures with strong Harrisburg ties meeting in the Old 8th Ward, conversing and sharing a text of the 15th Amendment. They’re gathered around the “Orator’s Pedestal,” the completed part of the bronze-cast monument unveiled on Tuesday. The pedestal features images from the Old 8th around its four sides, along with a high relief map of a section of the ward at the top (close-up below).

Sloan and his team still must raise about two-thirds of the $360,000 needed for the project, he said.

“The next step is the casting in clay and the molding of the four figures,” he said.

Those life-sized figures are civil rights activist William Howard Day, Harrisburg native, journalist and lawyer Thomas Morris Chester, musician and restaurateur Jacob T. Compton and abolitionist and suffragist Francis Ellen Walker Harper. The third piece of the monument, besides the pedestal and the figures, is the circular landing, meant to mimic cobblestone, on which the figures will stand.

“We’re thrilled to be a part of this,” said Becky Ault, president of Lancaster-based Art Research Enterprises, which is sculpting the monument. “This is so much more than just art. It’s history, it’s social studies, it’s everything.”

Sloan said that much work lies ahead before the planned June 2020 monument unveiling, coinciding with the anniversaries of the 15th and 19th amendments. A large sum of money still must be raised to complete the project. Afterwards, the state legislature must vote to accept the gift.

In the meantime, visitors can drop by Strawberry Square to see the pedestal, which will be on display, along with an explanation of the project, until Labor Day.

“This will not just be a place for pigeons,” Sloan said of the completed monument. “It is about that junction in time through which we make the awareness of the vote.”

To read more about the project, read our March story, Pieces of the Puzzle, and watch our Burg in Focus video, featuring interviews with Lenwood Sloan.

Click here to contribute to the monument project.

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Pieces of the Puzzle: A century ago, Harrisburg’s Old 8th Ward was wiped off the map. A group of activists wants to remind us what was lost.

Burg in Focus: Harrisburg’s 8th Ward from GK Visual on Vimeo.

The stories lurk in half-forgotten memories. The images hide in boxes stashed in attics.

Harrisburg’s Old 8th Ward, a dense, crowded neighborhood squeezed between the Pennsylvania Capitol and the railroad tracks, is long gone. But through a diverse group of activists, genealogists, scholars, actors and techies, the voices and faces of a vibrant community are emerging to illuminate a crossroads of history.

Throughout 2019, they are mounting a multi-faceted history project with a reflection and re-examination of the Old 8th at its core.

 

Lose Track

“The Bloody 8th” inhabits our imaginations as home to speakeasies, brothels and tenements along narrow streets “into which little of God’s free air or sunlight can enter,” in the words of newspaper chronicler Howard J. Wert in 1912.

But the 8th was also home to a melting pot of residents—a gateway to the city for African Americans, Russians, Greeks and others. They ran tanneries and laundries, attended churches and synagogues, raised families, and harbored refugees along the Underground Railroad.

Still, by Wert’s time, City Beautiful proponents couldn’t abide the huddled masses teeming outside the back door of Pennsylvania’s new Beaux Arts Capitol. They envisioned a park. So, by the 1920s, most of the 8th Ward was gone, and its residents scattered.

Today, when arts activist Lenwood Sloan looks at the Capitol’s East Wing and Soldier’s Grove, he hears echoes of the past. The problem, he said, is finding tangible reminders. Other than the K. Leroy Irvis Building, named after the first African American speaker of the Pennsylvania House, no monuments recognize the contributions of African Americans to the city or nation.

That absence seems especially poignant now that it’s 2019, the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, which granted voting rights to men regardless of race, and the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which finally gave women the vote. Local historian Calobe Jackson, Jr., learned that news of the 15th Amendment’s passage sent 8th Ward residents into the streets to celebrate.

“We lose track when we lose physical monuments or places of engagement,” Sloan said. “We lose track of ourselves and especially each other, and we lose track of how hard communities work to achieve the right to vote and then to sustain that right and protect that right.”

Through the project, a jigsaw puzzle of activities will recreate the sights and feels of a bustling community:

  • A monument to four key players in 8th Ward history and voting rights.
  • A search for descendants of 100 prominent residents—ministers, state workers, musicians, attorneys, baseball players, Underground Railroad conductors, and one involved with “aeroplane school”—in hope of mining their family stories and archives.
  • A Chautauqua series at the McCormick Riverfront Library and Live and Learn “informances” from the Past Players, held at Gamut Theatre. TFEC is funding both.
  • A theatrical presentation to be developed by Gamut Theatre Group. The 8th “was a rough place, but it was a lot of tough people coming together and learning what their strengths were,” said Artistic Director Clark Nicholson.
  • Posters, a website and window clings—yes, window clings—developed by Digital Harrisburg to recreate for Capitol workers and visitors the sights and stories of the 8th Ward.

