Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum

Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum

In a small, unassuming white building on Hollow Road in Skillman, stands the 120-year-old one-room Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. The historic house of worship, which welcomed African American parishioners from 1899 to 2005, is now a museum that tells the often-overlooked stories of the people who have lived in the Sourland Mountains for hundreds of years.

The Stoutsburg Sourland African-American Museum was founded by Beverly Mills and Elaine Buck in 2015 after the two spent years conducting research on the lives of African Americans in the Sourlands, a mountainous region in Somerset County, to write their book “If These Stones Could Talk.”