John Pendygraft

Wet plate photography is a photographic process invented in the 1850s. The plates are made on site, using a portable darkroom. The process is slow, difficult, cumbersome and inefficient, especially compared to how quickly and easily we make images today. By slowing down, making images becomes collaborative. It embraces human connectivity and seeks surprises. We need those spaces today more than ever.

The Darby Free Library, located at 1001 Main Street, is the oldest library in the country in continuous operation. The library was established in 1743 by twenty-nine Darby Quakers. It was modeled after Benjamin Franklin's Library Company, which formed in 1731. The Darby Library claimed the title “oldest library in continuous operation” when Franklin’s Library Company closed for repairs after a fire. The librarians who work there claim it is haunted.

For 34 of its 283 years, Susan Borders has been the heart and soul of the nation’s second oldest library. She keeps 50 cents on the front desk for a particularly large and intimidating regular they’ve nicknamed “Gruff” (after illustrations in the children’s book The Gruffalo). She knows Gruff uses the two quarters to buy one banana at the local hospital just up the street. She knows a nearby homeless shelter closes between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., and makes sure the library is a welcoming place, rain, shine or snow. “I meet people who other people might be afraid of. The community needs us and we need the community.” She takes a call about late fines, “Just bring the books in and we’ll waive the fees. I just want you to keep reading.” The caller got off easy. Normally, she makes people tell her a story before she waives their late fees.

She fumbles with a flustered dad and a grumpy toddler trying to make a letter-size print from an email attachment on an iPhone. “Just try to send it and we’ll see if the size is right. First one is on me.”

“The history of this place isn’t about dates. This is a living library. It is about 280-something years of days with people.”

And with ghosts. Ask any of the librarians. Books fall. Smells hover from nowhere. Stairs creek. Each librarian has stories.

In 1982, Borders was nine months pregnant with her first child, working at K-Mart, and looking for a house she could afford. She found a twin on Poplar Street in Darby for $25,000 and jumped on it. 

It was a different Darby back then. “The block was one, big, unrelated family,” she remembers. In grade school, her daughter and two neighborhood friends started dressing identically and introducing themselves as triplets. She could watch all the kids walk to school together and back from her front porch. 

When she first brought her two-year-old daughter to the Darby Library, there were no scheduled story times. She asked then-library president William Frasch if she could organize one. Children lit up around her. Frash recognized how Borders brought the library to life and hired her part time. 

In 1992, he asked her if she balanced her check book regularly. When she said yes, he paid for her to go to community college for accounting and put her in charge of the books. 

In 1994, the head librarian resigned and Frasch offered the job to Borders, on two-year probation. In that time, she would have to earn her associates degree and librarian certificate. She aced her classes and won hearts in the community. For the 275h anniversary of the library she dedicated herself to writing a book that compiled the library’s history.

When her daughter was 16, crack pipes began littering their peaceful neighborhood. There was little the police could do, so she eventually moved her family. “The whole block has turned over. I think there is just one family still there that we know.”

Harold Finnigan is untroubled by the sweat saturating his shirt or the record-breaking summer heat. He paces an open lot at 1000 Main Street with a cell phone to his ear, walking first towards the historic library, on the southwest side of the lot, and then towards the historic Darby Friends Meeting house on the north side. 

Finnigan is supervising renovations on both. He is solidly against all forms of personal vanity and guides his days through time-honored Quaker principles: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality and stewardship. 

In him, Darby’s history, and the ways it created the America we know today, is very much alive.

He traces his own Quaker values to 1682 - one year after King Charles II granted William Penn a charter for the land that would become Pennsylvania. That year, the Darby Quaker meeting was established along the Great Minquas Path by John Blunston as a foundation for Penn’s “holy experiment” - a country unified by a commitment to freedom of religion, equality and democratic government.

Darby is Finnigan’s hometown. He loves its history obsessively, particularly its commitment to abolition and human equality. He remembers being a young boy walking past century-old greenhouses that were once crowded with mulberry trees. His father was a well-known businessman in Darby who made sure his son knew that the greenhouses were part of a Quaker abolitionist movement, and that the town was once surrounded by acres upon acres of mulberry orchards.

Finnigan explains that many early abolitionist Quakers would not wear cotton, the economic foundation of the slave economy in their time. The mulberry trees hosted worms that produced silk for clothing mills built along Darby Creek, which runs along Main Street. The mills produced silk as a thriving, exportable alternative to cotton.

In an act that would one day haunt Darby, hills along Main Street were lowered to allow horse drawn carts to pull trading barges up the creek to those factories. Then, for generations, people dumped dirt in the creek to dispose of it. As towns around the creek became paved, less water was absorbed by surrounding soil. Increased runoff filled the creek with more sediment. When Finnigan was a boy, Main Street was cobblestone and the creek was deep enough to swim in. Today it runs shallow.