One of the discovered descendants is well-known musician Jimmy Wood, whose great-grandfather, Jacob Compton, spirited Abraham Lincoln out of Harrisburg to evade assassination.

Wood didn’t know Compton, but he knew his great-uncle, Armon S. Compton, a pharmacist trained in Philadelphia who was never employed at white pharmacies but plied his trade in the 8th Ward. Wood never heard stories of Jacob’s heroism, but he remembers the spark of pride in Armon’s bearing.

“My assumption is that, besides his intellect, his pride would be based on what he knew about his image,” said Wood. “I’m hoping I can find somewhere a picture of Jacob. That would be absolutely awesome.”

Wood won’t cry over spilled milk, but the disappearance of the 8th Ward—where musicians played in clubs, a great-uncle ran a hotel and his midwife grandmother delivered babies—offers a warning.

“Bring some caution and some good sense when you decide on these kind of development projects,” he said. “It can’t always be about someone’s dollar and making a profit. People have to live somewhere. They should have some decent place.”

An aerial depiction of the Old 8th Ward.

Wild Side

Some churches and synagogues of today have their origins in the 8th Ward. They were, like residents, pushed aside “to erase this area of ‘blight,’” said Andrew Dyrli Hermeling, project manager of Digital Harrisburg, the Messiah College-Harrisburg University joint venture to digitize archival images.

Two factors drive our ongoing fascination with the 8th, said Messiah College History Department Co-chair David Pettegrew.

“It has the reputation for being the wild side of the city in the late 19th century,” he said. “The other has to do with this disturbing factor of displacement that occurs for the greater good. So, it naturally raises questions about what is the common good. It was in the name of beauty, but there’s a feeling that the state just yanked away properties. That injustice surprises people.”

Harrisburg genealogist Sharonn Williams is the great-granddaughter of Ephraim Slaughter—prominent 8th Ward leader and Civil War veteran. Williams joined the 8th Ward project because too much of the history she has researched reflects today’s political turbulence.

“You’re trying to take away my right to vote, when my right has been paid for in the blood, the sweat, and on the backs of my ancestors for hundreds of years,” she said.

Today’s “civil war over civil rights” and the devaluation of civics in education “break down understandings of the responsibilities of citizenship and the privileges of the franchise,” agreed Sloan.

“We are among the last generation where we can talk to people who were in those struggles, and also we’re in the last generation that cares enough to keep those family artifacts in the closet or under the bed,” Sloan said. “We’re saying if you’re not interested in this, don’t throw it away. Give it to the historical society. Give it to the state archives. It’s pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that help us build memory and continuity.”

For more information about Digital Harrisburg, including online history resources, visit www.digitalharrisburg.com.

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She’s Making Movies (On Location): At 11 years old, Lily Compton is already a veteran of short films.

Lily Compton stars in her short film, “Picochi.”

At 9 years old, most of us were just trying to avoid our homework and get home before the streetlights came on.

At 9 years old, Lily Compton had submitted her first film into Vidjam, an annual, 48-hour filmmaking frenzy, becoming the organization’s youngest filmmaker to date.

Now 11, Compton already has 20 short films under her belt, with more to come.

“At Vidjam, someone came up to me, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, when you’re an adult you’re going to be so great,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, cool…when I’m an adult…” she said. “That’s really been pushing me.”

Since her first Vidjam, Compton has submitted a short film every year for the Harrisburg-based competition. Her films feature an array of elaborate costumes, makeup and props created from scraps, things people lend her and items from her parents “Free Store” in back of the Harrisburg Improv Theatre.

Her latest film, “Mental,” which was submitted to the Vidjam competition in June, stars Compton as a psychiatric patient who believes she’s being visited by people of her past life. The film begins with Compton’s character in the hospital before being transported into a grassy field, surrounded by strangers in all-white clothing. They run around, splashing in the creek and holding hands before the strangers become sinister, their makeup resembling skull faces, their clothes black, and they chase Compton, revealing who they are.

