The Cox House - Longwood Gardens
The Source of Longwood Gardens’ Name
Page 1.
Above: Longwood Farm is the namesake of Longwood Gardens. The farm was owned by John and Hannah Cox who lived here on the farm at the Cox House. Image source: Lee J. Stoltzfus
The Cox House of Longwood Gardens:
Above: The Cox House is owned by Longwood Gardens. Image source: Google maps, labels added.
The Cox House
Rescued by Longwood Gardens:
Above: Longwood Gardens acquired the Cox House in 2001, in recognition of the building’s historic importance. In 2024, Longwood took another major step to preserve the house, which stood just eight feet from Route 1, by moving it 100 feet farther back on the property. Image source: Wolfe House and Building Movers.
Anti-Slavery Activists John and Hannah Cox
Owners of the Cox House
at Longwood Farm:
Above: Image source: History of the Underground railroad in Chester and the neighboring counties of Pennsylvania, Smedley, 1883, Internet Archive.
The Quaker Meetinghouse at Longwood
Longwood Progressive Friends
On the Coxs’ Longwood Farm:
Above: Longwood Quakers closed the meeting in 1940. Later the building was used as a Brandywine Valley tourism center. Image source: Lee J. Stoltzfus.
The Longwood Quaker Meetinghouse in 1865:
Above: William Lloyd Garrison, one of the country’s most prominent anti-slavery activists, was the guest of honor at the 1865 meeting. He stands between John and Hannah Cox who lived nearby at the Cox House, at Longwood Farm. The meetinghouse was on land previously part of Longwood Farm.
Above: For 85 years the Longwood Quaker Meetinghouse was a forum of reform for leading American activists advocating for human rights and social justice. The building is an often forgotten temple of free speech and free thinking.
In 1940:
Pierre du Pont Purchased the Meetinghouse
To Add to his Longwood Gardens:
Above: Pierre du Pont, founder of Longwood Gardens, purchased the Longwood Quaker meetinghouse in 1940, the last year of the meeting. Image source: Wikimedia
William Lloyd Garrison
A Fearless Leader
of the Anti-Slavery Movement:
Biographies of William Lloyd Garrison:
Above: William Lloyd Garrison was the most famous white abolitionist editor in the U.S. He was a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Through The Liberator and relentless lecture work he demanded a radical commitment to immediate emancipation. He also advanced nonresistance, racial equality, and women’s right to participate fully in reform. He was not a Quaker. Image sources: Portrait: Library of Congress, Left statue: wfrjr.com, Right statue: James R. Murray, Book covers: Google Books, etc.
Lucretia Mott
“The Greatest American Woman of Her Era”
Above: Biographies of Lucretia Mott.
Quaker minister Lucretia Mott was one of the leading white female anti-slavery activist in the U.S. She was also and advocate of women’s rights. A founder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and she was an organizer of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention. She also championed peace, religious liberty, and racial equality.
Lucretia Mott has been described as the greatest American woman of her era.
Susan B. Anthony:
Above: Biographies of Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony was one of the leading advocates for women’s rights in nineteenth-century America. She grew up in a Quaker household in Massachusetts and New York.
She worked closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to establish the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. She spent decades traveling, lecturing, organizing, and petitioning for women’s right to vote. Her arrest for voting in the presidential election of 1872 brought national attention to the suffrage movement.
W. E. B. Du Bois
The First African American to Earn a Doctorate at Harvard:
Above: Biographies of W. E. B. Dubois.
W. E. B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt Du Bois) was an American sociologist, historian, and civil rights leader who devoted his life to challenging racism. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University. He became one of the most influential Black intellectuals of his time.
His influential books, including The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America, challenged prevailing views of African American life and history.
Thomas Garrett
A Fearless Organizer
of the Underground Railroad:
Thomas Garrett was a Wilmington Quaker abolitionist and one of the Underground Railroad’s best-known station masters. Despite lawsuits and financial ruin under the Fugitive Slave Law, he continued assisting freedom seekers, worked closely with Harriet Tubman and William Still, and is credited with helping thousands reach freedom.
Garrett’s Underground Railroad work came at great personal and financial risk. In 1848, he was held liable in federal court for helping the Hawkins family escape slavery and faced judgments that cost him much of his personal wealth. Yet he refused to abandon the cause, publicly declaring that anyone who knew of an enslaved person needing assistance should send that person to him. Image source: Portrait: Eastern Illinois University.
