Appalachian Churches Series – Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Cumberland, Maryland
On the hill above downtown Cumberland, where Wills Creek meets the Potomac River, stands Emmanuel Episcopal Church. The stone Gothic Revival building is visible from almost every direction, its spire marking the site of an earlier stronghold, Fort Cumberland, that once guarded the western edge of colonial Maryland and shaped the early military career of George Washington. Beneath the sanctuary, tunnels and powder magazines from that fort survive in the dark. In the nineteenth century, those same tunnels drew a different kind of traveler, enslaved people who followed hidden routes toward the Mason Dixon Line and freedom.
Emmanuel’s story is layered. Parish registers and vestry minutes trace family life on the mountain frontier. National Register forms and architectural surveys describe a finely detailed Gothic Revival church and parish hall. Oral histories, diocesan projects, and the Maryland State Archives’ Legacy of Slavery case studies tie the church to the Underground Railroad and to later efforts to confront the history of slavery and racial violence in Allegany County. Archaeological projects are now turning instruments on the hill, scanning for the buried imprint of fort walls and later structures.
This article follows those records and interpretations to tell the story of the church on the fort, from its founding as a parish in 1803 to its ongoing work as a place of worship, memory, and public history.
Fort Hill and the Making of Emmanuel Parish
Long before there was a stone church on Washington Street, there was a frontier fort on the bluff above the creek. Built in the mid 1750s and renamed Fort Cumberland in 1755, the log palisade fort anchored British strategy during the French and Indian War and served as a supply and staging point through the Revolution. The fort watched over Nemacolin’s Path, the early road over the mountains, and later the routes that would become the National Road and the line of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
By 1803, the fort itself had fallen into ruin, but Cumberland was beginning to grow as a transportation hub and county seat. In that year local Episcopalians organized Emmanuel Parish, recording the names of members in a parish register that would become one of the central sources for the church’s early history. Ora Eugene Monnette’s 1911 Monnett family genealogy preserves a pamphlet issued for Emmanuel’s centennial in 1903, quoting those first entries and listing early communicants with familiar Allegany County names. The same work notes that the parish was understood as a dignified successor to earlier informal Episcopal gatherings in the region and emphasizes the prominence of the site then called Fort Hill.
Parish registers and vestry minutes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, preserved on microfilm by the Maryland State Archives (M877), continue the record of baptisms, marriages, burials, and parish governance through the coal and canal years. A separate compiled volume, Historic Records of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Cumberland, Maryland, held at Frostburg State University’s special collections, abstracts many of these entries for genealogists and local historians. Together, these layered records anchor the narrative of a parish that grew with the town and served as what later interpreters would call the “mother church” of Western Maryland Episcopalians.
Building a Gothic Revival Church on the Fort
For its first decades Emmanuel worshipped in more modest accommodations. The present stone church rose only after parishioners decided to build on the hill that preserved the fort’s old earthworks. The cornerstone of the new building was laid in 1849, and the church was completed and consecrated in 1851.
The architect was John Notman of Philadelphia, one of the leading early Gothic Revival designers in the United States. SAH Archipedia describes Emmanuel as a stone Gothic Revival church with a cruciform plan, nave and transepts, chancel, and a tower that rises above Washington Street. The timeline in that entry notes the construction of the church in 1849, the addition of a parish hall in 1902, and an interior renovation around 1905 that included work by Louis Comfort Tiffany.
The Monnett genealogy preserves a long architectural description from an early Emmanuel pamphlet, probably the 1903 centennial booklet, which praises the oak interior, open timbered roof, stone chancel arch, multi level sanctuary, and the presence of a gallery specifically identified as seating for enslaved people. In that description the building stands proudly on Fort Hill and the writer remarks that “no church in America has a more beautiful situation,” overlooking the town that had grown up below.
The Washington Street Historic District entry in SAH Archipedia sets Emmanuel in its neighborhood context, noting the church and parish hall as major contributing buildings at the eastern end of a street lined with nineteenth century houses and civic structures. National Register forms for Emmanuel and for the Washington Street Residential Area echo that assessment and describe the church as one of Maryland’s finest examples of early Gothic Revival design.
