Martha Claire Catlin, Historian for the Alexandria, Virginia, Quaker Meeting at Woodlawn will make a presentation as part of the Historical Society’s New Jersey History Speaks lecture series. In 2010, Catlin retired from a career in historic preservation at the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Building on 30 years of research, her current emphasis is on the Woodlawn settlements of antislavery Quakers, many of whom were from Moorestown. Their story is now featured in the Historical Society of Moorestown exhibit “Inscribed Quilts: A Portal to Moorestown History”.  

Her most recent book “The Quaker Scout: Testimony of a Civil War non-combatant of the Woodlawn Anti-Slavery Colony”, is the story of Jonathan Roberts who was a member of the Woodlawn Colony.  

The Quakers of Woodlawn, well-educated progressive agriculturalists from northern states, were successful in establishing a colony of free-labor farms, uneasily surrounded by George Washington’s Mount Vernon heirs and others of the slaveholding planter elite. Among the new freeholders of the colony were African Americans descended from Mount Vernon’s enslaved population, manumitted by Washington at his death a half-century earlier. The Friends converted thousands of acres of plantation lands into productive free-labor farms, hoping their example would become a transformative influence throughout the South. Yet, with increasing sectionalism in the years leading up to war, even the faithful could see that the possibility of ending slavery by peaceful means – however strategically devised, and diligently practiced – was diminishing. It was this realization that sent Roberts on his amazing adventure. 

This presentation will be the perfect companion piece to Historical Society’s current exhibit.