MOUNT VERNON — A group of more than 50 people walked the streets of downtown Mount Vernon together Saturday morning, meandering through places frequented daily by residents shopping or grabbing a bite to eat.
But Saturday the group stopped to learn about the little-known history behind the commonly walked areas.
Knox Alliance for Racial Equality, a non-profit group that promotes a welcoming community and strives for civic justice and racial equality, hosted its first civil rights walking tour in Mount Vernon Saturday.
The tour featured nine stops, each representing a person, group or organization that fought for political and social freedom and equality.
Key issues of focus among the figures discussed included abolitionism, women’s equality and racial equality.
Enoch Harris and the First Congregational United Church of Christ
One of the founding fathers of Mount Vernon was a Black man named Enoch Harris, better known as ‘Knuck’.
Harris was born in 1784 in Virginia and moved north to Mount Vernon in the early 1800s when Black codes were in effect, which required Black people to purchase a certificate issued by a court of law to prove they were free. Further legislation also required Black people to file a $500 bond before settling in Ohio.
Black people could not vote, hold office, testify in court, were not permitted in the public school system, among other restrictions. At the same time, Harris owned approximately one-sixth of Mount Vernon.
“He actually owned the property we’re standing on,” said Rev. Scott Elliot, referring to the First Congregational United Church of Christ, where the walking tour began.
Thirty members of the local Presbyterian Church left it to found the First Congregational United Church of Christ in 1834 as an anti-slavery church that participated in the Underground Railroad.
The church’s stance was not a collectively held view at the time. Those in Mount Vernon who supported slavery made their disapproval of the church known, often disrupting services and protesting, Elliot said.
The prominent stained glass windows at the front of the church were put in years later in 1895, and the biblical figures depicted on them are Black.
“Both of them are Black,” Elliot said. “Both of them have been facing Main Street since 1895.”
Mary Ann (Ball) Bickerdyke
Mary Ann Ball was known for her medical work assisting soldiers during the Civil War.
She was born in 1817 in Knox County near Mount Vernon. She attended Oberlin College, one of the first colleges to accept women, and later went on to become a nurse.
As a nurse, she worked in Cincinnati during the cholera epidemic of 1837, and during the civil war, she established more than 300 field hospitals to assist wounded soldiers. She traveled with Union armies throughout the conflict and was known for risking her life by searching for soldiers at night.
She would carry a lantern into the areas between the Union and Confederate sides to find soldiers and treat them.
The soldiers she helped gave her the nickname “Mother Bickerdyke,” Bickerdyke being her married name, because of her continued care for them. After the war ended, she continued to help veterans, specifically by providing legal assistance to those seeking pensions from the government.
Union Soldier Monument
At the centerpoint of Public Square in Mount Vernon stands a towering statue of a Union soldier. A women’s Union organization placed the monument in 1877 to honor the 3,000 men and boys from Mount Vernon who fought in the Civil War. The monument faces South.
“You really cannot talk about the struggle for civil rights in this country without talking about the Civil War,” said KARE co-chair Renee Romano.
Mount Vernon was a center for two civil rights debates around the time of the Civil War, Romano said.
“One was this question over slavery and one was a question around freedom of speech, and how far can the government go to curtail your freedom of speech during a time of war,” Romano said.
The fight over slavery was hotly debated even in places that were fighting for the Union, such as Mount Vernon.
The divisions were mainly along party lines, between Republicans and Democrats, Romano said. These parties featured the Republicans being President Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery party and the Democrats mainly opposing abolition.
These divisions were also played out in the local newspapers, the Democratic Banner and the Mount Vernon Republican.
“This became so heated that people would put in storefronts symbols that stood for whether you were for fighting to continue the war and to end slavery or whether you wanted a compromise with the South and you were ok with slavery continuing,” Romano said, adding that there were incidents of broken windows and fights.
The growing influence in Ohio and elsewhere in the country of Peace Democrats, who were willing to compromise, led the Republicans to pass regulations about speaking out against the war in an attempt to prevent division.
Specifically in 1863, a general issued General Order 38, which stated that anyone who expressed sympathy for the enemy could be arrested.
Peace Democratic Party leader Clement L. Vallandigham spoke to 10,000 people in Mount Vernon criticizing the aforementioned order and the ongoing war. He was soon after convicted of treason.
“This case to me symbolizes a real perennial tension in the struggle for civil rights, which is really how do we balance the need between, let’s call it, national security and civil liberties,” Romano said.
Kremlin Building
The building is commonly referred to as the Kremlin Building because its architecture has been compared with the features of the famed Moscow citadel.
