Moncure Conway House

Moncure Conway House. "As good [an] abolitionist as any of you!". , In the spring of 1862, a passing Union soldier was shot and wounded, allegedly by someone at this house. His enraged comrades broke down the door to ransack and burn the place, but one who had known Moncure Conway earlier recognized his portrait. Family slave Eliza confirmed that "It's mars Monc the preacher, as good [an] abolitionist as any of you!" The soldiers stopped and the house became a Union hospital. In the winter of 1862-1863, the 20th Massachusetts Infantry (Harvard Regiment) quartered here., The house was Moncure Daniel Conway's (1832-1907) childhood home, which his slaveholding father bought in 1838. Educated at Dickinson College, Pa., young Conway became a Methodist preacher. He grew interested in Unitarianism; met Ralph Waldo Emerson, and attended Harvard Divinity School., His abolitionist views resulted in his exile from Falmouth., During the war, two of Conway's brothers served in the Confederate army. His mother went north to live with his sister, while his father evacuated to Fredericksburg in 1862. In July 1862, Conway accompanied 31 of his father's escaped slaves from Washington, D.C., to Yellow Springs, Ohio. There the former slaves, including Dunmore and Eliza Gwynn, established the "Conway Colony" and First Anti-Slavery Church of Yellow Springs., Conway spent his later years abroad. While in London, he was a literary agent for numerous writers including Walt Whitman, who had served as a nurse in Falmouth. Whitman's first important Civil War poem, "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," based on his experiences, was published in Leaves of Grass.