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- Growing mold, dilapidated boilers: Failing infrastructure has kept La Mott Community Center and Free Library closed since October 2021.
- The site — anchoring a small, predominately Black neighborhood — shares ground with what was once the largest training camp for Black troops in the Civil War: Camp William Penn.
- With 15 other facilities in need of repair, Cheltenham Township says it can’t guarantee it will ever reopen. Architecture and feasibility studies are underway across the sites.
- Now residents are fighting for their community center, a staple of neighborhood identity, generations of memory and national Black history.
LA MOTT, Pa. – Children cut across the grass in the afternoon sun. Parents watch them swing on playground equipment, empty squirt guns, and yell above streaming music.
These tiny feet are dusting across the same land where soldiers marched over 150 years ago. It’s here that one stone building among a half-dozen suburban blocks north of Philadelphia shares ground with the largest training camp for Black troops in the American Civil War: Camp William Penn.
A school came in 1879. A community center filled the same building by 1941, anchoring a middle-class, predominately African American neighborhood.
La Mott residents have gathered here for decades. The corner of Willow and Sycamore avenues has heard school bells, wedding bells and the drumming of basketballs. Cue bridal showers, birthday parties, Girl Scout meetings, dance classes, summer camps, library collections and senior bingo.
Today, it’s silent. History runs deep on this spot the future is in question.
Failing infrastructure closed La Mott Community Center in October 2021. Dark mold meets crumbling walls, rusted piping and dilapidated boilers. Residents listen as local officials debate whether the center will be deemed worth the costs of renovation. For many, it’s leaving a staple of neighborhood identity, generations of memory and national history at risk.
“La Mott Citizens United” emerged to preserve the center. Members host meetings, share information and advocate to state and local officials, while another question positions itself at the frontlines.
Residents, architects and onlookers alike ponder what value today’s generations place in community centers, libraries and similar public spaces — if this pocket of significant U.S. history may lose its symbol.
For now residents crowd the shade outside, hosting this Community Day under late-August heat.
“If they take this away, what are we going to have?” said Geraldine “Gerry” Brown, resident of nearly four decades, sitting on the center steps below sealed doors. “We’re not going to have anything. All the history will be gone. They’ll tear all this down and say La Mott who? La Mott where?”
Cheltenham Township, just over 12 miles north of downtown Philadelphia, says reopening would mean a costly, complete remodel — but even in an area bearing the highest tax burden in Montgomery County, about 15 of its other facilities demand similar repair.
“We don’t like it,” said Interim Township Manager Alyson Elliott. “We don’t really know where this is gonna go, and we want to make sure that whatever outcome we have is going to be fiscally sound.”
Former manager Robert Zienkowski resigned from his post in early October. With clear answers in short supply, officials brace coming months with “tough decisions.”
Camp William Penn Museum, a small outfit tucked inside one neighborhood house, already struggles to hold its typical events without the center. And one director believes the fight is larger than nine square-miles of township or a handful of Pennsylvania homeowners.
“This is national history,” Joyce Werkman said. “And we need to get the story out there.”
‘A magnet for Black pride’
He volunteered.
Likely a husband and a father, a free man and a day laborer, he would’ve worked in nearby cities and the countryside. Though racism stifled families like his to a lower income, a different call to service weighed on his mind.
Any previous urge to join the war effort was turned away in Pennsylvania. Over most of his lifetime, Black men were not handed guns.
That would change.
After the U.S. authorized the recruitment of African American troops, after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, after a Union war effort realized millions of able bodies were not being utilized — a camp would take shape.
A Camp William Penn volunteer would have walked like thousands of men, some having escaped slavery in Maryland and Delaware, to pour through the gates and enlist in the Union Army. Far north of an unwelcoming Philadelphia, the first and largest federal training facility for U.S. Colored Troops dropped roots on rolling countryside.
Training was rigorous. Heavy stress on discipline and command matched a reality that Confederate soldiers likely wouldn’t take Black prisoners.
Issued his rifle musket, he’d learn to carry it, stand at attention, execute nine different steps involved in loading and firing, while keeping step with other men marching. A great solider could shoot three times in a minute.
Some 11,000 men, 11 infantry units, would pass through these gates, landing on battlefields across the country and earning medals for their service.
But this camp quickly proved far more than combat training ground.
“It became something of a magnet for Black pride,” said military historian Greg Urwin. “A lot of Black civilians came to visit Camp William Penn to watch the men there, drilling and whipping themselves into soldiers.”
Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, namesake and American abolitionist Lucretia Mott — prominent figures in U.S. history — crossed paths with Camp William Penn. Douglass was a fierce advocate for recruiting Black soldiers from the start.
These volunteers fought against a divided union in more ways than opposing secession.
“He was like: ‘We all know this is about slavery,’” the Temple history professor continued.
“So Camp William Penn is one of those places where steps are taken to redeem promises of the revolution, to make the freedoms for which America supposedly stood accessible to more Americans — and it’s largely a Black story.”
That story left a lasting impression. Post-war the camp was demolished, leaving history to soak into the ground that fostered it. Volunteering soldiers may have settled nearby. Only after the Civil War did a strong Black community begin to grow in present-day La Mott.
Such roots are still felt.