Oliver Johnson
Anti-Slavery Editor and Reform Journalist:
Above: Anti-slavery newspapers edited by Oliver Johnson.
Oliver Johnson was a leading Quaker anti-slavery journalist, editor, and lecturer. He edited The Pennsylvania Freeman, The Anti-Slavery Bugle, the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Johnson served as acting editor of The Liberator while William Lloyd Garrison was in England in 1833. He used the press to advance emancipation, equal rights, and liberal religion.
Johnson was a longtime clerk of the Longwood Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends. He served as the meeting’s principal officer and one of its most influential leaders. Portrait source: Burlington Free Press.
Sojourner Truth
Slave, Prophet, Legend:
Above: Biographies of Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth was an anti-slavery activist, preacher, and advocate for women’s rights. She escaped from slavery with her infant daughter in 1826. Two years later, she secured the return of her young son, who had been illegally sold to an enslaver in Alabama. In 1843, she adopted the name Sojourner Truth, reflecting her religious calling to travel and speak publicly.
Sojourner Truth became a powerful voice against slavery and for the rights of women. Her address at a women’s rights convention in 1851 in Akron, Ohio, became widely known as “Ain’t I a Woman?”
Chandler Darlington and Hannah Darlington
Chester County Quaker Activists:
Above: Chandler Darlington was a Quaker anti-slavery activist from Kennett Square. Darlington was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. He and his wife, Hannah Darlington, hosted nationally known reformers and helped make the Longwood Progressive Friends a platform for abolition, racial equality, women’s rights, peace, and religious freedom.
Hannah Monaghan Darlington, wife of Chandler Darlington, was a Quaker anti-slavery activist, Underground Railroad conductor, temperance advocate, and early women’s-rights organizer. She attended the first National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1850, served as its secretary, and organized the influential Pennsylvania Woman’s Rights Convention at West Chester in 1852. Image source: Massachusetts Historical Society.
J. Williams Thorne
Quaker Abolitionist, Educator, and Reformer:
Above: Joseph Williams Thorne was a Chester County Quaker farmer and Underground Railroad host who later entered Reconstruction politics in North Carolina. He advocated Black civil rights, public education, temperance, and freethought.
In 1873 Thorne published a twelve-page religious tract criticizing orthodox Christianity and defending freedom of religious thought. His political opponents later used the pamphlet to portray him as religious outsider and to support his expulsion from the North Carolina legislature. Image sources: Pamphlet: Cornell University Library, Portrait: AncestorsFamilySearch.
Joseph A. Dugdale and Ruth T. Dugdale
Quaker Abolitionists and Progressive Reformers:
Joseph A. Dugdale was a Quaker abolitionist, women’s-rights advocate, and a principal organizer of the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends. His national reform connections and work at early women’s-rights conventions helped make Longwood an unusually open platform for activism regarding abolition, religious liberty, and equality.
Ruth Townsend Dugdale (Mrs. Joseph Dugdale) was a Quaker abolitionist and early women’s-rights organizer whose work joined the local Chester County movement to national conventions. She was among the Pennsylvania women remembered in the early history of woman suffrage for sustaining both antislavery and women’s equality campaigns. Portraits source: TriCollege Libraries.
Alfred H. Love
Anti-War Activist, Nobel Peace Prize Nominee:
Above: Alfred H. Love of Philadelphia was a Quaker merchant, abolitionist, and one of the most persistent American peace advocates of his era. He founded the Universal Peace Union in 1866 and linked nonviolence to racial justice, labor reform, Native rights, woman suffrage, and humane treatment of animals.
During the Civil War he refused military service. He also refused to sell textiles from his woolen-goods company to the army, a decision that harmed his business. After the war he helped found the Universal Peace Union, serving as its president from 1866 until his death in 1913. He was also vice president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1903, 1904, and 1906. Images: Poster: TriCollegeLibraries, Portrait: Wikipedia.
Samuel Joseph May
Unitarian Minister and Activist:
Books by and about Samuel May:
Above: Samuel Joseph May was a nationally influential Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and reform lecturer. He was a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society and became one of the country's most persistent advocates for immediate emancipation. He also supported integrated education, women’s rights, peace, temperance, and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law.
In 1833 he established the anti-slavery newspaper The Unionist. His writings included The Rights and Condition of Women and Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (1869), an important firsthand account of the abolitionist movement. Image source: Portrait: Massachusetts Historical Society, Book cover: Internet Archive.