How a Bryn Mawr College research project surfaced one of the earliest documented Black families in Manayunk

Long before Black Manayunk started collecting oral histories and combing through baptismal records, a college student named Grace Pusey was already doing some of that work, a few miles away, for a different institution entirely. Her research does not belong to us, and we want to be clear about that up front. But it touches our neighborhood in a real way, and we think the people who follow this project should know about it, know who did it, and know where to find it.

This post is our attempt to introduce you to Grace Pusey’s work, explain how it connects to Manayunk, and point you toward the source so you can read it in full and in her own words.

Who Is Grace Pusey, and What Is Black at Bryn Mawr?

Grace Pusey was a Bryn Mawr College student, Class of 2015, who spent her final year on campus researching a history the college had not told about itself. Working alongside classmate Emma Kioko and under the guidance of Professor Monica Mercado, Pusey helped build Black at Bryn Mawr, a public history project and blog dedicated to what the project calls “re-remembering Black experiences at Bryn Mawr College.” The project included a walking tour, a digital map, and a growing archive of blog posts covering everything from the Black women who staffed the College’s dormitories and kitchens to the students who fought to establish Perry House, a residence and cultural center for Black students, in 1972.

Pusey’s writing on the blog is careful and self-aware about its own limits. She often names the difference between what the historical record actually documents and what she is imagining to fill the silences the record leaves behind. That distinction matters for the piece we want to highlight here.

The Blog Post: Black Labor at Bryn Mawr

In March 2015, Pusey published a post titled “Black Labor at Bryn Mawr: A Story Imagined Through Census Records, 1880 to 1940.” Using federal census records, College publications, and archival letters, she reconstructed how the College came to depend on Black domestic workers, mostly women, who cooked, cleaned, waited tables, and staffed the dormitories for decades while receiving little acknowledgment in the College’s own histories.

The numbers she found tell their own story. In 1880, five years before Bryn Mawr College even opened, Lower Merion Township counted only 15 Black residents. By 1900, the campus itself housed 68 Black people, nearly all of them recorded in the census as servants. That number climbed to 87 by 1910, dipped through the 1920s, and rose again to 85 by 1940. A 1926 College source suggests the real figure that year may have been closer to 96, meaning the census likely undercounted the workers who kept the College running.

Pusey does not let those numbers stand alone as statistics. She traces the working conditions in the residence halls, the cramped fourth-floor quarters where Black women lived, and the college’s own complaints, voiced by Director of Halls Ellen Faulkner in 1926, that state labor law requiring one day off per week left the college short-staffed because it had no relief maids. She also raises a pointed question about College President M. Carey Thomas, whose documented white supremacist views stood in contrast to the fact that only one of her seven personal servants, according to the 1910 census, was Black.

Where Manayunk Enters the Story

Pusey opens her piece not at Bryn Mawr, but with a family that lived on Belmont Road in Manayunk.

Their name was Hall. Penrose Hall and his wife appear in the 1880 census of Lower Merion Township as the only Black family recorded there that year. Most of the 15 Black residents counted in the township that year were young, single men working as servants. The halls were different. Both were native Pennsylvanians; they were raising five children, two daughters and three sons, in a household headed by a married father who had served in the Civil War and later worked as a United States postal carrier.

Pusey uses Hall’s life as a point of contrast before the story turns to the college. He was not a servant on anyone’s campus. He held a federal job that put him in public view every day, traveling a mail route that, she notes, may well have passed near the new Bryn Mawr College campus after it opened in 1885. His children were baptized at First United Methodist Church of Roxborough on February 26, 1886. He died in December 1888 and was buried at Leverington Cemetery, near Ridge and Lyceum Avenues, in the Roxborough and Manayunk area.

Pusey is honest about where the record ends, and imagination begins. She pictures Hall’s horse-drawn mail buggy making its rounds six days a week. She wonders, in a passage she is careful to frame as speculation rather than fact, whether a father delivering mail near a brand-new women’s college might have imagined a future where his own daughters, Bella and Laura, could walk through its doors. That is not something the census can tell us. But the underlying facts that Hall lived on Belmont Road, served in the Civil War, carried the mail, raised five children, and was buried in Roxborough come directly from draft registration records, the 1880 census, church baptismal records, and Philadelphia death certificate records, all cited in her original post.

Why This Matters for Black Manayunk

We did not know about Penrose Hall until we went looking for how our neighborhood connects to the wider record of Black life on the Main Line and in Philadelphia. Finding him in a Bryn Mawr College research project, rather than in anything written specifically about Manayunk, says something about how much of our own history has been recorded elsewhere, in someone else’s archive, attached to someone else’s institution.

It also opens real research questions we intend to keep pulling on. The blog does not give an address for First United Methodist Church of Roxborough, and “United Methodist” as a denominational name did not exist until 1968, so the congregation the Halls attended in 1886 would have gone by an earlier name, likely something closer to Methodist Episcopal. We know Galilee Baptist Church did not incorporate until 1899, thirteen years after the Hall baptisms, so it could not have been the church in question. Untangling which congregation baptized the Hall children in 1886 is exactly the kind of thread this project exists to follow, alongside the histories of Galilee Baptist Church, New Umbria Baptist Church, and Josie D. Heard A.M.E. Church, the Black congregations we do know stood in Manayunk and Roxborough.

Penrose Hall’s burial record also points us toward Leverington Cemetery, whose records are held by the Roxborough Manayunk Wissahickon Historical Society, as a place worth searching for other Black families whose names have not yet surfaced in any published account.

Credit Where It Is Due

Grace Pusey did this research. She and Emma Kioko built this project as students, on their own time, digging through census records and archives that the institution itself had not prioritized. We are grateful for it, and we want anyone reading this to go read her original post in full rather than relying on our summary of it. The full piece includes details we have not repeated here about the Bryn Mawr students Jessie Fauset and Enid Cook, about the College’s own self-congratulatory account of its “Maids’ Club,” and about the wider story of the Great Migration that brought Philadelphia’s Black population from roughly 63,000 in 1900 to 220,000 by 1930.

Black Labor at Bryn Mawr: A Story Imagined Through Census Records, 1880 to 1940, by Grace Pusey (Black at Bryn Mawr, March 9, 2015)

Grace Pusey’s full author archive at Black at Bryn Mawr

We will keep following the leads that Penrose Hall’s story opens, and we will keep crediting the people whose research helps us find our own history. If your family has any connection to Belmont Road, Leverington Cemetery, or the Roxborough churches of the 1880s, we would love to hear from you.