REV. ABRAM PRYNE

Inscription

REV. ABRAM PRYNE
1823-1862. LIVED ON THIS
PROPERTY IN 1852. ORATOR,
ABOLITIONIST, AND EDITOR
IN 1860 OF “FREDERICK
DOUGLASS' PAPER”.
WILLIAM G. POMEROY FOUNDATION 2026

Born in 1823, Rev. Abram Pryne was orphaned at the age of eleven, which left him destitute. As a young man, he worked as a freight hauler on the Erie Canal before becoming involved in the abolitionist movement. By 1852, he had settled in Warners, New York (then called Van Buren Centre) in the Town of Van Buren, Onondaga County. In 1858, he debated the pro-slavery apologist Rev. W. G. Brownlow in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which was widely reported on in the abolitionist press. He was a friend of Frederick Douglass, whose newspaper, Frederick Douglass’ Paper he edited in 1860 while Douglass was out of the country in the wake of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. On November 5, 1861, he was elected to the New York State Assembly, representing part of Wayne County.

Pryne died on September 20, 1862, aged thirty-nine, in Palmyra, New York. He took his own life, reportedly while in a delirious state caused by a bout of typhus fever. He was buried in the Warners Village Cemetery. In an obituary published in Douglass’ Monthly, Pryne was said to be “…our personal friend and fellow laborer in the abolition cause. We knew him well and esteemed him highly. Though he was white, and we colored, though he was born free, and we a slave, there were so many points of resemblance between his early life and our own that we were brought into great nearness to each other,” (Douglass, Frederick. “Rev. Abram Pryne.” Douglass’ Monthly, Oct. 1862, p. 3.).