THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN CENTRAL NEW YORK:
A RESEARCH GUIDE

by Judith Wellman

Sponsored by the Oswego County Freedom Trail Commission with funding from the National Park Service and the State University of New York at Oswego.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Documenting the Underground Railroad: Oral Traditions, Physical Remains, and
Written Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Abolitionism in Central New York: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Researching the Underground Railroad Surveying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Researching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
Rating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18

Writing a New History: Some Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23

Appendices
Research Checklist: People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Research Checklist: Places. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Sample Research Project: Starr Clark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 29 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to all those who helped supply funding, sources, information, and ideas for this guide, including the National Park Service (especially Vivien Rose, Historian, Women's Rights National Historical Park, who wrote the original grant for this project, and to Maria Semchuk, Research Foundation, State University of New York at Oswego, who administered it); the keepers of the records (Special Collections, Penfield Library, State University of New York at Oswego; the Oswego County Historical Society; the Oswego County Clerk's Office; the Mexico Town Historical Society; the National Archives; Olin Library at Cornell University; Bird Library at Syracuse University; the Utica Public Library; the Onondaga County Public Library; the Rochester Public Library; and the Oneida County Historical Society); to members of the Central New York Freedom Trail Committee for providing inspiration; to Bob Shear for creating the website at www. NYHistory.com; to Jim Ford, Learning Support Services, SUNY Oswego, for setting up the Oswego County Freedom Trail webpage; to Milton Sernett for sharing all kinds of ideas; to the Oswego County Legislature for creating an Oswego County Freedom Trail Commission; to my co-workers from historical agencies in Oswego County (Terry Prior, Director of the Oswego County Historical Society; Barbara Dix, Oswego County Historian; Katrina Wilder, Director, and Helen Breitbeck, Researcher, Heritage Foundation; Mercedes Neiss, Associate Director, H. Lee White Marine Museum; and George Reed, Director, Fulton Historical Society); to the History Department at the State University of New York at Oswego; to Mark Peckham, Field Representative from the New York State Historic Preservation Office, and to all those local volunteers and students who worked so generously and enthusiastically to help with research in Oswego County, including Terry Bales, Eleanor Cali, Charlene Cole, Marjorie Carter, Hosmer Culkin, Elisabeth Dunbar, Kevin Engle, Barbara Bakeman Fero, Nicola Gibson, Janet Harder, Elinore Horning, Barbara Knight, Stephen Nohara, Ellen Nowyj, Melissa Osborne, John Paeno, Laree Pease, Mary Ellen Ross, Bonnie Shumway, Jason Simone, Rachel Weinreb, and Justin White.

DOCUMENTING

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN CENTRAL NEW YORK:

ORAL TRADITIONS, PHYSICAL REMAINS, AND WRITTEN EVIDENCE

In March 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a 41-year-old mother of six children, published Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the most famous novels in American history. Within a year, she had sold more than 300,000. Ten years later, President Abraham Lincoln supposedly greeted her in the White House with the famous words, "So this is the little woman who caused the Civil War!"

Uncle Tom's Cabin had such an impact because it dealt with enslaved African Americans as heroes. Uncle Tom himself transcended the brutality of slavery through Christian commitment. Others, however, tried to escape from slavery through the underground railroad. Eliza, for example, died trying to cross the Ohio River in winter. As the images of Uncle Tom and Eliza infused American minds, they rejuvenated the movement to abolish slavery in America and inspired a whole generation of Northerners to recommit themselves to freedom for all Americans, even if it took a civil war to do it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about escaping from slavery through Ohio. Indeed, much underground railroad activity centered in the upper midwest. A map of underground railway routes, published in 1898 in Wilbur Siebert's The Underground Railroad, reveals a dense spiderweb of trails, looking almost like a nest of spaghetti, north of the Ohio River.

But, as any resident of central New York can tell you, underground railroad routes also criss-crossed New York State. Some of the most famous people in abolitionist history lived and worked in this region, from Frederick Douglass (himself an escaped slave, a world-famous orator, and editor of the North Star in Rochester) to Harriet Tubman (who helped so many people escape from slavery that she became known as the "Moses of her people" and who settled in Auburn in the 1850s) to Reverend Jermain Loguen (who escaped from slavery in Tennessee to become a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and whose home in Syracuse became a center of underground railroad activity) to Samuel J. May (Unitarian minister in Syracuse) to Gerrit Smith (landowner and abolitionist whose home became a major center for abolitionism, women's rights, and land reform), to Samuel Ringgold Ward (a black minister, author, and publisher, who was nominated for Vice-President of the United States at a Liberty Party convention in Oswego, New York).1

Most underground railway people and places in central New York, however, remained relatively unknown. Even today, we do not know how many of them really existed. But local stories abound, and people in small towns and large cities across the region still identify hundreds of places associated with the underground railroad. For too long, these stories have been all that we know about some of the most important and intriguing mysteries of our upstate region and of our country as whole.2

Much of this oral tradition has been kept alive by references to the physical remains of landscapes and buildings. "This old house has a tunnel to the river," says one. "That barn has a hidden room under the floor," says another. Those descriptions may be true, but they do not necessarily indicate an underground railroad site, for the underground railroad was not literally below the ground. It was called "underground" because it was a relatively secret network, much as the French underground would be in World War II. Hiding places might indeed be in the basement or cistern, but they might also be in the attic, kitchen, bedroom, barn, or woods.

Oral traditions and physical evidence remain very important clues to the existence of the underground railroad. Written evidence from 1830-1860 also exists, however, and much of it has almost never been used. Most compelling are primary sources, i.e. evidence recorded by people directly involved with an event. Because the underground railroad was a relatively secret system, with penalities for those who might be caught supporting it, historians have often assumed that solid primary sources do not exist in large numbers. Larry Gara argued in 1961, for example, that the importance of the underground railroad has been over-emphasized. After the Civil War, he noted, when people began to talk more freely about their involvement, they romanticized and exaggerated their efforts.3

To some extent, this is true. Oral recollections and physical remains do not provide definitive evidence of underground railway activity. And written contemporary evidence about the underground railroad has not been clearly identified. This does not mean, however, that such evidence does not exist. This guide will argue that, while oral and physical evidence may not be definitive, they are important clues and that written evidence is indeed available on a wide scale. Combining all three sources--oral, physical, and written--and using careful standards of analysis, we can begin to develop a more detailed and complete picture of underground railroad activity. Based on what we have found so far in Oswego County, New York, underground railroad activity may not have been less than what we suspected from oral and physical sources but, in fact, much more.

We can begin our search with the oral tradition itself. Much of it was recorded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. William Still's record of underground railroad activity in the Philadelphia area and Wilbur Siebert's documentation of conductors and routes, especially in the upper midwest, both remain key works. Closer to home, Eber Pettit documented underground railroad activity in western New York. County histories sometimes contain scattered references to abolitionist activity. And local historians have often preserved these oral traditions in talks and articles.4

Some of these tales of the underground railroad will remain only and forever part of local folklore. Others, however, can be documented with written evidence. Although the underground railroad was by its nature a relatively secret network, a remarkable amount of written evidence about it still exists. Historians have already used some of it. Diaries, letters, memoirs, obituaries, and church records, for example, often yield scattered pieces of written documentation.

Some of the richest material still waits to be analyzed. Most helpful for central New York are two types of documents. Minutes of local, county, and regional anti-slavery meetings list names of active abolitionists. Some of these abolitionists formed Vigilance Committees, specifically designed to help fugitives escape. Although local newspapers only rarely printed these minutes, they regularly appeared in the Friend of Man, the official newspaper of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society from 1836-1842, and in other reform papers. Census records for 1850, 1855, and 1860, long used by historians and genealogists for other purposes, provide a particularly fruitful source of information about the underground railroad. Since they list birthplaces for African Americans in central New York, they offer clues about fugitives who chose to settle on the U.S. side of the border. Both of these kinds of records have been almost unused for underground railroad research. Both are easily available for towns and counties across New York State and other northern states. And both yield rich information.

