African American Church to Mark 180th Anniversary

SWAINTON – Cape May County’s oldest African American church may not be where some thought it was. The John Wesley United Methodist Church, on Goshen Swainton Road, will celebrate its 180th anniversary in February 2020, dating its inception to 1840. Church members said this makes their church the oldest.
The church, active but with dwindling membership, sits astride railroad tracks that once hosted the Swainton Station. The cemetery is the final resting place of black veterans from the Civil War to Vietnam, as well as the Spanish American War of 1898.
Several historic African American residents of the area are also interred there. No final count of the graves is possible since markers continue to be found, lost in the trees and often covered with moss.
The church was founded by John West, whose early years were spent as a slave in Raleigh, N.C. Escaping slavery in 1823, West traveled to Cape May County. A religious man, West was active in the local Methodist community. 
After working in the area, West was able to purchase a tract of land in East Goshen, near an old canning factory. Later, West bought the existing 1832 Asbury Methodist Church building, which was moved to the tract in East Goshen.
West appealed to the Methodist Conference at Dennis Creek for permission to begin a church. Permission was granted on the leap day of the leap year in 1840, giving the church an old pedigree among county African American churches. It is that date that the church community will celebrate Feb. 29, 2020.
The church building in Swainton was erected in 1908. Nan LaCorte and Gregory Hudgins, church members active in researching the history of West’s church, said this is not the building from East Goshen, which many thought had been moved to the site in Swainton.
The 1908 building, over a century old, was built as the new home for the church when blacks began moving down from the Goshen location in search of better work opportunities. The Civil War veteran whose grave is marked was among the first interred in the new cemetery when he passed in 1908.
LaCorte and Hudgins said that the church community is actively seeking grants and other funding to help care for the aging building and cemetery, which represents an important and less well-known chapter in the African American history of the county.
In addition to the anniversary celebration, the congregation plans other events intended to help county residents appreciate the church’s history. In April 2020, the church will participate in an “African American Cemetery Tour.”
A presentation of handmade replicas of quilts, sewn by Quaker sympathizers as “road maps” to the north for escaped slaves, will be held May 16. The church will offer an enactment June 20, 2020 entitled, “Who was Lovinia Armour Coachman?,” which will present a factual account of an early 1800’s African American woman born into slavery in the Goshen area.
With plans for a Harriet Tubman Museum next door to the historic Macedonia Baptist Church on Lafayette Street in Cape May, along with the expected restoration of the Franklin Street School, which was used as a school for African American children during segregation, a number of efforts are underway to tell the story of the county’s African American heritage. The church on Goshen Swainton Road has played a critical role in that heritage for 180 years.
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.