Near this site was located the first African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Worcester, founded by Rev. Greensbury Offley
Nov. 1, 1847: At a meeting of the Colored Methodist Zion Society of Worcester held on Nov. 1, 1847, G. W. Offley their preacher
was appointed agent to call upon their friends and the Christian public for aid to enable them to build a House of Worship in the Town of Worcester Mass. [signed] David Roberts Moderator, Jas J Johnson Clerk [As published in the Worcester Spy]
Born in 1808 in Queen Anne’s County, Maryland, to a slave mother who had been set free in her master’s will, Greensbury Offley made his way North as a young man settling at Hartford, Connecticut in 1835 and studied for the Methodist ministry. He became a lay minister of the A.M. E. denomination. Many of the details of his early life are depicted in his Narrative of the Life and Labors of the Rev. G. W. Offley, A 
Colored Man, and Local Preacher, which was published in Hartford in 1860. The work was subtitled “Who lived twenty-seven years at the South and twenty-four at the North; who never went to school a day in his life, and only commenced to learn his letters when nineteen years and eight months old; the emancipation of his mother and her three children; how he learned to read while living in a slave state, and supported himself from time he was nine years old until he was twenty-one…”
Colored Man, and Local Preacher, which was published in Hartford in 1860. The work was subtitled “Who lived twenty-seven years at the South and twenty-four at the North; who never went to school a day in his life, and only commenced to learn his letters when nineteen years and eight months old; the emancipation of his mother and her three children; how he learned to read while living in a slave state, and supported himself from time he was nine years old until he was twenty-one…”While he remained part of Hartford’s African-American community and occasionally boarded with black families at Worcester, Rev. Offley’s local flock met at people’s homes and in rented halls. In November 1847, Worcester’s African Americans resolved to work to create their own place of Worcester, naming Rev. Offley their agent. Then known as the Colored Methodist Zion Society, the Worcester group authorized Offley “to call upon their friends and the Christian public for aid” to enable them to “build a House of Worship in the Town of Worcester,” raising $230 for the new church and support of Offley as pastor. The “colored people” of Worcester provided some $75 and local contributors included Ichabod Washburn ($50), Charles Washburn ($5), William Fox ($25), Henry Goulding ($25) and Charles White ($25); additionally, “colored” contributors William Johnson provided $10, John Morey $5, Ebenezer Hemenway $5 and Peter Rich Jr. another $5 gift.
With these contributions, the Colored Methodist Zion Society began considering potential sites in February 1848. What followed was a two-year labor, painstakingly documented in Offley’s account books, when he appeared on behalf of his Worcester African-American congregation at churches, public halls, and private homes, crisscrossing the region, raising money through gifts and sometimes loans.
In great detail, Rev. Offley kept track of both his expenses and any funds raised at sites. As part of the campaign, he visited churches, hall,s and public venues at Ashburnham; Ashland; Barre; Brighton; Brookfield; Cambridge; Charlestown; Charlton; Concord; Dudley; Enfield; Fitchburg; Framingham; Gardner; Grafton; Hartford; Holden; Hopkinton; Hubbardston; Ipswich; New Hampshire; Lancaster; Leicester; Leominster; Lexington; Marlborough; Mason, New Hampshire; New Braintree; Northampton; Oxford; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Paxton; Princeton; Providence; Spencer; Templeton; Waltham; Warren; Watertown; Webster; Westborough; Westminster; Wilbraham; Williamsburg; Winchendon; Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Generous Worcester contributors included Stephen Salisbury, who gave $25; Mrs. Stephen Salisbury who gave $20; and ministers Edward Everett Hale and Alonzo Hill while other Worcester residents who made repeated gifts included Ichabod Washburn, Benjamin Goddard, Albert Curtis and members of Flagg, Waldo, Kinnicut, Denny, Allen, Goulding, and Davis families. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edward Everett at Cambridge each contributed five dollars; and, Ralph Waldo Emerson contributed twenty-five dollars following a presentation by Offley at Concord. Many of the signers of Offley’s contribution book were actively involved in anti-slavery societies. Numerous donors were Unitarians or Universalists and frequently contributors were part of wealthy and prominent families in regional towns.
At the same time, however, members of Worcester’s “colored” community continued making donations. That number included: Alfred Toney, who gave twelve dollars; James J. Johnson, who gave five dollars; and David Roberts, another five dollar contributor. Some individuals made what might have been “small” but, for them, possibly significant donations; for example, at Hopkinton, Warren Hemenway, an African American, and his wife Eliza Gigger Hemenway, a Nipmuc Indian, both of them poor people, supported as “state paupers,” signed Offley’s book in unsteady hands, she contributing fifty cents and he twenty-five cents from whatever meager disposable income they had.