The tour highlighted three figures associated with the building — the first German Jewish person to come to the city, a feminist and equal pay advocate and a famed American abolitionist.
Frederick Douglass spoke in the Kremlin Building, specifically in Kurt Hall, following the Civil War in 1877. He spoke mainly about happenings in Washington D.C. at the time and the building of the Washington Monument.
In the Kremlin Building’s earlier history, it was home to a clothing store run by the first German Jewish person to come to Mount Vernon, Adolph Wolff. Wolff came to Mount Vernon in 1841 and opened the store in 1848, stocked with everything from tweed coats to pocket handkerchiefs to cloaks of the latest Parisian style.
The book Our Worthy Townsmen written by Lois K. Hanson, who manages Paragraphs Bookstore in Mount Vernon, details the lives of Wolff and other of Mount Vernon’s first Jewish families.
Wolff moved to a different location within a few years, making way for its next occupant, Amelia Bloomer.
Bloomer and her husband came to Mount Vernon to do missionary work and opened a print shop in the Kremlin Building, which Bloomer used to print her feminist newspaper The Lily.
Women’s rights advocates including Susan B. Anthony published in her paper. Bloomer was vocal about fighting for equal pay and brought suffragist Lucy Stone to Mount Vernon to speak about the issue.
Bloomer’s name also became synonymous with trousers, “Bloomers,” which women’s rights activists increasingly wore in the 1850s to free themselves of stereotypical fashion of the time (i.e. corsets that led to restricted breathing and overheating).
Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church
The Episcopal Church has a spotty record when it comes to slavery, said Saint Paul’s Rev. Rachel Harrison.
“The Episcopal Church for a very long time liked to brag that it was the only church that didn’t split over the Civil war, and I would argue is that really a good thing? I don’t think it is,” Harrison said. “Unity at the expense of the most vulnerable is certainly not something that I think we should celebrate.”
However, Saint Paul’s specifically has a history of opposition to slavery. The church’s leadership housed escaped slaves in the basement as a part of the Underground Railroad, risking arrest and their positions in the denomination.
“The symbol of the church showing up, light coming in from darkness, is a potent one,” Harrison said. “And while we don’t know very much, I think it is really extraordinary that we don’t know a lot but what we do know, the risks that they took, is enough of a story.”
Knox Memorial Theatre
Marian Anderson was the first Black person invited to perform at the White House as well as the first to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in 1955. Anderson also sang at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.
Before these accomplishments, Anderson graced the stage of the Memorial Theatre in Mount Vernon twice.
The Booker T. Washington Club raised funds to bring here here in 1930 in the middle of the Great Depression, and she again came to Mount Vernon to perform in 1939.
However, both times she visited the hotels in Mount Vernon refused to accommodate her, so local Black families offered her places to stay.
Anderson faced similar opposition elsewhere throughout her career.
For instance, the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from performing at the Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. in 1939, and Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR as a result.
Jane Payne
Jane Payne was the first female doctor in Mount Vernon, and one of the first in the country.
Payne was born in England in 1825 and moved with her family to Ohio. Payne was impaired by childhood illnesses and injuries, leaving her blind in her left eye and unable to walk except for short distances.
She began her studies with Dr. John W. Russell in Mount Vernon, and later went on to graduate top of her class at the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia. Payne practiced from 1861 until 1882, and was known for tending to the medical impacts of poverty. In her final years of life, Payne got cancer, but she continued to practice between surgeries.
Mount Calvary Baptist Church
Mount Calvary Baptist Church is the second oldest church in Mount Vernon. The church served a Black congregation for roughly 100 years, until the early 2000s. The physical church building was built by its congregation in 1915, but the congregation met in homes for about a decade prior.
“For me, I want to talk about this space really as evidence of the resiliency and the energy of the small Black community that has always existed in Mount Vernon and Knox County,” Romano of KARE said.
The church was more than a place of worship. It provided meals, financial assistance and a sense of community to Ohio’s rural Black population.
The church is also known for hosting the annual State Convention meeting for the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women’s Club in 1917, an organization that assisted Black women in attaining equal rights and other opportunities.
Ellamae Simmons
Ellamae Simmons was the first Black female physician in the country to specialize in asthma, allergy and immunology.
Simmons, a Mount Vernon native, graduated from Mount Vernon High School and obtained a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Hampton Institute in Virginia. She went on to become a member of the U.S. Army Nursing Corps, one of the few Black women to integrate the U.S. Armed Forces.
Simmons was also the first Black female physician hired by Kaiser Permanente, a healthcare company based in California, and one of the founders of the Kaiser Permanente’s African American Professional Association, which provides mentorship and scholarships.
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