In the early twentieth century, the parish hall was designed by Cumberland native Bruce Price, who chose a Second Empire vocabulary of tall windows, strong rooflines, and deep detailing that complements the older church. Today visitors encounter a linked complex of church and hall on the hill above Baltimore Street, with stone walls and stairways guiding them up from the commercial district.
Inside, Tiffany windows from three different periods, a Tiffany designed altar and reredos, and other artist commissions testify to the parish’s aspirations and its engagement with national artistic trends. Parish interpretive materials and the Clio entry for Emmanuel highlight these works as central to the experience of the sanctuary and as part of a larger story of how western Maryland congregations participated in the Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts movements.
Slavery, Tunnels, and the Underground Railroad
If the architecture tells one story, the ground beneath Emmanuel tells another. The Legacy of Slavery case study on the Maryland State Archives website, written by Vernon Roberts, begins by placing the church squarely on the site of Fort Cumberland and noting that several tunnels and the old powder magazine survive beneath the building. These underground spaces began as military infrastructure but acquired a different reputation in the mid nineteenth century as stories of the Underground Railroad accumulated.
The fort tunnels did not suddenly become an Underground Railroad route. Instead, existing spaces took on new uses as enslaved people moved along the C&O Canal, the National Road, and other paths that converged at Cumberland. The Allegany County tourism article “African American Sites in Mountain Maryland” describes how Emmanuel, the Allegany Academy, and the rectory stand in a line on Washington Street and explains that a tunnel, re used in the 1850s as a steam line corridor, connected these basements. The sexton’s duties naturally required him to walk that route at all hours. Oral tradition, recorded in that article, holds that the sexton rang the bell in a particular pattern when it was safe for freedom seekers hiding in the nearby Shanty Town neighborhood to move into the tunnel system. They would rest under the church, receive food and assistance from the rector and others, then move through the tunnel to the academy, on to the rectory, and out into a quiet corner of town where wagons or guides waited to take them toward the Mason Dixon Line, only about four miles away.
Western Maryland’s Historical Library hosts a narrative titled “Emmanuel’s Underground Railroad” that expands on this story. It traces the founding of Emmanuel Parish in 1803, the decision to build on Fort Hill, and the later use of the tunnels under the church and along the old fort lines as part of an Underground Railroad route. That account also points readers toward the church’s own Underground Railroad interpretive materials and to archival sources that document both the fort and the nineteenth century parish.
The Trail of Souls guidebook produced by the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland describes Emmanuel as a mid nineteenth century church standing over fort remains and notes that long standing oral tradition, supported by academic research, identifies the tunnels beneath the church as a station on the Underground Railroad. The same entry emphasizes that Emmanuel’s rector in the 1840s and 1850s, Rev. David Hillhouse Buel, was a known Union sympathizer and had been involved in Underground Railroad work before coming to Cumberland.
Maryland Historical Trust reports and grant announcements echo these interpretations. In 2020 the Trust’s African American Heritage Preservation Program highlighted Emmanuel’s tunnels in a blog post, stating that the church was built atop the remains of Fort Cumberland, that its tunnels “eventually came to be used as shelter by African Americans escaping slavery,” and that a local tradition remembers a quilt panel bearing a cross on a hill that signaled Emmanuel as a stop on the road to freedom.
Together, these sources show a convergence of oral history, parish memory, diocesan research, and state level heritage work. They do not provide a diary like narrative of individual escapes, but they establish that by the late twentieth century the story of Emmanuel as an Underground Railroad site was taken seriously enough to anchor historic preservation funding, interpretive trails, and diocesan pilgrimages.
Samuel Denson, Rev. Buel, and African American Parishioners
The Underground Railroad story at Emmanuel is closely tied to individual names. The Trail of Souls guidebook notes that during Rev. Buel’s tenure there was an increase in the number of enslaved and free Black people listed in the parish registers, and it highlights a man named Samuel Denson, who arrived in Cumberland in the early 1850s after escaping from slavery in Mississippi and who later became sexton of the church.
A detailed biographical study of Denson, available through Western Maryland’s Historical Library, cross checks census records, parish registers, newspaper articles, and the Legacy of Slavery case study. It concludes that Denson did indeed serve as sexton at Emmanuel, although his documented tenure as sexton falls after the Civil War, in the late nineteenth century. The paper treats the Denson story as a window into how memories of Underground Railroad activity, parish records, and later community storytelling intertwine.