The church that came into being on Exchange Street, accordingly, was the culmination of a significant community undertaking of Worcester’s people of color. Offley’s accounts detail work on furbishing the site—putting in flooring, building pews, working on the roof, etc. and record that by Dec. 13, 1849, the owner of the property had been paid $1048, the principal plus all interest charges. A note from Dec. 13, 1849, however, states that final payment of the owner includes “three hundred I borrowed from Ex-governor John Davis of Worcester, Mass and one hundred & forty-eight from a collection from the public.” His work accomplished in assisting the “brethren” at Worcester in establishing their house of worship and obtaining a permanent pastor in the 1850s, Rev. Greensbury Offley spent fifteen years ministering to the needs of the “colored” communicants of Hartford’s Belknap Street Church. He was an active participant in many of the political struggles of New England’s people of color, for example, printing a broadside about the arrest of runaway slave Anthony Burns, much as Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband wrote at this time, “Mr. Offley is a well known and much respected citizen of Hartford, whose cause we recommend.”
In 1866 with two other African Americans, an unidentified man from Hartford and Isaac Mason, —of Worcester, and author of his own life as a slave— Offley returned to Maryland, visiting freedman. The trio were engaged in fact-finding since “freedmen who live in townships among large plantations where churches and school-houses are five or six miles apart—our Northern missionaries do not reach them, and they can only be reached by our Northern colored mission, as in many place our white people are not allowed to go, and in other places the colored people are not permitted to go to the white people’s meetings.”
In particular, the three Northern visitors wrote of a Methodist meeting in September 1866 in Chestertown, Kent County, Maryland where it was resolved that “no people of color would be allowed to attend,” but as they “started for the camp-meeting, with ox carts, mules, and horse-carts, and a hundred on foot…before they reached the camp-ground, they were met by the committee of their white Methodist brethren, and all sent back.”
Accordingly, at a winter 1865 meeting of the Annual Conference of the Zion Methodist Episcopal Church held at Baltimore, was issued an urgent appeal on behalf of “missionary operations South among the freedmen in Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, Kentucky and other states.” Claiming to be associated with 26 congregations, the Zion Conference had “but insufficient funds,” and was appealing for assistance.
Although now almost sixty years old, Offley spent much of 1866 stumping, making speeches, presenting sermons and conducting meetings to raise funds for the freedmen. He returned to many of the towns he had visited fifteen years earlier when seeking aid for Zion Church. Again logging donations in an extant subscription book documenting contributions, Offley gathered over a thousand dollars for the cause. In an October 25, 1866 visit to Worcester, for example, he received donations from individuals including Stephen Salisbury, Jr.; Ichabod Washburn; George Frisbie Hoar; Benjamin Goddard, James Green and members of Rice, Barton, Moen and Curtis families.
In 1867 Offley relocated to New Bedford where, in 1875, he printed God’s Immutable Declaration of His Own Moral and Assumed Natural Image and Likeness in Man, a mystical work on the religious symbolism of color and the children of Ham, arguing for five “grand” virtues: truth, justice, temperance, prudence and fortitude. While at Worcester, Offley had been concerned about needs of women of color and created The Female Mutual Relief Society, charged to “visit the sick members, inform the Directors when money is needed for their aid,” with all members of the society who had paid a year’s dues, who were “taken sick and unable to attend to their Daily Business,” eligible to receive benefits including burial. However, membership was limited to “any female of respectable character belonging to the church and congregation” of the African Methodist Episcopal corporate structure.
Although Offley’s motivation can only be guessed, his organization of the Female Mutual Aid Society in the early 1850s may have influenced his decision to adopt a child of color, Elizabeth Brown, later Brown-Offley, born at Worcester in 1857. She was a daughter of Elizabeth Brown [born 1840] whose mother was Deborah Brown; the Browns were impoverished Nipmuc Indians connected to the Native community at Grafton.
In 1876, at New Bedford, Adelaide Brown-Offley married Alexander C. Jones, and remained at New Bedford until her death March 9, 1927; her family remained in possession of Rev. Offley’s manuscripts, now at the American Antiquarian Society.
March 22, 1896, Greensbury W. Offley died at his home in New Bedford; he was 87 years old, and, according to the New Bedford newspaper, was “a well known colored citizen.” His obituary informed that “he supported himself from the time he was 9 years old, and when he was a mere boy he supported his parents.” His “first trade was that of a basket maker and before he attained his majority he was devoting some of his hard earned money to assist some of his fellow men who were in bondage to their freedom.” Coming North when he was about 30 years old, he remained at Hartford for 25 years before the move to New Bedford in 1867. He was “what is known as a travelling minister, and during his life he built a number of churches, one of which was the Zion church of Worcester.”
Additionally, it was reported that Offley was “connected with the famous underground railroad, and through his instrumentality, many a poor fellow was secreted from slave masters and assisted to freedom.” He “advocated strongly the advisability of colored people having homes for themselves, and through his liberality and help many people in this city were enabled to make homes for themselves.”