Jacob's Chapel AME
Colemantown, Burlington County
Elbo Road (Route 616)
founded c.18__, built 1859
Jacob's Chapel is not mentioned in Woodward & Hageman's History of Burlington and Mercer Counties (1883), an oversight that should not surprise anyone. The black churches were generally ignored—few of the contributors to that compilation of institutional and personal history thought the black Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches worth noting.
The small frame chapel was erected in 1859 on land donated by a Quaker for whom it was named; indeed the chapel's deep burial grounds to the rear of the building adjoins an old Quaker cemetery.
The chapel and the small Coleman Meeting-house a few yards to the east are regarded with reverence by many; there is an unsubstantiated claim (as far as I can see) that it "may be the oldest original black church building extant in New Jersey and possibly among the oldest original black edifices in the nation)."