“Troops that were trained there made important contributions to the Union war effort. They were bloodied in combat; they didn’t just go guard behind-the-lines facilities like some Black troops were left to do,” Urwin said.
“And it gave birth to a community that now finds itself in battle, trying to retain its identity, trying to retain its heritage.”
The Center of it all
Old trinkets huddled between framed photographs, loose birthday cards and stacked books. Martha Woods isn’t much for unused surface space, and her life seemed to flow and climb throughout the room.
She reached for one frame in particular as she spoke, tucked into a cozy dining room on Graham Lane.
One stoic, black-and-white face peered through the glass, labeled with her tight cursive.
“My great grandfather fought in the Civil War,” Woods said, a smile glowing beneath her eyes. “He was stationed at Camp William Penn. He left a wife and nine children, a farm, when he came to fight in the Civil War for our freedom. He was quite a distinguished gentleman, as you can see.”
He would return to her family in central Pennsylvania, living to 104.
Woods moved to this La Mott home with her husband in 1984. She heard of the village once called Camptown by chance, seeing a sign from the bus. A vibrant neighborhood pulled her in, and a bustling community center helped her raise a family.
“It was just a part of our lives,” she said. Township meetings, the polling place, bake sales, children’s birthday parties: “We had everything there.”
Andrea White’s family roots stretch into the 1800s; her La Mott memories pour like water over once-tennis courts for kids to ice-skate. Zaki Gaillaird just moved away at 40 but can’t imagine the same basketball and comradery not available for new generations. Jyena Wallace is just thinking about losing Girl Scout meetings in the center the 12-year-old has always known.
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Woods realized she walked the same ground as her great grandfather inside that center. “Isn’t it something?” she said, recalling the chill it gave her to learn she shares the space nearly 160 years later.
Last year, a single flier would have Woods learn the center and adjoining library were closed. Others cite less.
“If we hadn’t gotten together and started fighting for what we want in this community, I think they would have just shut it down, and we wouldn’t have known a thing,” said longtime resident Gerry Brown, joining Woods and others to lead La Mott Citizens United.
“It’s hard to trust. Even though the township people are telling us: ‘We’re going to do what we can to try to help’ — there’s still paranoia.”
Brown wakes up at night worried about the center. She said she worries people won’t work together, struggles with the unknowns and suppresses thought that her history isn’t given the same value because it’s Black history.
She wears optimism during the day, as residents and the township now sit in stalemate.
“We want our community center back. We want our library back. The children need the library, the adults need the library and the community center just to get things done,” she said, looking up at closed doors.
An unclear future in Cheltenham
Cheltenham Township says one thing is clear: It cannot continue to manage 16 facilities.
From a police station to an administrative building, another community center, three libraries, two pools and an historic Wall House, the township had to hire an architecture firm this summer to study the myriad infrastructure shortcomings and feasible renovations. Recommendations are expected by the end of the year.
Eight buildings exceed a century in age. Mold persists, outer facades crumble.
La Mott Community Center and Free Library will not receive any priority, explained Elliott, the assistant township manager, over videoconference call.
“We have 16 other facilities that are in very similar if not worse shape — so we have to look at the entire community to understand what the needs are, not just La Mott,” said the official of roughly eight years.
Fire Marshall Scott Lynch said if the center were a business, he’d have to slap an “uninhabitable” sign on its front door.
Floors are uneven. Walls erode. Asbestos remains. Photos show mold growing from walls to floors, from furniture to kid’s games themselves. Its smell hangs in the air. Boilers leak, rust builds across the cover and the floor. Officials say wiring, lighting, piping and controls need updating to be safe to operate.
Something else may need updating if the center reopens, too — its core design.
“A community center or a library, as an asset to that neighborhood, is just as crucial as something like a park or a playground,” said Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman, an urban anthropologist based in Philadelphia.
“You can go into that space and feel a sense of communal ownership, that it is being maintained… In a library or community center, there’s access to necessary resources that some people don’t have in their homes.”
The COVID-19 pandemic only sharpened that message.
“It’s exactly like health care: The system exists for when you need it, and you don’t always need it. But it should still be there,” Johnston-Zimmerman said of all public spaces.
“Our health is tied to our environment. So, these kinds of places where people can come together in times of good and bad or just curiosity and shared experience — that’s the kind of thing that gives us a greater sense of physical and mental health.”
Most La Mott residents concede their center could use updating. Brown hopes a renovation could attract more new families.
“The library was old,” she said. “We asked for updated books, updated computers, wi-fi — we asked for all those things. And I think it’s going to draw more people to the center.”
Back in Martha Woods’ house, her air conditioner churned against 90-degree weather.
Her hands still gripped the portrait. Alongside other residents, she has poured time into fighting for a center she believes holds her neighborhood and its history together.
Answers remain out of reach.
“If you leave your family, you really have something on your heart,” she said, meeting her great grandfather’s gaze. “You really are serious. He left my great-grandmom and those nine children and came here to fight for our liberty.
“And I see the fight still continues.”
Kelly Powers is a culture reporter for the How We Live team — covering race, culture and identity for the USA TODAY Network’s Atlantic Region. Contact her at kepowers@gannett.com or (484) 466-9121, and follow her on Twitter @kpowers01.
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