SHE HAD A DREAM

For twenty years, the little building on Yardley’s South Canal Street stood abandoned, its paint sun-bleached, its Gothic windows caked in dust, until its condemnation seemed less like a possibility than an eventuality. Shirley Lee Corsey had grown up down the street from the building, and though she’d never attended services there, she vividly remembered the days when it had been a functioning African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, the Black denomination established in Philadelphia in 1787. After Corsey moved to Winslow Township, in southern New Jersey, she continued to monitor the church’s status through reports from relatives and trips to visit her mother and sister, who still lived in the family home on South Canal.

Her mother died in 2002, and in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic descended on the River Towns, Corsey bought her family home and set to rehabbing it. Just as the pandemic was starting to recede, she says, the old church called her. “I don’t want to get too spooky on you,” she recalls, “but I just felt it.”

To understand the significance of that statement, you have to know Shirley Lee Corsey. At 72, she radiates the energy and determination of someone half her age. She calls herself a “glass-half-full” kind of person, and obstacles have a way of motivating her rather than shutting her down. When a mystery presents itself, her inclination is to solve it. So when the old church called to her, she responded.

The first mystery she faced was that of the church’s ownership. Though she has an associate degree in computer science and built a successful career in IT, she’s always loved history and had long ago assumed the role of family historian. So this was a project, like the church itself, that spoke to her. In her research she discovered that no one owned the building or the land on which it sat. The deed from 1877, the year the church was founded, lists the owners as the original trustees—Moses Journer, Theodore Rodgers, and Lewis Tilghman—all of whom, Corsey learned, had come from Trenton and purchased the property for $100 from one Edward Siapler and his wife, Sarah. But the trustees had never bequeathed the property to anyone.

Corsey also learned that a Pennsylvania law, known as the Abandoned and Blighted Property Conservatorship Act, stipulated that anyone who lived in the neighborhood of such a property could petition the court to be named its conservator. Undaunted by what responsibilities that might entail, Corsey applied for conservatorship in January 2022 and was granted it that September. While the building is still considered the AME Church of Yardley, Corsey envisioned a space where people from all over could find community and learn untold and under-told stories about African American history. She named it Gather Place.

Adrienne King, president of the Bucks County chapter of the NAACP, calls Corsey’s efforts “heroic.” Corsey’s willingness to take on the job of creating Gather Place largely on her own, King says, is in many ways typical of the Black community. “When we find gaps in society,” King says, “it’s usually a single person who will step up and try to do something about them.”

One of the first tasks Corsey set for herself (beyond rehabilitating the building) was to unearth more of its history. That was important to Corsey because she and her family were an integral part of Yardley’s African American heritage. South Canal Street was one of several streets in the borough that had once largely been populated by Black working-class families. By the early 2000s, following a wave of gentrification that had swept through the River Towns, the borough’s Black population had dwindled to a handful of residents. That demographic trend was one reason why Corsey, a third-generation resident of the borough, purchased her family home. “I didn’t want to see one less Black-owned property in Yardley,” she says.

That same urge to maintain an African American presence in the borough impelled her to save the little church on South Canal Street. “I felt very strongly that it needed to be preserved,” she says, “because it’s essentially the last landmark indicating that Black people were here.”

Corsey managed the preservation process through gumption and grants. Her first grant, in 2022, in the amount of $50,000, awarded by the Pennsylvania Department of Economic Development, enabled her to have a new roof installed on the church building, get the exterior of the building painted, and its windows reglazed.

With the help of her brother, Michael Lee, a retired Air Force mechanic and an ace handyman, and a group of willing neighbors, she was able to sweep the interior clean of decades of dust and debris. “You know the African expression ‘It takes a village?’” she asks. “Well, that took a South Canal Street village.” Thanks to donations amounting to a few thousand dollars, she had the original wide-plank floors refinished. She kept the raised choir at the back of the 800-square-foot interior, as well as the pulpit beside it, so visitors would always understand the building’s original purpose.

Her second grant, $75,000 from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, funded the Generational Voices Project, whose mission, Corsey says, “is to orally preserve Yardley’s dwindling African American community.” The grant allowed her to hire a professional audio/visual team to help her interview and record Black residents and their descendants. Corsey also works with a dozen volunteers—among them retired and active librarians, a history teacher, historical archivists, actors and historical reenactors, and docents—who help her with research, program development, scriptwriting, guiding visitors through the museum, and technical and administrative work. She and her team have collected hundreds of photographs, family documents, and other records, and she plans to expand those efforts in the future and to produce a documentary series based on everything she’s discovered.