“I changed my style up with ‘Mental,’ and you could hear people in the crowd crying,” Compton said. “People came up to me and congratulated me, even days after.”

Even at age 8, Compton was comfortable behind the lens. She ran around her house and her neighborhood with her mother’s Sony Handycam, creating what she called “documentaries.”

She roped friends into starring in her films, which they either loved or quickly grew tired of.

Compton’s mother Somers, co-owner of the Harrisburg Improv Theatre with her husband Jacob, met the founder of Vidjam, Sam Miller, years ago, before he started the film group. As Vidjam grew, Miller developed a relationship with the Comptons and the theater. The Comptons helped Sam with props and costumes and supported him any way they could. Somers then encouraged Lily to take a stab at the Vidjam competition.

“My mom, who really supports me and my filmmaking, was like, ‘Lily, there’s this film contest, and you should join it,’” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, okay,’ and just got a team together for it.”

Lily’s team consisted of her friend and fellow filmmaker, Ben Hill, and a couple of actors she found after scouting the streets and asking, “Do you want to be in a film?” In 48 hours, she helped write and direct their first Vidjam short film. But she missed having full control over her films.

“I thought that I wanted to be more part of my films,” she said. “The next film I wanted to break free of that and try editing on my own because, during that time, I had been experimenting with different editing softwares. So, the next one that I did was the ‘Picochi.’”

“Picochi” is an ugly duckling-type tale starring Lily as a ginormous bird, Picochi. After the bird is born, it begins searching for a companion, but everyone who comes in contact with Picochi scurries off or is an inanimate object. Then finally, Picochi finds a human friend. The humorous, touching film was submitted into the 2017 Vidjam competition.

“There is heart in her films,” Miller said. “It’s a sort of heart, sentimentality and awareness that I think a lot of us as older filmmakers and writers may be scared or hesitant to tap into.”

Aside from being a quadruple threat in filmmaking—writing, acting, editing and filming—Lily loves to dance, sing, write her own songs and draw. She is also involved with the Harrisburg Improv Theatre’s Kidprov, which her father runs.

Even though she has many different talents, her passion lies with filmmaking and acting. In the years to come, she plans to keep submitting to Vidjam and continue working on her acting and filmmaking future.

“I just think you’re never too young to pursue your dreams,” she said. “I don’t feel like people have to wait until their older to pursue what they love.”

To view Lily Compton’s films, visit vidjam.org or their YouTube @Vidjam.

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Citizen’s group proposes Riverfront Park monument to honor prominent African Americans

Harrisburg’s Riverfront Park is dotted with historical monuments, but none of them honor African Americans.

A group of citizens hopes to change that.

Members of the Peace Promenade Project are asking city hall to green-light Harrisburg’s first monument to African Americans, which they hope to erect near the corner of Forster and Front Streets by June 2019.

Their proposal calls for a life-size tableau of four Pennsylvania abolitionists and voting-rights advocates: Thomas Chester, a Harrisburg-born journalist and attorney; William Howard Day, the first black school board director in Pennsylvania; Jacob Compton, a pastor who drove Abraham Lincoln’s carriage during his visit to Harrisburg; and Frances Harper, a poet and women’s rights activist.

All except Harper lived in Harrisburg and are buried in Lincoln Cemetery in Penbrook.

The monument would testify to the city’s African-American history and honor the 15th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which granted African-American men the right to vote. (Women would not get the right to vote until the 19th amendment passed in 1920.)

“This is an American monument that represents the continuing struggle for the full fulfillment of the 15th amendment,” said Lenwood Sloan, leader of the Peace Promenade Project, which aims to rededicate Harrisburg’s public monuments through a yearlong event series.

Kelly Summerford, another project leader, said that the monument would also offer local students an opportunity to learn about abolition and voting rights.

Mayor Eric Papenfuse said he met with the project leaders and enthusiastically supports the project. He also offered to help the group pursue a gaming grant from Dauphin County.

City Council President Wanda Williams also pledged her full support at tonight’s legislative session.

The Peace Promenade group, which counts more than 200 members and 40 supporting organizations, plans to fund the monument through public support, corporate donations and individual giving. They did not announce an anticipated budget.

According to Summerford, the group plans to follow a process used by the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts to commission an artist and develop a design.

They hope to install the monument by “Juneteenth” 2019 – the anniversary of June 19, 1865, the official announcement of the end of slavery in the former Confederacy.

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