Amos Noë Freeman (1809 —1893) was an African-American abolitionist, Presbyterian minister, and educator. He was the first full-time minister of Abyssinian Congregational Church in Portland, Maine, where he led a station on the Underground Railroad. Early life and education Amos Noë Freeman was born in Rahway, New Jersey. He was orphaned and raised within the church from an early age. As a child, he was sent to attend the African Free School in Manhattan, then matriculated to Phoenix High School in New York City, established by his mentor Rev. Theodore Sedgewick Wright. Freeman returned to his native New Jersey to attend Rahway Academy, and later transferred to the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York. It had recently been founded by radical Presbyterian minister, Rev. Beriah Green. Freeman was one of four African Americans in the first year class of 33; others were Amos Beman, who became a good friend; Alexander Crummell, and Henry Highland Garnet. Upon graduating from Oneida Institute in the early 1830s, Freeman moved back to New Jersey, first to New Brunswick, then Newark, to teach in the "colored" public schools. Marriage and family In 1839 in Newark, Freeman married Christiana Taylor Williams (1812-1903), born in Red Hook on Hudson, New York. She was a recently manumitted domestic slave and black descendant of Philip H. Livingston (1769, Jamaica-1831, New York), grandson of Philip Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; and Barbara Williams, an enslaved woman of African descent born in Jamaica. Christiana Williams had worked in one or more of Livingston's households in New York state. The Freemans had a family, including a daughter, Mary Freeman. She married Rev. Robert Foster Wheeler. One of their daughters, Laura Wheeler Waring, became a portrait painter known for her work during the Harlem Renaissance. She was among the first African-American artists to have works exhibited by the Harmon Foundation, and was commissioned by them to do portraits of prominent African Americans. Ministry Freeman was ordained as a minister by the New York Presbytery in 1840. In 1841, he and his wife moved to Portland, Maine, where he was installed as the first pastor of the Abyssinian Congregational Church, now the third oldest surviving black church in the United States. It became a center of the anti-slavery movement and part of the Underground Railroad. Freeman became the most well-known African American in Maine because of his leadership there; he was