Some of the voices she’s captured belong to the Derry family, whose long history in Yardley is intertwined with that of the AME church that now houses Gather Place. For a century, the family was an active part of its congregation, and in 1982, Helene Derry Giles, who’d been assembling a history of the old church, filed an application to have the building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. When Giles died in 2000, she donated her historical materials to the Yardley Historical Association, where they would later aid Corsey in her own historical perambulations.

Searching through documents wherever she could find them—including the Yardley Historical Association, the Heritage Conservancy in Doylestown, and the Lower Makefield Historical Society—she discovered the property was originally the site of a Quaker-owned barn, known as the Colored Church, likely a place of worship for Black residents dating at least to the eighteenth century. When the three original trustees oversaw the construction of the existing church building in 1877, they named it the Bethel AME Church of Yardley, Bethel referring to a specific congregation within the AME church.

In 2023, Corsey turned her popular lecture on Harriet Tubman, delivered at Gather Place, into a historical reenactment, in which she performed as the Black abolitionist, one of her personal heroes. In 2025 she received a $20,000 grant from America250PA, the statewide commission charged with commemorating Pennsylvania’s role in the nation’s founding, enabling her to expand her repertoire of historical reenactments to include Lucretia Mott, the abolitionist and women’s rights activist; Hannah Callowhill Penn, the second wife of Pennsylvania founder William Penn; and the journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

In 2025, Adrienne King was a cofounder of a celebration of Juneteenth (the federal holiday marking the end of slavery) at the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, at which Corsey performed a variety of reenactments. “It was amazing to watch her work and to see how she embodies those lives,” King says. “And it was amazing to hear her tell stories about things that happened right here in Bucks County.”

As director of Gather Place, Corsey has honed her skills as both an actor and a passionate storyteller, offering lectures on Yardley’s Black history, such as “The Underground Railroad: Bucks County and Beyond.” Her portrayal of Tubman was so popular that she found herself fielding requests to perform it at the Bensalem Library and Pennsbury Manor in Morrisville. These days she’s aided by three volunteers who help with research, scriptwriting, and performing.

Corsey also conducts a walking tour of purported and documented Underground Railroad sites in the environs of Gather Place, ending at the site of what was a general store on the edge of the canal. Documents show that its owner, a Quaker named Aaron LaRue, and his wife regularly fed and harbored freedom-seekers on their journey north.

“Our strength is our programs,” Corsey says, explaining that Gather Place is much more than a museum. It does, however, mount exhibitions, including the latest, highlighting the Bucks County Abolitionist Trail and featuring photographs of sites that were crucial to the abolitionist movement in the county. In September 2025, Corsey was elected to the board of America250 PA-Bucks County, a group formed to commemorate the semiquincentennial. Among other duties, she was tasked with creating what board members envisioned as the Underground Railroad Trail, a self-guided tour of related Bucks County sites. Corsey, however, wanted to go bigger. “Why not widen that a little bit,” she asked, “and make it the Abolitionist Trail?” Gather Place became one stop on the trail.

Going bigger” encapsulates Corsey’s plans for the future of Gather Place. She notes that the history of Yardley is inextricably connected to a larger national history. “One of my goals,” she says, “is to keep making those connections—untold stories of women, people of color, and how people come together with a common goal.” This is especially important, she notes, at a time when some Americans appear to be trying, in her words, “to erase history”—notably, difficult history, like the story of slavery.

One of the under-told stories she wants to tell is that of Edward E. Robinson, a member of the Derry family. Corsey notes that people often hail Wilson Goode, mayor of Philadelphia from 1984 to 1992, as Pennsylvania’s first Black mayor. In fact, that honor belongs to Robinson, who served as Yardley’s mayor from 1977 to 1989. “That’s worth celebrating,” she says.

In fact, she’s planning to host a January 2027 fundraiser, marking the church’s 150th anniversary, in Robinson’s honor. It would help Corsey’s other big goal for 2027: building an extension off the back of the church for an ADA–accessible bathroom. Eighty percent of her visitors are seniors, many with limited mobility, Corsey says, and a new bathroom would allow more of them to attend lectures and reenactments.

The new construction would also allow her to restore the façade, where one window was removed to accommodate the old bathroom. She estimates the project will cost upwards of $500,000. She hopes to raise the money through grants and private donations.

Meanwhile, she plans to continue doing what she does best: telling stories and creating community. In May, after running Gather Place for only four years, she won a Visit Bucks County Award for promoting the county’s travel and hospitality industry, aside such stalwart organizations as the Michener Art Museum and Peddler’s Village. Of the award, Corsey says, “If you want a blessing, be a blessing.”

Leslie Garisto Pfaff is a regular contributor to River Towns. She wrote about the Tinicum Arts Festival, which celebrated its seventy-fifth year in July, in the Summer issue.