That changed landscape altered Darby forever in 1999, when Hurricane Floyd flood waters decimated homes and businesses along the waterway.

Harold Finnigan

Jan and John Haigis are proud of the fact that they live in a home once owned by Passmore Williamson, who, along with “Father of the Underground Railroad” William Still, was jailed in 1855 for helping Jane Johnson and her two sons escape slavery. Jan and John Haigis curate a website that details Darby history, https://www.darbyhistory.com. There, they tell Williamson’s story, one of many that center Darby as a birthplace of the underground railroad. 

It began when John H. Wheeler, United States Ambassador to Nicaragua, stopped in Philadelphia with three enslaved people, Jane Johnson and her two children. While boarding a ferry, Johnson whispered her desire to be free to a hotel porter. Word was received by Still and Williamson, who boarded the ferry with five Black dockworkers. Still recalled Williamson’s words in his book The Underground Rail Road, "You are entitled to your freedom according to the laws of Pennsylvania, having been brought into the State by your owner.” Johnson exclaimed, "I am not free, but I want my freedom--ALWAYS wanted to be free!! but he holds me." Still led Johnson and her children off the ferry and into a carriage. Both Still and Williamson remained intentionally unaware of the Johnson family’s future destination. 

Furious, Wheeler petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus to force Williamson to produce Johnson in court. When Williamson said, in complete honesty, that he had no idea where Johnson was, he was jailed in Moyamensing Prison between July 27 and November 3, 1855. 

Williamson’s arrest aroused the anti-slavery movement. The case was covered by newspapers around the country and he received prominent abolitionist visitors, including Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas. 

Still and the five dock workers faced riot and assault charges. In a bold and risky move, on August 29, 1855, Jane Johnson appeared as a surprise witness in their trial. She arrived veiled and escorted by a cadre of female abolitionists, testified on behalf of the people who freed her and was whisked out the back with four officers for her protection. Williamson was released. Still and the five dock workers were acquitted of riot charges. Two of the dock workers, who physically restrained Wheeler, served one week for assault.

Jan and John Haigis remain dedicated to keeping Darby history, and the inspirations to civil liberties within it, alive.

As Bernard Freeman, assistant foreman for Darby Borough Public Works, rides his lawnmower across the now-vacant lot at 870 Main Street, he remembers when it was Woolworth. He points to the corner of the lot where the cafeteria counter used to be. There were balloons on the ceiling. You pulled them down, and the price you paid for your ice cream sundae was written on a piece of paper. 

“Main Street back then was bustling. We had jewelry stores, hardware stores, shoe stores. You didn’t have to go to the mall for nothing. Christmas time? You did all your shopping here. Everything was right here in Darby. You could get everything you needed. Everything. Man, it was bustling. But now? People don’t do the small towns anymore. At least, not here.”

There were parades down Main Street. There was a huge Christmas Parade, a Memorial Day Parade with a tank kids could climb on, a parade to open Little League season, and a parade for the high school homecoming football game.

“Last parade I can remember must have been fifteen, twenty years ago?”

Freeman has five children. They were born in 1987, 1999, 2001, 2004 and 2006. Only the child born in 1987 had the opportunity to play Little League, PAL football or was able to join a swim club. Local organizations dried up in the 90s.

“We didn’t have the volunteers and parent participation. Recreation wise, we didn’t have anything anymore.”

And then Floyd hit. The storm took one life, impacted 330 homes and 59 businesses. Many of the businesses never reopened. Scores of properties were purchased by the government, who relocated families and leveled homes. 

Freeman was hired by the city as part of the cleanup. The job, which he still holds today, hit home. “I have aunts, uncles, sisters, cousins, all kinds of family here. 10th Street is named after my uncle, Marine Lt. General Ronald S. Coleman.”

This is his hometown, come what may. “If you can make it here you can make it anywhere. Darby makes you tough. It’s a no-nonsense type of town.”

James Vani, 71, who is also with Darby Borough Public Works, fled Liberia’s civil war with his wife in 2002. They joined his parents in Florida. “My wife went to nursing school. She graduated and everything, but she couldn’t find a job. She tried to find a job in Florida, but she couldn’t because of our accent. Maybe I’m talking to you and you can’t understand me? Even myself, I have some problems with people from the South. The way they speak is a little but different, Vani explains,  “A friend of my wife was here [in Darby] and she said ‘Come over here. You will be able to find a job because there are a lot of Africans here.’”

