Buckingham Mountain

Wooded ridge with hiking trails and a historic African Methodist Episcopal church

Buckingham Mountain is a long forested ridge running through the township, rising about 200 metres above the surrounding farmland. The wooded slopes are crisscrossed with informal hiking trails — pleasant walks of one to three hours under tall oaks and tulip poplars, with views east to the Delaware and west towards Doylestown when the leaves are down.

At the summit sits Mount Gilead African Methodist Episcopal Church, a small white-frame building that has been the spiritual centre of a free Black settlement here since 1835. The current building dates to 1852. The church is still occasionally used for services and is a National Historic Site. The community that built it included families who escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad and stayed on the mountain.

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A story
The Lenape name for the ridge was Pepacating. From the late 1700s, free Black families bought land on the mountain — at the time, cheaper and less desirable than the valley farms — and built a small community of homes and a church. The Mount Gilead A.M.E. Church on the summit was a documented stop on the Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War.

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