Seventy-four-year-old Ann Fletcher died this date, August 8th, in 1849, of Dysentery and was buried at Bethel Burying Ground. She resided with another elderly woman at #6 Little Pine Street in one room for which they paid $5 a month rent. Neither woman was born in Pennsylvania. According to the 1847 Philadelphia African American Census, Ms. Fletcher was working as a laundress.
Little Pine Street was literally in the shadow of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church at 6th and Lombard Streets. The street is now named “Addison Street.”
As a member of the Bethel Church congregation, Ms. Fletcher was witness to many seminal events in the Church’s history, such as the visit of the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. She may have been one of the thousand mourners who attended the funeral of her longtime pastor, the Rev. John Boggs. If her health was good enough, she may have joined the long procession to Bethel Burying Ground to inter the beloved minister in May of 1848. Shortly before her death, Ms. Fletcher may have witnessed the funeral of Bishop Morris Brown, who was the successor to the AME Church founder Richard Allen. She may have been able to look out her window on May 14, 1849 and see a large number of mourners in front of the Church where the elders were lowering Bishop Brown’s coffin into the vault where Bishop Allen’s remains also were situated. It was an end of an era.
Ms. Fletcher would make her own journey to Bethel Burying Ground two months later.
Bethel surrounded by her foes,
But not yet in despair;
Christ heard her supplicating cries,
The God of Bethel heard.