Two other sources are useful but less definitive and also less easy to find. Anti-slavery petitions sent to Congress beginning in 1835 list thousands of names of people in hundreds of local towns and villages who supported at least part of the anti-slavery cause. Subscription lists to anti-slavery papers also provide clues to active reformers.

This guide suggests that we take stories about the underground railroad seriously, and it outlines a model for using written sources to document these oral traditions. After a brief introduction to the development of abolitionism in central New York, it suggests three steps in a research project (including surveying, researching, and rating). Finally, it suggests some hypotheses that we might test as we work toward a new history of the underground railroad. As you begin your research, keep in mind some basic goals:

1) Most important, we want to document underground railroad people and sites accurately. This means using eye-witness primary sources wherever possible, i.e. information recorded by people actually involved in the event. Often this is not possible, but we still must evaluate our evidence carefully: Was our informant in a position to know what really happened? Does that person have a vested interest in telling the story one way or another? Do two or more sources confirm the story? As you do your initial research, cast your net widely. Look for evidence of general abolitionist activity as well as specific references to the underground railroad. Perhaps you can find only one documented underground railroad story but you can also identify that person as a very active abolitionist. In that case, you may be able to make a very compelling case for adding that person to your list of likely underground railroad participants. Look for evidence of people who may be fugitives themselves as well as of people who may have assisted them.

2) We need to save our information in a place accessible to other researchers. We do not want our research to be lost or destroyed. Think about finding a suitable repository at the very beginning of your project--a local historical society, college manuscripts collection, county or town historian, or an historic preservation group--to keep your material in one place, available to others.

3) Think about how to use your material. Most important is to share your information not only with other researchers but especially with your state historic preservation office. In central New York, you can fill out blue survey forms and send them to your regional representative at the Division of Historic Preservation at the New York State Office of Parks and Recreation. The best-documented sites may become part of the Central New York Multiple Resource Nomination to the National Register of Historic Places.
While this guide is useful for the study of the underground railroad everywhere, many of the examples do come from Oswego County, New York. Thanks to the generosity of the National Park Service and the active participation of local historical agencies and local volunteers throughout Oswego County, we have been able to try out this research model in one relatively small but important area of upstate New York. Results have been amazing. On the one hand, we began to question some of those sites that locally "everyone knew" were underground railroad sites. On the other hand, documentary evidence revealed sites that local stories had never revealed, particularly those that related to African Americans who were fugitives themselves.

While we have found underground railroad sites in many parts of Oswego County--including the cities or villages of Fulton, Gilbert's Mills, and Pulaski and the towns of Oswego, New Haven, Richland, Schroeppel, and Scriba--we will use people from two communities--Mexico, New York, and Oswego, New York--as major examples for this guide. Mexico was a key center of abolitionist activity in Oswego County. Mexico residents formed the earliest anti-slavery society in the county and sent the earliest anti-slavery petition. While Mexico was an agricultural trading center, Oswego was a city of almost 16,000 people in 1850. As a major U.S. port for trade with Canada, Oswego offered haven to many African Americans before the Civil War. Some of them worked as sailors, laborers, or washerwomen; a large number were barbers. Gerrit Smith, a prominent abolitionist from Peterboro, New York, owned the eastside harbor facilities. A network of very active local abolitionists organized societies, sent anti-slavery petitions to Congress, wrote letters, and helped organize among the very third-party political abolitionist campaigns in the country.

In Mexico, strong local tradition suggested that Starr Clark maintained the headquarters of the underground railroad in his tin shop on Main Street. Clark's grand-daughter remembered both a tunnel connecting Clark's tin shop with his house next door and a "tank room" in the house itself, used as a refuge for fugitives. Can we find primary source evidence to support the oral tradition of Starr Clark's involvement with the underground railroad?5

Local tradition also asserts that in October 1851, Mexico abolitionists helped one fugitive escape to Kingston, Ontario. Asa Beebe, say village residents, hid Jerry Henry for two weeks in their barn on the south side of Salmon Creek, near the old Earle butter dish factory. Do primary sources confirm this story?6

Tudor E. Grant, an African American barber in Oswego, never appeared in local folklore. His name did appear, however, in the 1850 and 1855 censuses. In 1850, he listed his birthplace as Maryland. In 1855, he told the census-taker that he was born in Westchester County, New York. Was Tudor E. Grant himself an escaped slave? Can we discover where he lived or worked?

Charles Smith, also an Oswego barber, became part of our story through the fortuitous discovery of his 1882 obituary. Smith had been born in slavery in Maryland in 1815, reported the newspaper. He had been a gentleman's servant but had run away on the underground railroad about 1840 to Oswego, New York, where he worked as a sailor for about ten years before becoming a barber in the 1850s, an occupation he had held for thirty years. Here was clear evidence that Smith had been himself a part of the underground railroad. But could we confirm this story from other sources, and could we identify where he had lived or worked?7

Finally, in Oswego, local tradition identified Edwin W. Clarke, lawyer and first clerk of the village, as a major abolitionist. Local residents reported that his home at East Seventh and Mohawk Streets had a tunnel in the basement through which fugitives could escape to waiting ships in the Oswego River. Can we confirm these stories?

These are five men. Where, you may rightfully, ask, were the women? Hints of women's abolitionist activity appear in many places. In 1837-38, Oswego Town sent three petitions to Congress containing almost 500 signatures of both women and men, asking for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and protesting the annexation of Texas as a slave state, and in 1848, women from Mexico sent their own petition. A son-in-law remembered that Mary Wheeler Beebe had worked with her husband and son to hide and feed Jerry Henry. Edwin W. Clarke's gravestone noted that ". . . ." His sister-in-law, Olive Jackson Clarke, believed, said her son, that she and her husband had sheltered about 125 fugitives. Tudor E. Grant's second wife was Maryland-born and a possible fugitive herself, as were many of the African American women in Oswego in the 1850s. White abolitionist Asa Wing wrote in his diary on Christmas Eve, 1850, that "today a colored man, his wife and five small girls came to my house on their way to Canada to save their children from the kidnappers."8

Although much of the written evidence deals only with men's names, we can assume, in fact, that women as well as men were fugitives and that women did much of the actual work of feeding, clothing, and housing self-emancipated people.

Taking underground railroad stories seriously has led us on a surprising tour of the past, a kind of roller coaster, twisty-turny ride, propelled by the evidence into a new understanding of the ways in blacks and whites, women and men cooperated to help enslaved people escape and at the same time to undermine the whole system of slavery in the United States. We invite you, too, to become historical detectives, to solve the historical puzzles in your own area, and to determine as accurately as you can who was involved in the underground railroad and which sites remain to help us tell their story. Our task as researchers is to document as many underground railroad sites as we can, as completely as we can. We know that the sketchy outline of Siebert's map does not begin to tell the story of the underground railroad in upstate New York. It is up to us to fill in the blanks.

This work assumes particular importance now. The National Park Service is working to identify underground railroad sites that might be linked in a national freedom trail, while New York State became the first state in the nation to pass, in the fall of 1997, a Freedom Trail Act. In central New York, Onondaga County became the first county in New York State and Oswego County became the second to set up a county-wide Freedom Trail commissions.

