The neighborhood the Pa. Capitol destroyed

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Helen M. Lee was one of the last holdouts in Harrisburg’s Old Eighth Ward — a wrench in the gears of official plans to raze the neighborhood and build a grander state Capitol complex.

Lee owned four of the last five buildings — located on Walnut and Short Streets — that the commonwealth needed to carry out its plan.

First it had to find her.

According to researcher Rachel Williams, Lee’s properties had been condemned for the project, but she still held the titles. The local sheriff launched a fruitless search for her, and state officials — intent to finish clearing the impoverished neighborhood at the edges of the opulent Capitol — pressed a court to force the buildings from her hands.

“Many hours were spent in vain by the sheriff and his corps of three deputies in the neighborhoods where they thought Mrs. Lee might venture,” reads a frustrated-sounding notice that was published in the Evening News paper (paywall) on Oct. 17, 1917. 

“All this trouble is due to the fact that Mrs. Lee is unwilling to surrender her properties for the price offered by the Capitol Park Extension Commission.” 

Lee would ultimately hand over the keys to the deputy attorney general that following June. By that time, the Eighth Ward as they knew it — a Black, Jewish, and immigrant enclave comprising 20 blocks and thousands of residents at the turn of the century — was gone, the Capitol Park soon to take its place. It was the most diverse neighborhood in the city.

“There’s not a brick, a rock, a cornice, or a cobblestone left — absolutely nothing,” Lenwood Sloan, a local activist and organizer, told Capital-Star in 2019. “Hundreds of workers come to the Capitol every day without knowing there was a proud African-American community that lived there.”

A monument to the erased neighborhood was unveiled in 2020, and the ward’s history is being told in other ways, including through a new play — Voices of the Eighth Chronicles II — by Sharia Benn, co-founder of Harrisburg’s Sankofa African American Theatre Company. 

Benn has previously written about the Old Eighth's entrepreneurs, advocates, abolitionists, and stars of the Harlem Renaissance.

Her latest work on the subject is on now through Feb. 12 at Harrisburg’s Gamut Theatre. It’s described as a blend of storytelling "that fuses imagery, movement, sound, and music to uplift the work of chain-breakers and change-makers from Harrisburg’s demolished Eighth Ward.”

“The Old Eighth Ward was about 60% European and about 40% African American,” Benn told PA Local by phone. “It was a vibrant community where African Americans owned property. They owned businesses. They were entrepreneurs. They were champions of change from the mid-1800s until about 1918, when the Old Eighth Ward was pretty much gone.”

Benn’s work has leaned on a growing catalog of research, some of it showcased by Digital Harrisburg here, to introduce audiences and students to the people of the Old Eighth. It’s a long list that includes:

• Esther Popel, a poet and the first African-American woman to graduate from Dickinson College. “But she couldn’t stay on campus, they wouldn’t allow her to,” Benn explained, “so she had to make her way from the Eighth Ward to Carlisle to go to class.” 
   
• Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who published a major work, Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence. It was a collection of speeches by the likes of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. And like Popel, she was an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement.
   
• Thomas Morris Chester, who was America’s first Black war correspondent and covered the Civil War from the Virginia front lines for the white-owned Philadelphia Press newspaper.
   
• Jacob Compton, a soldier, musician, and carriage driver who once “spirited Abraham Lincoln out of Harrisburg to evade assassination” on the eve of his inauguration in 1861.
   
• There was also Catherine McClintock, a child of German parents who helped enslaved people escape bondage on the Underground Railroad; Jane M. Chester, who fled slavery to Harrisburg, where she helped others do the same; and writer, abolitionist, and temperance and suffrage activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

All, at one time, called the Old Eighth home.

“Because that history is buried, lost, unknown, people locally have not discovered it, they didn't even know to look for their greatness through their ancestors in the Old Eighth Ward,” Benn said. “This is our history. This is Harrisburg history. This is American history.”

Learn more about Benn's Voices of the Eighth Chronicles II: Stories from Harrisburg’s Old Eighth Ward here.

—Colin Deppen, PA Local editor 

"We confront it, and that huge fear goes away. We realize how we can control it. Students don’t want to be robbed of the product. They don’t."

—Point Park University Professor Chris Girman, one of several Pittsburgh-area instructors trying to embrace AI tools, like ChatGPT, in the classroom as some universities ban the technology over cheating concerns

Fog on the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg, via Jim F. Send us your photos, use #PAGems on Instagram, or tag us @spotlightpennsylvania.