The Sharpsburgh Museum of History has partnered with Tolson’s Chapel to tell Sharpsburg’s African-American History, by offering week day tours (by appointment only).

Tolson’s Chapel

On an April morning in 1868, eighteen young African-American students filed into a church in Sharpsburg, Maryland, to begin lessons in the newly established American Union School. Their teacher, Ezra Johnson, was provided by the Freedmen’s Bureau and funded by the local African-American community. Twelve of the children had been enslaved only four years earlier, before Maryland abolished slavery in 1864.  The church, Tolson’s Chapel, was a small log building constructed in 1866 on land donated by a Sharpsburg African-American couple…