For people working on Oswego County sites, this guide is designed to be supplemented with Oswego anti-slavery material from the Friend of Man, the Oswego Palladium, four African American newspapers, anti-slavery petitions, maps, and elsewhere--all collected in notebooks to be available at the Oswego County Historian's Office, the Oswego County Historical Society, Special Collections in Penfield Library at SUNY Oswego, the Fulton Public Library, the Snow Memorial Library in Pulaski, and the Onondaga County Public Library. Selections from these sources are also available on the web through www.oswego.edu.

ABOLITIONISM AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

IN CENTRAL NEW YORK:

AN OVERVIEW

Enslaved people have always escaped. Some settled in the southern mountains or joined Indian peoples--the Cherokee in Georgia and Tennessee or the Seminole in Florida, for example. Others settled either in northern states or in Canada. During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, many escaped to the British and freedom in what is now Nova Scotia, Quebec, or Ontario.

From 1830-1860, anti-slavery sympathizers--both black and white--developed this system into an active network of assistance for fugitives. In upstate New York, this system was connected to stations in New York City and Pennsylvania through networks of friends and family members. Often these networks were informal and very haphazard. Sometimes, however, those committed to helping fugitives organized themselves more formally into Vigilance Committees, whose members often listed their names in newspapers.

After 1830, people began to call this system of escape routes and safe houses an "underground railroad." It was not literally either underground or a railroad, of course, but it was a secret system of routes as effective, some thought, as the real railroads that Americans were beginning to build. And just as these physical railroads would revolutionize land transportation in the U.S., so this underground railroad would contribute to a new contribution of revolutionary values, of what Americans meant when they said that "all men are created equal."

The growth of this more active phase of underground railroad activity was closely related to the development of a new and more radical phase of the anti-slavery movement in general. The Colored American began publication in 1827. Maria Stewart (an African American and the first American woman to give public speeches) began her Boston lectures in the early 1830s. William Lloyd Garrison began to publish The Liberator in 1831, calling for immediate rather than gradual emancipation of slaves. And in 1833, anti-slavery advocates organized the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery.

From the mid-1830s into the 1840s, abolitionist organizing went through four basic phases.

Pamphlet Campaign. In 1833-34, hoping to appeal to southern slave-owners as Christians who believed in loving their neighbors as themselves and as Americans who believed that "all men are created equal," abolitionists began to mail anti-slavery pamphlets throughout the South. This attempt came to abrupt end when President Andrew Jackson supported the U.S. Postal Service in its refusal to deliver abolitionist material.

The Agency System. In 1835, under the supervision of Theodore Weld, who grew up near Syracuse, New York, the American Anti-Slavery Society sent about seventy agents--including two women, Sarah and Angelina Grimke--across the northern states to organize anti-slavery societies. In some places, they were very effective. By 1836, there were almost four hundred local and county societies, with thousands of members. In many areas, however, local citizens, fearing the dissolution of the Union, violently attacked abolitionists. In these years, Theodore Weld earned his nickname as "the most mobbed man in America."

In October 1836, a mob led by future State Supreme Court Judge Samuel Beardsley and other "gentlemen of property and standing" attacked a meeting of hundeds of abolitionists at the Presbyterian church in Utica. At the invitation of Gerrit Smith, this group met the next day in Peterboro, New York, where they organized the New York State Anti-Slavery Society. From 1836-1842, this Society published a monthly newspaper, the Friend of Man, which reported in detail about abolitionist activities, including underground railroad activites--in upstate New York.

Anti-slavery Petitions. Beginning in 1834-1835, a few abolitionists--men and women, black and white--sent anti-slavery petitions to Congress. Beginning in 1837, however, petitions became a primary means of anti-slavery organizing.
Abolitionists emphasized petitions for two reasons: they were cheap, and they were effective. When the Depression of 1837 undercut abolitionist attempts to raise money, responsibility for anti-slavery organizing shifted to local citizens. Petitions became an important and cost-effective means of converting local people to the abolitionist cause. At the same time, petitions created a furor of public debate at the national level. Congress, dominated by white southerners, passed a "gag rule," refusing to accept anti-slavery petitions for debate. Northerners interpreted this, rightly, as an attack not only on slaves but on the rights of free white citizens. People who might not have become abolitionists earlier now joined the petition campaign as a way to assert the rights of whites as well as blacks.

Between 1835-1850, upstate New York residents sent more than 400 extant anti-slavery petitions to Congress. Seventy percent of them were signed either by women alone or by men and women together.

Political Organizing. By 1838, many male abolitionists, especially in central New York and Ohio, were beginning to wonder why they voted for state and congressional representatives who refused to support the anti-slavery cause. Beginning in places such as Oswego County in 1838, abolitionists began to query candidates nominated by Democrats and Whigs about their anti-slavery views. In 1840, a coalition of these political abolitionists from throughout the Northeast organized the Liberty Party in Warsaw, New York, and nominated James G. Birney--a former slave-owner--for President. The American Anti-slavery Society split in two over this issue.

In the 1840s, political abolitionists became increasingly effective. In 1844, ironically, so many New Yorkers defected from the Whig Party to vote for the Liberty Party that they swung the state's electoral votes to the Democratic pro-slavery candidate James Polk. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican War, New Yorkers were key organizers of the new Free Soil Party, which tried to keep slavery out of the former Mexican territories.

In 1850, California's admission to the Union as a free state presented a national crisis. As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress agreed to a new and more effective Fugitive Slave Act. Federal marshalls everywhere were committed to holding hearings to determine whether accused fugitives were slave or free. Accused people were not entitled to jury trials, nor could they speak in their own behalf. If federal officials ruled in favor of slave-catchers, they would receive a fee of $10.00. If they found in favor of the accused slave, they would receive only $5.00. Abolitionists interpreted this, rightly, as a bribe.

The Fugitive Slave Act spurred resistance all across the North. Famous cases, such as that of Anthony Burns in Boston, resulted in the return of many fugitives to the slavery. In central New York, however, federal strategy backfired. When agents captured Missouri fugitive William ("Jerry") Henry in Syracuse in October 1851, local abolitionists, both black and white, broke into his cell, rescued him, and sent him through Mexico, New York, to Oswego and then to Kingston, Ontario. Several central New York citizens were tried for the rescue of Jerry Henry. None of them ever served time. In return, under an 1840 New York State law, abolitionists indicted U.S. Marshall William Allen for kidnapping. In spite of Gerrit Smith's best efforts to argue that the Fugitive Slave Law itself was unconstitutional, Allen was acquitted.

Many African Americans who had settled in upstate New York fled to Canada in the early 1850s, fearful of capture under the Fugitive Slave Law. By the mid-1850s, however, fugitives once again came relatively freely through Syracuse and surrounding areas. Jermain Loguen, himself a fugitive, and his wife Caroline openly maintained a center to help fugitives at their home on East Genesee Street.

In the three decades before the Civil War, underground railroad activities in central New York were an integral part of more general abolitionist activity. Such activity contributed directly to the one of the most traumatic and divisive wars this country has ever experienced. Upstate New Yorker would be a part of this conflict, too, a war fought in part for the ideals that a whole generation of abolitionists had worked for. The motive for reform, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, is always the same. It is "the comparison of the real with the ideal." Abolitionists compared the real world of slavery with their Christian, American ideals of equality. The result was a movement that shaped American life for generations to come.

RESEARCHING THE

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN

CENTRAL NEW YORK

Surveying

Before you can choose which specific people or sites to research, you need to have a sense of possibilities. Your goal at this stage is to compile a preliminary list of all possible underground railroad sites in your area. In your initial survey, list every site, no matter how weak the evidence. Use any oral or written clue, no matter how far-fetched. Think of it as a kind of brainstorming. The point is not to evaluate but to accumulate. From this list, you will be able to select sites that you want to research more thoroughly.
At the beginning, think about how you will record your information. A standard format (including a description of the people and the sites and a note abouat where you located the information) will help you assemble your list accurately.

