Founding of Timbuctoo (1826)

Beginning in 1826, formerly enslaved and free Black people began settling along Rancocas Creek in Burlington County, New Jersey, founding a community that became known as Timbuctoo. Within a few decades the settlement had grown to roughly 125 residents with its own school, an AME Zion church, and a mutual aid society, functioning as a self-sufficient Black community in a state where slavery itself was not fully abolished until 1846 and lingered in a diminished form even after that.