Rev. David Hillhouse Buel appears in multiple sources. Maryland State Archives lists him in its “Stories of Flight” Allegany County page as an accomplice to slave flight connected to Emmanuel Episcopal Church. Biographical notes in the Western Maryland Historical Library and elsewhere emphasize that he arrived at Emmanuel in 1847, had prior abolitionist connections in other Maryland parishes, and was a strong Union supporter in a region sharply divided during the Civil War.
Architectural and genealogical sources add another dimension to the story of race and worship at Emmanuel. The architectural description preserved in the Monnett genealogy describes a gallery “for slaves” in the south transept, set opposite the organ loft and framed by the same arches and timber work as the rest of the interior. The African American heritage article from Allegany County tourism likewise notes that enslaved people owned by Samuel Semmes and others were allowed to receive communion at Emmanuel, provided that a balcony was built to seat Black worshippers.
These details point to the layered reality of Emmanuel in the 1850s: a parish that participated in the slaveholding order of Maryland yet also nurtured abolitionist clergy, sheltered freedom seekers in its tunnels, and counted Black parishioners in its registers.
A Hill of Freedom Roads
The Underground Railroad story at Emmanuel is also part of a wider landscape of freedom routes in the Potomac Highlands. The Appalachian Forest National Heritage Area’s essay “A Timeless Road to Freedom: Cumberland and Emmanuel Parish” frames the church as a node along paths that began with Native trails and Shawnee villages that sheltered runaways near Oldtown, continued along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath, and extended across the Mason Dixon Line into Pennsylvania.
The National Park Service’s study of Black laborers and freedom seekers along the C&O Canal directs readers to the Legacy of Slavery site for Emmanuel and discusses how canal workers, boatmen, and local African American communities used the canal corridor both as a workplace and as a route of escape. The Fort Cumberland walking trail, which includes the Emmanuel grounds, reinforces that story in the landscape with plaques and brochures that connect the fort, the canal terminus, George Washington’s reconstructed headquarters cabin, and the church.
The church itself has embraced this interpretation. Parish history and “Emmanuel and the Underground Railroad” pages describe the fort era, the building of the Gothic Revival church, and the use of the tunnels to shelter people seeking freedom, and they invite visitors to arrange Underground Railroad tours that include both the tunnels and the parish welcome center.
Archaeology and the Fort Cumberland Site
Beneath the grass and asphalt of Fort Hill, archaeologists and preservationists are now looking for more evidence of the eighteenth century fort and later use of the site. Fort Cumberland has been the subject of repeated geophysical surveys, and the Emmanuel grounds are part of that work.
Maryland Historical Trust’s annual reports and blog posts describe a 2019 African American Heritage Preservation Program grant that funded improvements to the Emmanuel tunnels, including better lighting and ventilation, in support of tours that interpret the Underground Railroad story. In 2024 the Trust announced a historic preservation non capital grant awarded to a local nonprofit to hire a ground penetrating radar specialist to conduct a non invasive survey around the Emmanuel and Wills Creek Museum campus. The goal, as the grant description notes, is to locate buried cultural remains under lawns, parking lots, sidewalks, and roads that may relate to Fort Cumberland and later construction.
In June 2025, the City of Cumberland confirmed that this ground penetrating radar survey would take place during Allegany County Museum Week. City notices explain that the survey would cover open spaces on and near the Emmanuel property in hopes of documenting subsurface features and clarifying the footprint of the fort and its associated works.
These archaeological efforts do not target the Underground Railroad narrative directly. Instead, they aim to map the physical remains of the fort and subsequent building campaigns. Yet in doing so they promise to refine our understanding of the tunnels, magazines, and earthworks that later generations remembered as part of a freedom network.
Records, Families, and Parish Memory
For genealogists and local historians, Emmanuel’s registers, vestry minutes, and compiled histories provide a dense record of life in Cumberland from the early nineteenth century onward. The parish register on microfilm, along with vestry minutes that record financial decisions, building campaigns, and the election of lay leaders, underpins studies of families like the Monnetts, Hillearys, Crabbs, and Spriggs who appear repeatedly in Allegany County records.
