N. 18th St. view of Stenton House. (Photo: Rasheed Z. Ajamu)

This story was produced as part of Next City’s joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship with Germantown Info Hub.

For Laura Siena, a Northwest Philly resident and descendant of Quakers who settled in colonial America, digging into her family’s history and the Quaker presence in 18th-century Germantown has led her to discoveries she’s still working to make sense of.

“My family came here in either 1681 or 1683 on a boat, and we grew up with this idea that they were just these amazing, wonderful people,“ she said. “Three years ago, a friend of mine sent me an article about how my family had owned slaves, and I never knew that.”

Through public events and archival research, Germantown’s Stenton Museum — one of 20 historic destinations as part of the Historic Germantown consortium  — has been working to complicate the long-held clean image of Quaker history and show Germantown’s role in both upholding and ending the institution of slavery.

Quakers in the north have become popularly known for their historic participation and leadership in abolition movements. Take the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery, for example, which was written to address other Quakers and is known as the first ever protest against slavery in American History, or the 1774 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which forbade Quakers from buying or selling enslaved people. Yet many Quakers did enslave Black people and worked to defend this practice.

On Dec. 16, Siena and other locals attended the fourth community conversation in the Stenton Museum’s Wrestling with Justice: Quakers and Northern Slavery project, where museum organizers revealed the records of enslaved individuals who lived on the Quaker-occupied property during the colonial era.

“A lot of people didn’t realize there was slavery in the north; they didn’t realize that Quakers were enslavers and not just abolitionists,” Director of the Stenton Museum, Dennis Pickeral, said. “We realized we needed to do more to tell that story as a museum.”

The Stenton House was built in the 1720s by former Philadelphia mayor James Logan as his country home. Logan – a Quaker – was also the state founder William Penn’s secretary during the Quakers’ expedition to Pennsylvania, and a lucrative businessman conducting extensive trade.

For the majority of the Stenton Museum’s 125-year history, its content focused on Logan himself. “It did not tell the stories of the larger community that again lived and labored here,” Pickeral said. Nor did it highlight slavery’s historical presence on the property. “That’s really what we’re trying to change now.”

The Dec. 16 event was guided by a historical timeline of the Stenton property and the presence of the Logans, who occupied the Stenton property for nearly 200 years. Attendees examined copies of two letters: one written by James Logan in 1723 described an enslaved Black teen named Jack, and the other, written in 1756 by his son, William Logan, revealed the presence of an enslaved Black woman named Menah.

The presentation also included a record of the names of the enslaved Black people, white indentured servants, and paid workers who spent time on the farm throughout the 18th century.

Through this series, funded by Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Stenton is working to unravel the untold stories of the house and challenge local assumptions, while speaking with the community about the ways that Stenton can potentially shift programming to represent these findings.

Carrying into 2026, Stenton Museum will use these community conversations to develop new ideas for tours and exhibits, which they will then share with community members to get additional feedback.

“The big idea is to work with our near neighbors, Quaker communities, and stakeholders who are interested in this subject, to come up with a way of telling these complicated stories of Quaker involvement in slavery,” Pickeral said.

While Gabbrell James didn’t attend the recent event, the Germantown Info Hub reached out to the near neighbor about her thoughts on this work, based on her association with the subject matter.

James, a Black Quaker, is also part of the local Green Street Friends’ Reparations Committee housed on School House Ln., which seeks to do repair for past injustices towards Black Americans through resource distribution, particularly in the Germantown area.

She says she has seen the almost squeaky clean reputation of the Quaker image for years, adding that even the non-clarification around the real realities of early Quakerism is a fallacy and real harm.

“Quakers were not abolitionists; there were [some] people who were abolitionists, who happened to be Quakers,” James clarified, pointing to Benjamin Lay, a Quaker abolitionist in the 18th century kicked out of four different Quaker meetings for his radical stance against slavery.

“It’s a fake story that white Quakers like to tell people to make themselves look better in history’s eye. There was maybe someone at [a Quaker meeting] who was an abolitionist, but the meeting wasn’t abolitionists.”

Stenton Museum curator Laura Keim and historian Dina Bailey, the project’s community conversations facilitator, guided the presentation and moderated historical discussions while welcoming community input about what Stenton could be prioritizing in its storytelling and research.

“We’ve taken a lot of notes and gathered a lot of feedback about questions that the community has, assumptions the community is making, expectations that folks have, and feelings that people have about certain content,” Bailey said.

Bailey further emphasized the significance of embracing the past, saying that “history is important because it really affects us today, who we are, how we think about things, how we feel about ourselves, and other people.”

“When we have objects or archival documents like letters, those can really be used as tools to think about what we know about the past, but then also how we feel about things in the present,” Bailey said.

From strong emotions to empathetic thoughts about the revelations of the time period, attendees spoke back and forth throughout the night while trying to make sense of the complex findings, an environment that Siena described as a “rich conversation.”

“I was really impressed with the thoughtfulness that everybody brought,” Siena said. “There were lines going out in every direction from the circle, connecting with history and modern life.

Siena also connected the significance of these Stenton discussions with the modern battles of preserving history while under the Trump administration: “I’m really grateful that [Stenton is] doing this work, and I’m very aware of the fact that they’re doing this work in the face of a powerful federal government that’s trying to rewrite history.”

Developing such programming is crucial to the future of Stenton, Pickeral added. “If we’re going to sustain this site for another 100 years, then we have to have a community that rallies around it.”

“People have to feel like this is a place for them,” he said. “That it’s a place that tells stories that they want to know about and that they want to hear, and that they’re a part of helping us tell those stories, not just the staff here doing it.”

Understanding the nature of the work Stenton is doing, Green Street’s James says she hopes to see the institution prioritize uplifting the stories from the perspective she says matters most. “… for any history that’s being told, first person is the best way to tell it,” she said.

“What Black people were alive at that time and wrote about what they were dealing with?” she asked. “How do you tell the story not from your perspective at all?”

Updates about similar Stenton events and exhibits can be found on the museum’s website and social media pages.