WYETH

THE CORNER

ANDREW WYETH

Wyeth was inspired by Mother Archie, a pillar of the Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania Black community from 1891–1932. She built and lived in a home on the same property as her church and cemetery. Wyeth created several paintings of the church's ruins over the years.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

MOTHER ARCHIE'S CHURCH

Addison's Gallery

1945

Archie’s Corner was named from the location of Mother Archie’s Church at the corner of Bullock and Ring Roads in Chadds Ford. The term was coined in 1953 by Andrew Wyeth. “The Corner”  ​is a snowy portrait of the church and the wood frame house in which Mother Archie had lived. 

Mother Archie was a powerful spiritual leader in the Black Community of Chadds Ford. A woman being ordained as a minister in a Black church in the 1800’s, or any church for that matter, was extraordinary. She somehow had the resources to purchase the former Bullock School building in 1891. Perhaps the resources came from her new congregation, and if so, it would speak to the value people placed in her...

What happened to the octagon derives from what happened after Mother Archie’s death in 1932. The church gradually disbanded, the property declined, people began living in the church and wood frame house, and battles ensued about the use of the property.

Chadds Ford contained a small enclave of African-Americans known as "Little Africa." The community settled around Mother Archie's Church, a Quaker schoolhouse converted to a house of worship. Andrew Wyeth painted the church in several landscapes during its active period, and the abandoned building walls appear in Ring Road (1985). African-American residents of Little Africa appear as recurring models for Wyeth's paintings.

Ring Road

1985

Wyeth’s home in Chadds Ford was not far from a community called Little Africa, an Underground Railroad stop operated by Quakers (A carriage house at Oakdale farm held a secret room to hide enslaved Africans). At the center of the community was Mother Archie’s Church, a former Quaker schoolhouse that was purchased by Lydia Archie in 1891. An ordained preacher in the African Union Methodist Protestant Church, she died in 1932, and the church was later dissolved.

African American Historic Places

Edited by Beth l. Savage

"Hillendale Road
Pennsbury Township, Chadds Ford

Built in 1840, Oakdale is associated with Isaac and Dinah Mendenhall, leading abolitionists. In 1853 they were among the abolitionists who established the Society of Progressive Friends at Longwood in response to the abolition cause.

Their farm was the first stop north of the Delaware line on the Underground Railroad, which was used to assist fugitive southern slaves on their escape from slavery. An interesting feature of Oakdale Farm is the concealed room in the old carriage house that was used to harbor fugitive slaves. Isaac Mendenhall constructed a square room between the walk-in fireflace and the west wall. The fleeing slaves entered the hideaway through the loft. Oakdale Farm remained in Mendenhall family ownership until the mid-1920's." 

NC Black Heritage Tour