There are. According to Data USA, 20 percent of Darby Township is foreign born, and 79 percent of that population comes from Africa. If you drive down Darby Main Street a short distance to the Philadelphia city line, the road turns into Africatown. The organization website touts the area as, “the premier destination for the global African Diaspora, celebrating arts, culture, and business.”

As soon as Vani’s wife got a job, she called her husband to join her. “So, I came here and got a job, too. Everywhere I go, if I got a job, I’m happy. I'm lucky. I have a job in Darby and I live in Darby. Thanks be to God.”

“Almost nobody from my generation is going to be able to buy a house,” laments Machi Hall, 17. His family moved to Darby two years ago from West Philly because “the crime here is lower and the houses are cheaper.” Hall worries about technology replacing jobs in the future. He plans to enroll in a four-year electrical contractor apprenticeship program, with an eye on a union job. “I won’t get rich, but it will put food on the table,” he says. Buying a home feels out of reach, so he dreams of buying land in Georgia and building a home himself. 

In 1990, Artan Sulollari was serving in the Albanian army. One day, they brought him in for questioning. At the time, he had no idea that one of his brothers had fled the communist country. 

“They beat me up very good, to tell them what I knew. I didn’t know anything. There was a couple guys in the room asking me stupid questions. Where is your brother? I said he was working, because he was working in the mines at the time. I didn’t know anything. From the beating and stuff, I lost a little bit of hearing. When people talk, I have to make sure I understand them well…It was a crazy life there. The communism was the worst communism. They would say ‘this guy does propaganda, this guy is a spy.’ They wound arrest you. They'd beat you. They put you in jail. They'd take your family. They’d incarcerate you far, far away. That happened to a lot of people in my village. In 1990, most of them were coming back. They were very healthy people, but when they came back, you don’t even know them.”

The Sulollari family was granted political asylum in the early 1990s. Today, Tony and his brother run Main Street Pizza in Darby and care for their aging parents, who live just a few houses down from the restaurant. 

“Have you ever seen the movie The Outlaw Josey Wales? Clint Eastwood says to the Apache chief ‘I’ve come to live with you, because the government will follow you. I’ve come to live with you or fight with you. To die is easy. To live is hard. Because life is hard, and death is easy.’ That’s how it is.”

Paul Feldman was born September 18, 1947, one day before his father opened Benett’s men’s wear store on Main Street. “I remember as a kid my dad giving me a check to deposit in the bank on Friday night. I had to walk in the streets because the sidewalks were so crowded,” he remembers. “You know how many stores there were in Darby that were run by a father and a son? I am the only one that is still around. Everyone else closed. There were 177 businesses along Main Street in the 70s. Now, really, you have mostly churches and beauty shops.”

Feldman looks around, “This place is starting to fall apart. I am, too.”

William  Hall, 73, works a couple days a week at the store. He remembers coming in as a young boy.

“Kids, when I came up, were ignorant. You better not wear the same clothes twice a week. They would tease you like you stole something from them. My mother used to do a day’s work for $6.00 a day. So, I used to collect cans and bottles to take them back for the refund. I would bring my money here and put my clothes on layaway. Heavens to Betsy I didn't know I'd be working here today.”

The store still offers layaway to its customers.

To this day, Hall dresses with personal flair. His look is always cleaned and pressed. “My clothes cleaning bill is higher than my insurance,” he laughs. 

Two years ago, Hall felt lightheaded and dizzy. He went to the doctor. The diagnosis was bad. Throat cancer. I didn't know it. I thought I was having a stroke. And when they did the blood work, up jumps Johnny C. Stage four. The chemo didn’t bother me, but the radiation, that got me. Underneath my feet, by my toes, I couldn’t feel anything. I have pretty good balance, but I didn’t feel my feet, none of it. But it came back, a little bit. That’s why you see me on my comfort stool.”

During his cancer treatment, he turned to coworkers at Benett’s for advice and support. He motions to store manager Bud Teaford, 55.

“This guy here, every time I went to the doctor I came to him. He would enlighten me, because my education is shallow, but I thirst for knowledge. I wasn’t afraid to ask him, ‘What does this mean?’ As a man, that’s hard to do, as a grown man, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t tell him.”

Hall believes his life was spared by the power of shared faith, close community and daily love.

“Suppose my heart was sheltered. Do you think God would have looked out for me?”

He brings his unsheltered heart to work every day.

“When I come in, I won’t say to him, ‘Hi.’ I say ‘Bud I love you.’ Everyday.”

“I love you too,” Bud answers.

“If you don’t have love, you don’t get no love. You get that mental aggravation.”

Bud laughs, “We get plenty of that here, too.”

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