When you do your preliminary survey, focus on materials that are relatively easily available and that cover a wide range of possibilities. Save intensive detailed research for the next stage.

Good sources for your preliminary survey include:

oral traditions. Ask people, and you will accumulate a surprising number of possibilities.

written local histories. For most areas, you will find articles or brief sections of books that describe the underground railroad. In Oswego County, for example, Elizabeth Simpson's Mexico, Mother of Towns (Mexico, 1949) described key people and events. Frieda Schuelke,'s "Activities of the Underground Railroad in Oswego County" (Oswego County Historical Society, 1940) recorded a wealth of oral traditions that might otherwise have been lost. For Syracuse, Earl Sperry, in The Jerry Rescue (Syracuse: Onondaga Historical Association, 1924) collected primary sources to document a key event for all of central New York.

general histories of the underground railroad. Most useful for central New York is Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Russell & Russell,1898, reprint Arno Press, 1968). An index to Siebert's references to people in central New York is available at www.NYHistory.com. Siebert lists eight known underground railway operators in Oswego County, for example: George L. Bragdon (Sandy Creek), Edward Fox, French (New Haven), James C. Jackson (Mexico), George Salmon, William Lyman Salmon, Ard. H. Stevens (Richland), Asa S. Wing (Mexico). Eber M. Pettit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad (Fredonia, N. Y.: W. McKinstry & Son, 1879) . Many other printed surveys exist, but they are not always site-specific, nor do they often deal with central New York.

censuses. Federal censuses for 1850 and 1860 and the New York State census for1855 provide information about age, family status, occupation, place of birth, property ownership, and sometimes marital status, literacy, and health. Both national and state censuses for all of New York State are available on microfilm in major public and university libraries and through the National Archives.

While they attempted to record data about everyone who lived in each locality, they often underrepresented those who were African American (as well as those who changed residences often, who lived in areas that were difficult to reach, or who were poor). Nevertheless, they provide one of the most important and under-used sources that we have for locating African Americans who were themselves fugitives from slavery.9

It is relatively easy to list African Americans from census data. Just scan the column for "race" quickly. Usually, whites will have no notation, while African Americans will be recorded as "M" for mulatto or "B" for black.

Popular views of the underground railroad suggest that most fugitives went to Canada. Yet as many as fifty thousand people who escaped from slavery may have remained in northern U.S. free states. In 1850, for example, Theodore Parker estimated that four to six hundred fugitives lived in Boston. Samuel J. May, an abolitionist in Syracuse, New York, noted that "hundreds ventured to remain this side of the border."10

If African Americans in upstate New York listed their birthplaces as a slave state, Canada, or unknown, for example, they may have been fugitives. (They may also, of course, have been a free blacks. The upper South, in particular, had a large free black population. _____of African Americans in Maryland in 1850, for example, were free.) Inconsistencies in the historical record also offer clues. If people listed their birthplace as a slave state in one source and a free state in another, the liklihood increases that they were fugitives. If children listed their birthplaces as Canada while adults in the same household were U.S.-born, this too suggests the possibility that this was a fugitive family.
Based on this criteria, the James family in Seneca Falls, New York, were almost certainly self-emancipated slaves. Thomas James, a barber, refused to tell the census taker where he had been born. His wife, Sarah E. James, reported her birthplace as Pennsylvania, while their thirteen-year-old daughter, Martha, listed her birthplace as Canada. It seems entirely likely that Thomas James was a fugitive, that the James family had moved to Canada sometime before Martha's birth, and they had then re-emigrated to the United States.

Tudor E. Grant, a barber in Oswego, offers another example. In 1850, Grant listed his birthplace as Maryland. In 1855, he changed it to Westchester County, New York. Other evidence confirms the hypothesis that Tudor Grant was indeed a self-emancipated man. Was Grant reflecting an increased fear of re-capture after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850? Nathan Green, who owned a house near the Grants in Oswego, listed his birthplace in 1850 as New York State, but when he died, cemetary records listed his birthplace as Virginia. His wife Caroline noted that she was born in Maryland, and one of his children was born in Canada. The Green family almost certainly can be counted as a fugitive family.

Census records probably underrepresent the presence of fugitives. If you had escaped from slavery, would you tell a federal government official the truth about your birthplace? Nevertheless, they yield rich results in terms of identifying possible fugitives in your community. A study of African Americans in Seneca Falls, Waterloo, and Oswego, for example, suggests that one (4.2%) of the twenty-four African-Americans in Seneca Falls and ten (9.7%) of the sixty-three African-Americans in Waterloo may have been fugitives. In Oswego, however, 26 of the 93 blacks in 1850 (30.9%) were possible fugitives, as were a full 42.6% of those aged fifteen years or older. In l855, 30.9% of those fifteen or older in Oswego were possible fugitives.11

For Oswego County, a preliminary list of underground railroad sites and people compiled from a sample of only these four types of sources--oral traditions, written local histories, Siebert's Underground Railway From Slavery to Freedom, and the 1850 and 1855 censuses--ran to four single-spaced pages.

Researching

Once you have a survey, even if it is not complete, you can begin to assign research priorities. You will have a wide variety of possible people and sites. You will think that some of these are improbable. Local tradition suggests that Fort Ontario was an underground railroad site in the City of Oswego, for example. Since this was a major U.S. Army base, re-built in the 1840s for a potential war with Canada, it seems unlikely that someone trying to escape from slavery would take refuge there.

Most sites, however, will be worth exploring. Some will be easy to document. Others will prove more difficult. Some of your research will confirm what you already knew. Much of it will turn up entirely new material that will certainly enlarge (and may transform) your ideas about how the underground railroad operated in your region.

Obviously, you will want to incorporate all the information about each person or site that you have already located in research for your survey, including oral traditions, written local histories, general underground railroad histories, and censuses. In most cases, however, you will need to do in-depth primary research to confirm the reliability of your survey.

For discussion purposes, we can divide our research task into two categories: people and sites. Sometimes we first discover people associated with the underground railroad people. Then we need to locate those sites associated with them. At other times, local tradition spotlights a house or barn associated with the underground railroad. Then we need to match that site with someone who was a known abolitionist.

Researching People

In addition to information you found in your survey from oral traditions, written local histories, Siebert's Underground Railway From Slavery to Freedom, and the 1850 and 1855 censuses, the following sources are likely to provide information about people associated with abolitionism and the underground railroad:

Memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies. Some people, both black and white, published at least brief accounts of their experiences with the underground railroad. In central New York, these included Frederick Douglass and Amy Post in Rochester, Jermain Loguen and Samuel J. May in Syracuse, and Samuel Ringgold Ward in Cortland.

Manuscripts. Unpublished diaries and letters written by people actually involved in the event at the time the event occurred are often the very best sources available. They are, however, sometimes difficult to find and use. They are not generally indexed, and usually only one copy exists. Sometimes they are available to the public in manuscript repositories or on microfilm. Often they exist in private homes or churches.