Monnett’s genealogy draws directly from these records, transcribing entries from “Emmanuel Parish Church, Site of Old Fort Cumberland, Maryland” and using them to tie together family movements from colonial Maryland to Ohio. In doing so, it preserves otherwise obscure details about the 1903 centennial, the wording of early pamphlets, and local traditions about the church’s hilltop setting.
Maryland Historical Magazine’s published list of subscribers to an Emmanuel Episcopal Church (in Baltimore but including a discrete section for the Cumberland parish) offers another window into nineteenth century Episcopal networks and giving patterns. Combined with Emmanuel’s own pew rent and donation records, such lists can be used to trace the social geography of the parish, identifying which families invested in the church and how that changed over time.
The parish history booklet The Church on the Fort by H. Maunsell Richardson, cited by later authors and held in regional archives, synthesizes these archival sources into a narrative history of the parish, the fort site, and the wider community. While not a primary source in the strictest sense, it is a near primary document that reflects mid twentieth century parish memory and scholarship and remains a starting point for many researchers.
Memory, Lynching, and Public History in the Present
In recent years Emmanuel’s role as a site of Underground Railroad memory has intersected with efforts to remember racial terror and segregation in Allegany County. On August 28, 2021, the Equal Justice Initiative and local partners dedicated a historical marker outside the church to memorialize the 1907 lynching of a young Black man long reported as William Burns but later identified by family as Robert Hughes. The marker stands near the courthouse where the lynching took place and directly across from the church with its tunnels and fort heritage.
The Maryland Lynching Memorial Project and the Allegany County Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Committee have used Emmanuel as a gathering place for soil collection ceremonies, educational events, and public conversations about the legacy of racial violence. In this way, the site’s history as a place of worship, as a station on freedom routes, and as a neighbor to the seat of local justice has become part of a contemporary movement for remembrance and reconciliation.
A Hill of Many Stories
Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Cumberland is at once a parish, a landmark, an archaeological site, and a memory place. The church’s registers and vestry minutes trace the lives of white and Black parishioners who worshipped on Fort Hill from the early republic through the industrial age. Architectural surveys and National Register forms describe a carefully designed Gothic Revival building and parish hall that reflect national trends and local pride.
At the same time, diocesan projects, state heritage programs, and local oral histories insist that the story of Emmanuel cannot be told without the tunnels under the floor and the people who passed through them. The fort that once sent British troops toward the Ohio River left tunnels that later offered shelter to enslaved men and women moving toward the Mason Dixon Line. The balcony that segregated Black worshippers in the sanctuary stands in tension with the same parish’s role in abolitionist networks and later racial justice work.
Today tours of the tunnels, Trail of Souls pilgrimages, archaeological surveys, and community memorials keep these stories in motion. Emmanuel remains a working parish on Sunday mornings, but it is also a place where the layered histories of the frontier, slavery, resistance, and reconciliation are written into the very ground beneath the pews.
Sources & Further Reading
Maryland State Archives. “Parish Register, 1910–1964, and Vestry Minutes, 1897–1900, 1909–1912, 1942–1955, Emmanuel Parish, Cumberland, Allegany County, Episcopal Church, Diocese of Maryland. MSA M877.” Guide to Government Records. Maryland State Archives. https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/stagsere/se1/se1-299/pdf/000016/000000/000298e.pdf
Frostburg State University Library. “Historic Records of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Cumberland, MD :: SpecCol :: F189.C9 H57 1984.” Genealogy Research Guide. https://libguides.frostburg.edu/c.php?g=432638&p=2952817
Monnette, Ora Eugene. Monnett Family Genealogy: Ancestry and Descendants of Solomon and Sarah (Coons) Monnette. Los Angeles: Torch Press, 1911. Selections citing “Emmanuel Parish Church, Site of Old Fort Cumberland, Maryland” parish register. https://archive.org/details/monnettefamilyge01monn
