Camptown Historic District

Laid out in the 1850s and 1860s on land in Cheltenham Township, LaMott is a residential village of modest houses, a stone schoolhouse, a firehouse and a brick and stone AME church. Edward M. Davis, a Quaker real estate developer and son-in-law of abolitionist Lucretia Mott, cut its streets and sold small lots to both black and white buyers, and the village grew steadily through the late nineteenth century. Early residents included William Butcher, who bought his rented house in 1879, and brickmaker William Watson, who supplied bricks for nearby homes. In the early twentieth century William A. Ritchie organized a cemetery company and a building and loan association that helped more than twenty black families buy homes. The district is valued for its integrated settlement at a time when such living arrangements were uncommon in the North, and for the link between the village and the nation's first training camp for black troops, which stood on part of the site.