They can, however, offer some of the best clues to underground railway activity. Gerrit Smith's agent in Oswego, New York, for example, was John B. Edwards, and his correspondence with Smith yields specific contemporary evidence for the experience of fugitives. In July 1847, for example, Edwards wrote to Smith that "nine poor fugitives from slavery's prison left this port last evening for Canada. They were I am told in much fear that pursuers were after them. They said that they left in a company of 100 and that about 60 of their number were captured before they got out of the slave states." In September 1847, Edwards recorded another incident. "That slavery maimed and branded man, and Brother, Robert Thompson, called on me with his subscription book and letters," Edwards reported to Smith. "By considerable effort I raised in this place $31.25 for him, and this morning put him on the steamboat for Lewiston."12

Major collections--such as the William Henry Seward and Thurlow Weed Papers at the University of Rochester--often yield unexpected evidence of local anti-slavery activity. From Mexico, New York, for example, Starr Clark wrote many letters to Thurlow Weed to keep local abolitionists loyal to the Whig Party rather than support the new Liberty Party. Local historical societies, too, may contain unexpected nuggets of information. John Jackson Clarke's reminiscences of his parents' and uncle's underground railroad activity, although removed from the actual events, is the best evidence we have for the important work of Sidney Clarke and Olive Jackson Clarke and of their brother-in-law, Edwin W. Clarke.13

Newspapers. Scattered references to anti-slavery activities often appear in local newspapers, even those who were unfriendly to abolitionism. If you are lucky enough to have a newspaper index available, use it. Otherwise, you may wish to look at the paper itself for certain key years. You may find references to abolitionism after 1835, when people in central New York began to organize regional and local anti-slavery societies by the dozens. Beginning in May and June1850, the country debated a new and stronger Fugitive Slave Act, and local newspapers often reported community resistance. African Americans in Oswego, for example, held a large meeting in June 1850 vowing to defy the Fugitive Slave Act.

Several national African American and reform newspapers have been indexed and keyed into a CD-ROM, so you can search these newspapers by topic and then print out the articles themselves. This CD-ROM is available in major area libraries, including Bird Library at Syracuse University. These newspapers sometimes yield important clues to local activity, including specific stories about the underground railroad.

Most helpful in central New York is the Friend of Man, published by the New York State Anti-Slavery Society from 1836-1842. Before and after those dates, this newspaper was published with other sponsors and other names. It is available on microfilm from several area libraries. (See bibliography for details.) A primilinary list of articles relating to central New York anti-slavery activities in the Friend of Man from 1836-1842 is on reserve in Penfield Library.

The Friend of Man yields long lists of anti-slavery activists throughout central New York. Minutes of local, county, and regional anti-slavery meetings indicate people who were committed to the anti-slavery cause. References to specific underground railroad incidents are also scattered throughout the paper. So are lists of Vigilance Committee members. Since Vigilance Committees were organized specifically to help fugitives escape, anyone whose name appeared on a Vigilance Committee was clearly willing to be identified with underground railroad work. On July 4, 1838, for example, the Friend of Man carried the minutes of the June 21, 1838, meeting of the Oswego County Anti-Slavery meeting in Pulaski. Four townships reported the formation of Vigilance Committees. Starr Clark, Joseph M. Barrows, and Orson Ames served on the Mexico Committee. Tudor E. Grant was a member of the Oswego committee.

Newspapers also print obituaries, which may contain important sources about the underground railroad. Charles Smith's obituary was the only clue we found about his birth under slavery. He was born in slavery in Maryland about 1815 and served as a gentleman's servant until his escape to Oswego about 1840.

Anti-slavery petitions. Thousands of people in upstate New York--both men and women--sent hundreds of petitions to Congress, beginnning about 1835, protesting the federal government's support of slavery (including slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, slavery in western U.S. territories, the admission of Texas as a slave state, and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850). When these petitions reached Congress, they were immediately tabled, folded, and tied into bundles. Today, they are available to researchers through the National Archives. Because they are filed under the name of the committee to which they were sent, however, they are difficult to locate by geographic area. Extant petitions for Oswego County are available in the underground railroad resource notebooks.

While these petitions do not give direct evidence of underground railroad activity, they do suggest which people were involved in abolitionism in general. Starr Clark, for example, signed six [?] petitions sent from Mexico, New York, including one of the earliest from central New York in September 1835.

Subscription lists to anti-slavery papers . While these do not provide direct evidence of underground railroad activity, they do suggest a commitment to the abolitionism movement. Subscription lists to the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's Boston newspaper quickly reveal, for example, which communities supported networks of radical abolitionists. These lists exist in the Boston Public Library. The Seneca Falls Historical Society has a list of local subscribers to all papers about 1850.

Grave markers. Gravestones will often carry some statement about the work of committed abolitionists. Edwin W. Clarke.

Researching Sites

In order to find sites associated with abolitionism and the underground railroad, we need to match abolitionists with the places in which they lived, worked, and worshipped. Many printed guides will help you do this. Among the best overviews is Barbara J. Howe, Dolores A. Fleming, Emory L. Kemp, and Ruth Ann Overbeck, Houses and Homes: Exploring Their History (Walnut Creek, California: Altamira Press, 1987).

In central New York, five sources for site-based research are widely available and very useful:

Physical evidence. For houses that reflect popular styles, you can usually determine the approximate construction date of construction (within about twenty years) for houses that reflect popular styles by looking at their shape and their details. In central New York, Federal houses were built up to the early 1830s; Greek Revival styles predominated until the 1850s; and Italianate buildings were constructed from the late 1840s to the 1880s. Many style guides are available to help you determine the style of a house.14

Physical details--nails, wallpaper, door and window moldings, paint colors, and types of wood, for example--can also give you clues. So can photographs, if you are lucky enough to find them, which may reveal house changes over time.

Maps. Detailed county maps, large enough to hang on classroom walls, were published throughout the nation in the 1850s and the 1880s. In addition, county atlases were published in the 1860s and 1870s. Other maps were published more sporadically, especially for urban areas. In Oswego County, for example, an 1851 map exists for the City of Oswego, while a county wall map was published in 1851, an atlas in 1867, and another wall map in 1883.
Each of these maps indicates individual buildings and often identifies their owners, as well. If a building shows up in the 1867 atlas but does not appear on the 1851 map, we can assume that it was constructed sometime between those two dates. Edwin W. Clarke, locally famous for his abolitionist activity, owned a house at the corner of East Seventh and Mohawk Streets, for example, but nothing appeared on this lot on the 1851 map. This site, therefore, could not be identified with the rescue of Jerry Henry in that year.
Starr Clark's house and tin shop in Mexico appeared on the 1854 map of the village, for example, exactly where two buildings stand today. The same map recorded Asa Beebe's property, however, on the north side of the Salmon River, rather than on the south side, where local people have always assumed that it was.

City directories. For urban areas (and, when they are available, for rural townships, too), city directories can be invaluable sources. The City of Oswego's first directory was published in 1852, but larger cities generally had earlier directories.

While directories are useful in many contexts, they are irreplaceable in two particular cases. First, when one person owned more than one piece of property, the city directory is often the only indication of which one was his actual residence, rather than a rental property or speculative investment. John B. Edwards, for example, invested in property throughout the City of Oswego. Maps alone could not tell us where he actually lived. In fact, local stories identify his underground railroad activities with a house on Syracuse Avenue, which was not built until after the Civil War. The 1852 city directory, however, located his residence on East Third Street, in house built probably in the 1830s. This site, then, is clearly identified with Edwards' underground railroad work.

City directories will also give information about people who rented rather than owned their homes. Charles Smith, one of Oswego black barbers, appeared in the city directories on West Fourth Street from 1852 until his death in 1882.
City directories often have one pitfall: they give house numbers, which sometimes changed. To be sure you have the right location, you will have to match information from the directories with information from maps.

Deeds. Once you have confirmed the existence of a possible underground railroad site, you need to find out who owned it at the relevant time period. You can find out through a deed search. Deeds are located in the County Clerk's office and are available to the public during working hours. Start with the name of anyone who owned the lot at any time. Maps may give you a nineteenth century owner's name. Or check tax records or city directories to find out who owns it now. Then use deed indexes to trace the property's ownership through time. The grantor index will tell you who sold the land. The grantee index will tell you who bought it. Look up the name of one person You will find the location of a deed listed under Liber (book) and page.. Look up the deed in the deed books themselves to find out who bought or sold the property, and then repeat the process until you have covered the period that you need. Sometimes you will need to take the deed search up to the present time, to be sure that you have identified the right site.

