In 1923, Mary Slaughter of Williamsport traveled to Martinsburg, Virginia, to visit her birthplace, a log cabin on the Myers Plantation, whose owners received $600 when they sold her at age 16 to a nearby plantation.

By the time the Williamsport Gazette and Bulletin interviewed her in 1923, Mary Slaughter had come far from her beginnings in the slave society of the Old South. She and her husband, William, moved to Williamsport in 1866, soon after the end of the Civil War. Here they found employment as custodians of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, although she personally was a member of the First Baptist Church and participated in activities at Bethel A.M.E. Church.

After her husband’s death in 1886, Slaughter did what many widows, white and black, did: she opened her home to boarders. But Slaughter found a particular purpose in making her house on Walnut St. a refuge for elderly women. In 1899, after extensive fundraising efforts locally and in Harrisburg, she opened the Home for Aged Colored Women on Brandon Place.

After Mary Slaughter’s death in 1934, the institution she had established continued to operate until 1973. Today, her work is remembered in the name of the current building on that site, the Mary Slaughter Apartments. Like the women who helped establish Williamsport Hospital (see page 19), she deserves to be memorialized with a state historic marker–a symbol of the many contributions of women to constructing our community.