| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.1

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Hinsonville, A Community at the Crossroads: The Story of a Nineteenth-Century African-American Village. By Marianne H. Russo and Paul A. Russo. (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2005. xiii, 198 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $39.50.)
Hinsonville, A Community at the Crossroads successfully chronicles the origins, impact, and activities of a vibrant village of black denizens situated in the southeastern part of Chester County, Pennsylvania. For forty years, between 1829 and 1869, black transient workers, entrepreneurs, and landowners there created an independent sanctuary that buffered the influence of slavery by affording blacks an opportunity to own land, educate their young, and worship in an independent black church. With great sensitivity, independent scholar Marianne Russo argues from the thorough research of her late husband, Paul Russo, that the black "antebellum haven" of Hinsonville disappeared in the wake of the Civil War because the war encouraged the influx of black and white industrial workers, outmigration of Hinsonville's agrarian natives, the growth of Lincoln University, and the sprawling of railroads in Chester County.	1
Using family Bibles, court records, and wills, Russo meticulously explores the lives of Hinsonville residents and demonstrates how family ties helped sustain the village. She humanizes the inhabitants of Hinsonville by chronicling their fears and reactions to nearby violence. Hinsonville's location six miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line—a line associated with the divide between free and slave states—placed its residents in constant fear. According to Russo, the Christiana Riot and the kidnapping of free-born black sisters Rachel and Elizabeth Parker by a Maryland slave catcher in 1851 shaped the actions of village residents and the whites who surrounded it.	. . .

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