Assessment records. Deeds will tell you who owned the property, but they will not usually indicate whether or not there were buildings on the site. You can often find out when a particular house was built by using tax assessments. Generally these are located in the County Treasurer's office. Sometimes they are also available on microfilm. To save time, confine your search to the period when the house, barn, or worksite may have been built. Check the assessments every five years, using names of owners that you have identified from the deeds. If the assessments rise dramatically during a particular five-year period, they indicate that some building was probably constructed there. Then you can begin to check each year to find out exactly when the assessments rose. That date may be the year the building was constructed. Two other possibilities exist:

The rise in assessments may reflect a general re-assessment throughout the locality. Check a handful of nearby properties. If assessments rose everywhere in the neighborhood, then your data probably do not reflect changes in your particular property.

The local tax assessor may have waited one or more years to re-assessed your property, whether because of overwork, political payoffs, or for some other reason.

If, however, the rise in assessment is consistent with other evidence, especially with the physical character of your house, this is the best evidence that you will usually find for a specific date of construction.
According to the city directories, for example, Charles Smith worked as a barber in a building that stands today at the corner of West First and Bridge Streets in Oswego. Between 1851 and 1852, assessments on that lot rose from $2000 to $8000. This date is consistent with the building's physical details and with the general development of the westside business district during the 1850s.16

Mortgage records. In many townships, assessment records do not exist before 1850. Sometimes, mortgage records can give important information. When someone took out a mortgage, we can assume they needed the money for some fairly large purpose, such as building a house or creating a business. If this year is consistent with physical evidence from a site, this may be the best clue we have to the year of house construction. We can also often tell something about the social network of mortgagees. Who was willing to lend this person money, to be a sort of patron for this person?

Rating Your Work

Recognizing that some underground railroad sites will be better-documented than others, use the following scale to rate your evidence. This rating scale assumes that you have already identified the residents or owners of a site in the appropriate time period. Evidence written directly by a person involved at the time of the event itself is most compelling. If you can confirm underground railroad involvement from more than one primary source, you can make a more positive identification.

--Probably not involved. Local tradition may associate this site with the underground railroad, but people and events connected with this site do not otherwise seem to related to abolitionism. Fort Ontario is a good example of a "1." Persistent local stories associate tunnels under the fort near the lakeshore with the underground railroad, but no documentary evidence supports this as a hiding place for fugitive slaves, and common sense suggests that fugitives would, if possible, avoid a site associated with federal government and filled with soldiers, too.

--Some possibility of involvement. An owner's name may have appeared on a list of people who attended a county anti-slavery convention or signed an anti-slavery petition, for example, but we have found no documentary evidence for long-term, consistent involvement with abolitionism and no clear evidence of association with the underground railroad.
Wilbur Siebert listed both William and George Salmon as active Oswego County abolitionists, for example. He identified George as a key participant in liberating Jerry Henry from the room where he was confined in Syracuse. Supposedly Salmon was at the front of the battering pole that broke down Jerry's door, yelling "Here's to old Oswego"! [check this quote] Locally, the Salmon brothers are associated with a tannery on the outskirts of Fulton. While we can safely assign a "4" or a "5" to George Salmon, we need further documentation before we can definitely identify the tannery as a site associated with the underground railroad.

-- Quite possibly involved. Considerable evidence of owner's consistent, long-term commitment to abolitionism but no positive evidence of underground railroad involvement. Local stories persistently identify Charles Case's home in Fulton, for example, with the underground railroad. Charles Case himself attended many anti-slavery meetings and clearly participated for many years in the county-wide anti-slavery network. We have found no documentary evidence, however, (and so far no physical evidence either) to corroborate local stories relating to the underground railroad.

--Very likely involved. Considerable documentary evidence of owners' or residents' abolitionist activity, and strong local association of the site with the underground railroad. The only possible underground railroad site in Oswego County identified by a blue and gold New York State historic marker, for example, is the Pease house in the Town of Oswego. This house has been in the Pease family since it was built in 1817. The current owner has found the name of Pease family members on anti-slavery petitions and has located an undated (probably nineteenth century) newspaper article about a large number of fugitives who worked, apparently unwillingly, on the Pease farm. This story raises issues about how fugitives were fed, housed, and clothed--particularly when large numbers of them arrived at the same time. It also helps us understand some of the problems involved in the underground railroad and some of the conflict in perceptions between fugitives and those who assisted them. Because it does not simply repeat romanticized stories, it lends credence to this site as a real stop on the underground railroad. Combined with strong family tradition, these sources suggest the strong liklihood that this house was indeed associated with the underground railroad.
--Certainly involved. When primary evidence, written by or directly about the involvement of the person or site with the underground railroad, is supported both by documentary evidence about anti-slavery activity and strong local tradition, we can be almost certain that these people or sites were associated with the underground railroad.

Strong local tradition identifies as small house on Route 69--reputedly owned by Asa Wing--in the Township of Mexcio, for example, as a stop on the underground railroad. Asa Wing's contribution as an orator, organizer, and underground railroad person was cut short by his death in 1854. Local abolitionists raised a monument over Wing's grave, and Frederick Douglass delivered the oration. Contemporary documentary evidence also confirms Asa Wing's involvement in the underground railroad. On Christmas Eve, 1850, Asa Wing noted in his diary that "today a colored man, his wife and five small girls came to my house on their way to Canada to save their children from the kidnappers." 17

But did Wing really own the little house on Route 69? Deeds described the outline of the property in terms that are not easy to understand from contemporary maps. A full deed search, however, connected current owners with the property owned by Asa Wing in the early 1850s. Both person and site therefore received a rating of "5."

What about the five men we introduced earlier? Using documentary evidence to explore local traditions, what can we determine about their involvement with the underground railroad?

Starr Clark's home and tin shop on Main Street in Mexico have locally been identified as primary underground railway stops in Mexico, with Starr Clark himself as the main conductor. A tunnel supposedly connected the family's home with the tin shop next door. Family stories support this tradition. His daughter's obituary in 1888, for example, noted that "her parents were staid Puritans, her father a noted abolitionist, harboring slaves, a strong Whig . . .universally respected."18

But does evidence from the period of underground railroad activity itself support this story? Yes. In 1838, the Friend of Man listed Starr Clark as a member of the Mexico Vigilance Committee. That same year, a letter from someone in Mexico, signed simply "C," described a fugitive named George who appeared in a tavern across the street from C's home. The letter described George's experience, both in escaping from slavery and in the village itself, in some detail. An 1854 map reveals that the Clark home was the only known abolitionist home in Mexico located across from a tavern. Other evidence places Starr Clark at the center of abolitionist organizing in Oswego County. He was the first signer (and probably the author) of the first anti-slavery petition sent to Congress from this area. Considerable correspondence links Starr Clark to major abolitionists throughout the region. We can give Starr Clark a rating of "5."

What about the house and tin shop? The 1854 map lists Starr Clark as the owner of both of them, on their current location on Main Street. Physical evidence suggests that the house was re-built after the Civil War. Further research may reveal more of its history. In the meantime, we are withholding a definite rating.

