MORE:\u00a0Bench in Rittenhouse Square to honor late WMMR DJ Pierre Robert<\/a><\/p>\n Most of the\u00a0chronicling of the National Historic Landmark in Southwest Philadelphia centers\u00a0around John Bartram, a Quaker and self-taught botanist who became known during the 1700s for his internationally renowned horticultural collection. But\u00a0Winschell said\u00a0Bartram’s Garden wanted to know more about the history of the farm, and\u00a0in 2017, it began working with New Jersey-based historian Sharece Blakney, whose research focuses on the lives of enslaved people in early America.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\u201cThere are a lot of people and ecosystems that are left out of the popular version of history,\u201d Winschel said. \u201cHere\u2019s this one brilliant white man who is learning from all these landscapes, getting rich and famous from them. There\u2019s just a lot that is unsaid and there is a lot that is unrecorded.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Historical records about the Bartram family have repeatedly referred to Harvey, but\u00a0\u201cwe don\u2019t know anything about him,\u201d Winschel said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re telling me that this was a cherished member of the family, but all we have is this one name and you\u2019re saying the great honor of his life was that he got to sit at John Bartram’s dinner table? Something\u2019s missing here. \u2026 It may have been a concocted story.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \nBlakney found that the story likely comes from a widely held belief in the early-19th century that members of the Bartram family were abolitionists who often spoke out against slavery. While some members signed manumission documents to free enslaved people, the family was also involved in trafficking across the East Coast.<\/p>\n \nIn the mid-18th century, John Bartram made arrangements to send his son six enslaved people who he had purchased to assist on a rice plantation in Florida. Census records and bills of sale have found evidence that other Black people were living in the Bartram house, but it’s unknown in what capacity.\n<\/p>\n Pennsylvania abolished slavery<\/a> in 1780, but not in a way that immediately freed many slaves. The law phased out slavery gradually; by 1840, there were still 64 slaves in the state.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFor Sharece to have found this very clear documentation that we know that the Bartram’s participated in enslaving people, that has to be part of the story we tell,\u201d Winschel said.<\/p>\n Former assistant gardener Yasir Hall, above, designed the Harvey Memorial Garden in 2024.<\/p>\n \nIn 2024, Bartram\u2019s Garden commissioned former assistant gardener Yasir Hall to design the Harvey Memorial Garden.\n<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a lovely and contemplative area, and it kind of gives an opportunity to recognize that there are people who worked this land and walked these paths that we might never know who they are,\u201d Winschel said. \u201cBut they were here and those memories matter to those of us who are still here and who are able to point to the absence of a story as a way of telling that story.\u201d<\/p>\n \nBlakney\u2019s research, and that of the late historian Joel Fry, on the subject of Black history at Bartram\u2019s Garden is available in a short booklet titled \u201cStories We Know,\u201d which can be viewed online<\/a>\u00a0and purchased in the Welcome Center.<\/p>\n Blakney declined a request for an interview, deferring to her published research on the site’s history, which she called “a labor of love.”<\/p>\n During a time when the federal government is targeting mentions of slavery at national parks and museums, Winschel stressed the importance of\u00a0retelling stories of American history from varying perspectives. Last month, the National Park Service removed<\/a>\u00a0exhibits in Philadelphia\u00a0that depicted the lives of nine people who were enslaved at George Washington\u2019s house.\u00a0The Trump administration classified the site as one that \u201cdisparages\u201d American history.\u00a0A federal judge later\u00a0ordered<\/a>\u00a0the displays to be restored to their original condition, but the federal government plans to challenge that ruling.<\/p>\n Winschel said Bartram’s Garden\u00a0has found that by acknowledging the pain, complications and harm that is embedded in historic places, it has become easier to connect with their visitors.\n<\/p>\n \n\u201cI think to tell the truth about what has happened in a space, and to be open that sometimes beautiful places have fraught legacies, that is part of making a space feel safe,\u201d she said. \u201c… That is the bare minimum of storytelling that a historic place owes to its past, to its neighbors and visitors. To say, here\u2019s who was here and here\u2019s how we are keeping their memories alive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a quiet corner of Bartram’s Garden that overlooks the Schuylkill River, there’a a small memorial\u00a0named after Harvey,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[27975,12910,94,8589,69,71,70,53031,34251],"class_list":["post-137349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-bartrams-garden","tag-black-history","tag-history","tag-memorial","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-presidents-house","tag-slavery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Bartram's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/031226_Yasir_Hall_Bartrams_Garden.width-704.png\")
Provided Image\/Bartram’s Garden<\/p>\n