Explore the Latest at SSAAM

Preserving Black Churches grants are highly competitive. This funding cycle, the National Trust for Historic Preservation will invest $4 million dollars in 31 historic churches, selected from more than 550 proposals. Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum (SSAAM) is honored to be among this distinguished cohort of grant recipients.

As part of its Black History Month celebration, the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum has a month-long display at the Montgomery Library featuring two newly-discovered love letters written in 1921, that reveal a century-old love story from the Sourland Mountain region's past.

New Jersey fought with the North during the Civil War, which may be one reason many of today’s residents don’t equate it with slavery. But enslavement was prevalent for 200 or more years before that.

Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum (SSAAM) and the Sourland Conservancy are pleased to announce that the two organizations’ jointly-owned historic True Farmstead on Hollow Road in Skillman will receive $75,000 from the Preserve New Jersey Historic Preservation Fund. New Jersey Historic Trust (NJHT) recommended the grant for the sites historic site project plan and it is authorized by the Garden State Preservation Trust.

Donnetta Bishop-Johnson, SSAAM’s Executive Director stated, “This project will help to ‘fill in the blanks’ in American history, which will enable us to understand where we are today and how we can move forward to a more just, equitable, and inclusive future.”

History will look to the future when the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum (SSAAM), Central Jersey’s only Black history museum, will hold its first Juneteenth celebration on June 18.

SSAAM is welcoming the public for the first time not only after the COVID-19 pandemic, but after extensive restoration and renovation, said Executive Director Donnetta Johnson.

Founded in 2014, SSAAM's mission is to tell the story of the unique culture, experiences and contributions of the African American community of the Sourland Mountain region, the largest undeveloped area between New York City and Philadelphia.

More than 240 years ago, in Charleston, South Carolina, a 13-year-old African American boy named Friday Trueheart was separated from his mother Dinah, when their enslaver, the Rev. Oliver Hart, came north to New Jersey and took the young teen with him.

Oliver would become the new pastor at the Old School Baptist Church, which still stands on West Broad Street in Hopewell.

On Thursday, a Witness Stone — a permanent brass marker to memorialize an enslaved individual — was unveiled on the ground in front of the church by Truehart’s direct descendant and family matriarch Patricia True Payne.

At a celebration ceremony called “Preservation in Action” Somerset County Commissioner Director Shanel Robinson spoke from the front porch of a modest house on the farmstead, located 100 feet from the newly renovated Mt. Zion AME Church.

Halfway up Sourland Mountain in Hopewell sits Stoutsburg Cemetery – officially founded as a burying ground for slaves, free Blacks and veterans in the 1850s when rules prohibited Blacks from being buried in white cemeteries.

As generations passed, the stories of those buried there slowly faded like the engravings on the stones themselves. Until Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills got to work. The lifelong friends, who trace their own ancestry back four and five generations in the Sourlands region, spent years digging through wills, deeds and court records to recover the area’s forgotten Black history.

As Mills and Buck first set out to make the nearby Stoutsburg Cemetery the official burial place for Stives, they sit on the board of the historically black burial ground where many of their own ancestors were laid to rest. The ground is rich with stories the ladies hope don't melt away.

Stoutsburg Cemetery, tucked in a clearing about halfway up Sourland Mountain, is one of the state’s oldest African-American burial grounds.

It may also be one its best chronicled, thanks to Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills, two self-described ordinary small-town, middle-aged women turned “history detectives” who have spent more than a dozen years combing through wills, property deeds, tax records and other documents to recover the area’s overlooked Black history.