The tin shop is a different story. Elizabeth Simpson in Mexico, Mother of Towns, noted that this building was constructed in 1827 by the Fitch family as a house and store and that Starr Clark bought it in 1832. Simpson does not cite her sources, but physical evidence from the building itself--including Federal-type moldings, post-and-beam construction, and cove ceilings on the second floor--are consistent with the 1827 date. Furthermore, part of the basement wall may indicate a filled-in tunnel. The tin shop rates a "5."
In Mexico, Asa and Mary Beebe were clearly identified with the Jerry Rescuse in 1851. Edmund Wheeler, their son-in-law, wrote a letter to the local paper many years later, stating that he himself had talked to Jerry and that Jerry stayed for two weeks in the Beebe's barn, "near where the Earle Butter dish factory stands." Locally, everyone assumed that that this referred to the barn closest to the butter dish factory, on the south side of Salmon Creek. Later in his letter, Wheeler noted that "they owned the mill now called Railroad Mills," on the north side of Salmon Creek. Deed searches clearly show that Asa Beebe owned the railroad mills property. The 1854 map also locates him at that site. So far, however, we have found no evidence connecting him to the house or barn nearest the butter dish factory. While we can give Asa and Mary Beebe themselves a rating of "5," the house and barn site that local people have always associated with them must receive a "1."19

In Oswego, Tudor Grant, an African American barber, left a clue in the 1850 and 1855 censuses about his possible status as a fugitive . In 1850, he listed his birthplace as Maryland; in 1855 he told the census-taker he was born in Westchester County, New York. A search through documentary sources revealed that Grant was an active abolitionist from 1836 forward. In 1838, he spoke before a meeting of the Oswego County Anti-Slavery Society. Mr. Grant had been a "chattel" himself, reported the minutes of the meeting, "although he spoke as though he felt himself to be a man, and as having always belonged to the race [of men]." At a meeting of the Oswego County Anti-Slavery Society on June 21, 1838, Grant volunteered (along with John Gridley and Sidney Clark) to be part of a Vigilance Committee for the City of Oswego, to organize local efforts to help fugitives from slavery.20

 

We can definitely give Tudor Grant a "5," as a fugitive himself and as an active participant in the underground railroad in Oswego.

But where did Tudor Grant live? A deed search revealed that he owned property from 1854, when he married his second wife, to 1858. The property itself was L-shaped, with frontage on two different streets. City directories listed his address as West Seneca Street. A house still stands on this site. Except for an old foundation, however, most of the house looks newer than the 1850s. Assessments suggest that this house was re-built about 1898-99, and this is consistent with the physical evidence. We can give Tudor Grant's house site a "5," but the house as it currently stands on the site is not his.
Charles Smith, whose obituary clearly identified him as a fugitive, never owned any property. But maps and city directories place him clearly in a house still standing on West Fourth Street in Oswego, where he lived from 1852 until his death in 1882. He worked as a barber in a building which also still stands at the corner of West First and Bridge Streets in Oswego. A stereopticon view of this corner in the 1850s or 1860s shows a barber pole marking the spot where Smith worked. Without deeds or assessment records, we can still identify both a house and worksite for Charles Smith. Both person and places received a "5."

In Oswego, Edwin W. Clarke was almost certainly involved with the underground railroad. At this point, our evidence is hearsay evidence but plausible. His nephew, John Jackson Clarke, gave a paper to the Oswego County Historical Society, repeating stories that his parents--Edwin W. Clarke's brother and sister-in-law--and neighbors had told him. Based on these reminiscences, we can safely give the Clarke himself a "4."

Clarke's house still stands at East Seventh and Mohawk Streets. Maps, deeds and assessments revealed, however, that this house probably dates to 1859. City directories list Clarke as living on West Sixth Street earlier in the 1850s, but assessment records do not record him as paying any taxes in the city. He may have rented property until 1859. His 1859 house was clearly associated with him, but we need more evidence to determine whether the house itself was actually part of the underground railroad site. Without more evidence, we would give the site itself a "3."

Writing a New History: Some Hypotheses

Looking at the history of the underground railroad from the bottom up, using documentary sources to test local traditions, leads us to some surprising results. On the one hand, we can find new people and places whose existence we never suspected. On the other hand, we can confirm (and in some cases deny) the existence of sites that we were always sure that we knew.
We raise new questions, not only about particular people and sites but also about their larger time and place.

How were the sites linked into "trails"? How did fugitives go from one site to another?

In several cases, people who made arrangements were often located in village centers, while people who actually hid the fugitives lived outside. Shall we count as underground railroad sites those home associated with "conductors," as well as those places that may have sheltered fugitives?
The underground railway network clearly involved both blacks and whites, women and men. Did they play different roles? What was their relationship to each other?

Black barbers seem to have been key players. Their shops were centrally located. Almost every male in town--white or black, U.S. or Canadian--who could afford a haircut would come to a black barber. What better place for networking?

Family links were extremely important. Often, fugitives went from brother to brother or brother to sister. Sometimes, one family member was well-known for abolitionist work, but they could be successful in helping with underground railroad work only because they relied on others who kept a low profile. It may be, in fact, that the most visible abolitionists were supporters of the underground railroad but that others, almost unknown to us, bore the brunt of housing and feeding fugitives.

What happened to fugitives once they reached Canada? Where did people from this part of the country go?

What problems existed? Were fugitives expected to work to pay for their room and board? How did people actually feel about their experiences.
As we continue this work, perhaps we will begin to find clearly answers to these questions and to many more.

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD RESEARCH CHECKLIST

PEOPLE

Name of Researcher___________________

Telephone Number____________________

Person/Family

Name

Location

Evidence.

Check off the sources you used.
Indicate years you looked at, if appropriate.
Enclose research notes, with photocopies of primary documents, if possible.
Cite sources and locations for all material.
Manuscripts. Note the kind of document, who wrote it, when it was written, and where it is located.
Printed Material. Note the author, title, place of publication, date, and location of the copy you used.
______local stories/oral histories
______diaries
______letters
______memoirs
______gravestones
______obituaries
______anti-slavery society minutes--from local newspapers,
Friend of Man or other abolitionist papers
______Vigilance Committee membership
______anti-slavery petitions (National Archives)
______subscription lists to anti-slavery newspapers
______censuses (African Americans who listed their birthplaces as a southern state or Canada may have been fugitives.)
______city directories
______church records
______other

Rating.

How would you rate the evidence for this person/family's involvement in the underground railroad ?

1= not enough

2= inconclusive

3= possible

4= very likely

5= certainly


What are the main reasons for your rating?
What other sources should be checked?

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD RESEARCH CHECKLIST:

SITE

Name of researcher_________________________

Telephone Number__________________________

Site Name:


Evidence:
Note the sources you used.
Indicate years you checked, if appropriate.
Enclose research notes, with photocopies if possible.
Cite sources and locations for all material.
Manuscripts. Note the kind of document, who wrote it, when it was written, and where it is located.
Printed Material. Note the author, title, place of publication, date, and location of the copy you used.

What associations does this house have with the underground railroad?
______local stories/oral histories
______family associated with UGRR lived there.
______name of family
______deeds (Attach copies of deeds or a list of title transfers.)
______assessment records
______physical evidence. Describe:

______other

Where is this house located?
Current Address
Maps
______city, town, or village maps
______year
______year
______1850s wall maps
______1860s-1870s atlases
______1880s wall maps
______bird's eye views
______aerial views, 1930-present, Soil and Water Conservation
______U.S. topographical maps
______others

What does this house look like?
___photographs
___drawings
___verbal description

When was this house built?
Date
Evidence
___assessment records
___architectural drawings
___physical evidence

Rating.

How would you rate the evidence for this person/family's involvement in the underground railroad ?

1= not enough

2= inconclusive

3= possible

4= very likely

5= certainly


What are the main reasons for your rating?
What other sources should be checked?

