NEWTOWN

The local designation Newtown is rarely found in newspapers of the period.

 

This African American name for the settlement described the foundation c. 1865 of a significant community of free African Americans. Newtown first existed outside of Harrisonburg's city lines, and then was incorporated within Harrisonburg itself in the

so-called Zirkel city additions (named for local landowners, the Zirkels). Today Harrisonburg's Northeast Neighborhood includes major parts of historic Newtown.

 

Defining Newtown institutions were its African American cemetery, with burials dating back to at least 1838. These earliest burials were established on land formerly part of the local Gray family's Hilltop Plantation. Newtown's early religious institutions included the First Baptist Church, the John Wesley Methodist Church on Liberty Street, the Church of the Kelley Street United Brethren in Christ (in 1919 to become the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church,) and the Mennonite Church. Newtown had an all-grade Colored School—first a small building located on Rock Street which in 1882 was replaced by the larger Effinger Street School. In 1939 the new Lucy F. Simms School on Simms Street came to serve as the community's educational institution. A thriving business district grew up in Newtown, including Wolfe and Main Streets, and the area's careful grid network of streets seamlessly continued the layout of the existing city plan. These new streets were lined with well-kept homes of Newtown’s thriving African American families, including the Historic Dallard-Newman House.

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