Richardson, H. Maunsell. The Church on the Fort: 150 Years of Emmanuel Parish, Cumberland, Maryland. Cumberland: Commercial Press, 1953. WorldCat record via LDSGenealogy Cumberland church records index. https://ldsgenealogy.com/MD/Cumberland.htm
Lowdermilk, Will H. History of Cumberland (Maryland) from the Time of the Indian Town, Caiuctucuc, in 1728, up to the Present Day. Washington, DC: James Anglim, 1878. https://archive.org/details/historyofcumberl00lowd
Maryland State Archives. “Emmanuel Episcopal Church Cumberland, Maryland.” Legacy of Slavery in Maryland case study by Vernon Roberts. https://slavery.msa.maryland.gov/html/casestudies/fifeec.html
Western Maryland’s Historical Library. “Emmanuel’s Underground Railroad.” Allegany County African American History collection. https://www.whilbr.org/AlleganyAfricanAmericans/Emmanuels-Underground-Railroad
Western Maryland’s Historical Library. “Reverend David Hillhouse Buel, 1817–1893.” Allegany County African American History collection. https://www.whilbr.org/AlleganyAfricanAmericans/Reverend-David-Hillhouse-Buel-1817-1893
Emmanuel Parish of the Episcopal Church. “History.” Emmanuel Parish of the Episcopal Church, Cumberland, Maryland. https://emmanuelparishofmd.org/history/
Appalachian Forest National Heritage Area. “A Timeless Road to Freedom: Cumberland and Emmanuel Parish.” America 250 stories, September 22, 2023. https://www.appalachianforestnha.org/america250-in-the-appalachian-forest-stories/a-timeless-road-to-freedomcumberland-and-emmanuel-parish
Clio Foundation. “Emmanuel Parish of the Episcopal Church.” Clio: Your Guide to History. https://theclio.com/entry/11588
Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. “Emmanuel Church, Cumberland.” On the Trail of Souls. https://trailofsouls.org/emmanuel-church-cumberland/
Paulsen, David. “Diocese of Maryland’s Trail of Souls Uncovers Hidden History of Churches’ Ties to Slavery.” Episcopal News Service, February 24, 2017. https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2017/02/24/diocese-of-marylands-trail-of-souls-uncovers-hidden-history-of-churches-ties-to-slavery/
Maryland Historical Trust. “African American Heritage Preservation Program Awards $1 Million in Grants Statewide.” News release including Emmanuel Episcopal Church tunnels project, October 2020. https://mht.maryland.gov
Maryland Historical Trust. “Non-Capital Grant Awards, Fiscal Year 2025.” Listing of Fort Cumberland and Emmanuel Episcopal Church exploratory archaeology project. https://mht.maryland.gov
Davidson, Lisa Pfueller, and Catherine C. Lavoie. “Emmanuel Episcopal Church and Parish Hall, Cumberland, Maryland.” SAH Archipedia. Society of Architectural Historians. https://sah-archipedia.org
National Park Service. “Washington Street Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places documentation noting Emmanuel Episcopal Church as a contributing property. https://www.nps.gov
National Park Service. “Difficulty on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal: The Black Laborers and Freedom Seekers on the C&O Canal.” C&O Canal National Historical Park. https://www.nps.gov/choh/learn/historyculture/african-americans.htm
MDMountainSide (Allegany County Tourism). “African American Sites in Mountain Maryland.” Heritage listing including Emmanuel Episcopal Church and Underground Railroad tunnels. https://www.mdmountainside.com
Passages of the Potomac. “Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Cumberland, Maryland.” Regional heritage trail entry. https://www.passagesofthepotomac.org
Reed Brothers Dodge History. “Then & Now: Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Cumberland, Maryland, 1912.” Reed Brothers Dodge – Potomac, Maryland blog. https://reedbrothersdodgehistory.com/2014/02/09/then-now-emmanuel-episcopal-church-cumberland-maryland-1912/
Western Maryland’s Historical Library. “Allegany County African American History – Bibliography.” Includes Emmanuel Episcopal Church sources such as parish brochures and Tiffany window materials. https://www.whilbr.org/AlleganyAfricanAmericans/index.aspx
LDSGenealogy.com. “Cumberland Genealogy (in Allegany County, Maryland).” Directory of church and local histories referencing Emmanuel Episcopal Church records and related printed compilations. https://ldsgenealogy.com/MD/Cumberland.htm
Author Note: I first walked up to Emmanuel Episcopal Church because of its fort markers and Underground Railroad stories. I hope this article helps you see that hilltop not only as a pretty stone church but as a layered site of war, slavery, and freedom in mountain Maryland.