Delaware’s ‘Star of the East’ Is Underground Railroad Icon

I couldn’t get in touch. The recording said, “Have a blessed day,” and I left messages on the voice mail and on the Facebook page with no reply. But we had one more shot. It happened that we three cyclists would be riding through on a Sunday morning. Maybe we would just stop in for services. We had to try. After all, this was the Star of the East.

The Star Hill African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Dover, Delaware has a long history with the Underground Railroad. There aren’t many hills in Delaware. Star Hill was built on a little rise by a local Black congregation in 1842 so that freedom seekers might be able to see it. The local historian speculated that the congregation originally called it Star of the East because freedom seekers would actually be coming east from Maryland. As we would discover on our bicycle journey to Canada, the AME churches were central stops on the road to freedom. This one still stands. We wanted to see it, at least from the outside.

The early morning sun was firing up for a hot one. We had a sixty-mile day laid out, starting north on the Eastern Shore through Greensboro, Maryland, then to Sandtown, Dover, and Wilmington, Delaware. In interviews long after her Underground Railroad days, Harriet Tubman told historian Wilbur Siebert that this was her preferred route. As we rolled north into the heat, we made a first stop before crossing into Delaware.

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