SAMPLE RESEARCH PROJECT

Starr Clark

Evidence of Underground Railroad Involvement

Person

Local Stories. Elizabeth Simpson noted that "The headquarters of the Railroad was in the village of Mexico at the store of Starr Clark. Here time-tables were arranged and trains dispatched. Passengers were concealed in the store basement or in a dark tankroom over the kitchen in the Clark home just east of the store. To avoid detection in case of search, a tunnel was constructed between the cellars of the house and the store. The existence of this tunnel, now blocked and its openings stoned up, is vouched for by Mr. Clark's granddaughter, Mrs. Denton."

Mexico, Mother of Towns (1949), 349.

Family Stories

When Sarah Clark Plumley, Starr Clark's daughter, died in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1888, her obituary noted that "her parents were staid Puritans, her father a noted abolitionist, harboring slaves, a strong Whig, lieutenant of Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward, a political friend of DeWitt Clinton and Horace Greeley, universally respected.

Quoted in
Elizabeth Simpson, Mexico, Mother of Towns, 354.

Cora Plumley Denton, Starr Clark's granddaughter, told her grand-daughter, Barbara Knight, that fugitives were hidden in the "tank room," over the kitchen and brought to the kitchen table for their meals.

Barbara Knight
Speech to Mexico Historical Society
April 13, 1989.

Cora Plumley Denton, Starr Clark's granddaughter, wrote brief memoirs for Elizabeth Simpson about 1940 and noted that "he was an active abolitionists and his home was one of the stations on the underground railway. He had a tunnel dug from his house to his store where the slaves could pass from one building to the other when officials searched for them. Many were cared for and sometimes kept for days before ways were found to pass them on to Canada, sometimes in wagon loads of ga=rain to Os.. [sic] or to Mexico Bay where small boats would take them to larger boats going t Canada."

Family papers in possession of Barbara Knight.

Documentary Evidence

Directly relating to the underground railroad. Letter from "C" in Mexico, dated December 5, 1837, describing a fugitive named George who went into the tavern opposite C's house. The only abolitionist in Mexcio who lived opposite a tavern was Starr Clark. As "C" noted, `I was looking out at my front door, and saw a colored man go to the tavern opposite. Some one asked if that was not one of our people. It is my practice whenever a colored man comes into our village to go and invite him to my house and make him free at the same table with my family, let him be bond or free."

Friend of Man, February 28, 1838

In June 1838, Starr Clark was listed (along with Joseph M. Barrows and Orson Ames) as a member of the Vigilance Committee for Mexico. Vigilance Committees were organized to help people escaping from slavery.

Minutes of Oswego County Anti-Slavery Society Meeting, Pulaski, June 21, 1838, printed in Friend of Man, July 4, 1838.

Relating to Clark's strong commitment to abolitionist cause

Signature on anti-slavery petitions sent to Congress from Mexico. Correspondence with Thurlow Weed about Whig abolitionism, Thurlow Weed Collection, University of Rochester. Correspondence with William Henry Seward, Seward Collection, University of Rochester.

Site

House and tin shop.
1854 map shows Starr Clark's house and tin shop in their current locations. 1867 map also shows Clark's house and tin shop in current locations.
Deed and assessment records confirm this. Story of "Fugitive George" (Friend of Man, February 28, 1838) places home of "C" opposite a tavern. Maps show this relationship.

Tin shop. Elizabeth Simpson in Mexico, Mother of Towns (p. 353) noted that Starr Clark had arrived in Mexico in 1832 and had purchased the house and store of W.S. Fitch, built in 1827. (Cora Plumley Denton, Clark's granddaughter, believed this was the hardware store and house of J.M. Doolittle & Co. and called it about 1940 "the present Simons house and saloon on Main St.") This date of construction is consistent with the physical evidence of the front part of the building, including narrow eaves, a cove ceiling in the upstairs front room, six-over-six windows, and post-and-beam construction. The back of the building was probably built sometime later.
Cora Plumley Denton noted the existence of a tunnel between the house and store, and the arrangement of stones in southeast corner of the basement suggests the possibility of a filled-in tunnel opening. &nbsp

House. While both the 1854 and 1867 maps indicate a home on this site, physical evidence from the existing building suggests extensive re-building in the post-Civil War period. Simpson notes that the Clark home (or the tank room over the kitchen) was once "part of Carol Simons former home." (349). A search of assessment records (done by Terry Bales in 1998) is inconclusive. Between 1853-1863, assessments rose from $1500 to to $1600 between 1856 and 1857 and dropped to $1200 from 1857 to 1858. Current owner, Eileen Yager, saw walls from a "tank room" in the back wing that appeared to have been cement over lathe.

Bibliography: Printed Sources

Newspapers

Many of these newspaper are on microfilm and are also available outside upstate New York. Thanks to Ed Vermue, Penfield Library, SUNY Oswego, for helping to locate these.

Friend of Man series, 1835-1842, Utica, New York:
1835-1836--Standard and Democrat. Published by "An Association of Gentlemen." Available in upstate New York at North Country Regional Newspaper Repository, New York State Library.

1836-1842--Friend of Man. Published by the New York State Anti-Slavery Society. Available in upstate New York at Cornell University, SUNY Potsdam, SUNY Oswego, New York State Library (Albany), American Baptist Historical Association (Rochester), Syracuse University, Colgate University, Utica Public Library, South Central Regional Newspaper Repository, Rochester Regional Newspaper Repository.

1839--Anti-Slavery Lecturer. Utica, New York. Available at Cornell University, Syracuse University and the University of Rochester.
Liberty Press, 1842-1849.

Published in Utica, New York, James Caleb Jackson and Wesley Bailey, eds. Available in upstate New York at Cornell University, New York State Library, Syracuse University, Onondaga Historical Association, Oneida Historical Society, Colgte University, South Central Regiona Newspaper Repository, and the Utica Public Library.

Union Herald, 1837- .Cazenovia, New York. Luther Myrick, ed. This focused on the Christian Union movement, but it does contain much information about anti-slavery activities, especially in Madison and Onondaga Counties, including reprints of speeches, letters to the editor, minutes of meetings, political action, and national anti-slavery news.

Other Printed Materials

Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the New-York State Anti-Slavery Society convened at Utica, October 19, 1836. Utica: New York State Anti-Slavery Society, 1836.

B. Printed Materials

1. General Histories of the Underground Railroad

Charles Blockson. Hippocrene Guide to the Underground Railroad (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1995).
Charles Blockson, The Underground Railroad (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987).
Larry Gara, Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad. Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1961.
Pettit, Eber. Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad. Fredonia, New York: W. McKinstry and Son, 1879.
Wilbur Siebert, The Underground Railway From Slavery to Freedom, orig. 1967.
Still, William. Underground Railroad. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872. repr. Ayer, 1977.

2. Free Blacks

Leonard P. Curry's The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago, 1981); Hortons; Leon Litwack's North of Slavery, Theodore Hershberg's "Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia: A Study of Ex-Slaves, Freeborn, and Socioeconomic Decline," Journal of Social History 5:2 (Winter 1971-2); Shane White's "'We Dwell in Safety and Pursue Our Honest Callings": Free Blacks in New York City, 1783-1810," Journal of American History 75:2 (September 1988), 445-470; William D. Pierson's Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, Mass.: University of Masschusetts, 1988); Elizabeth Pleck's Black Migration and Poverty, Boston, 1865-1900; and James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York, 1997) suggest both the geographic range and conceptual diversity of this work.

2. African Americans in Upstate New York

For scholarship on African Americans in upstate New York before 1900, see Myra B. Young Armstead, "Black Families in Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930," The Grist Mill 19:2 (July 1985); Myra B. Young Armstead, Field Horne, Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, and Cara A. Sutherland, A Heritage Uncovered: The Black Experience in Upstate New York 1800-1925 (Elmira, N.Y: Chemung County Historical Society, 1988); Joan Baldwin, "Saratoga County Blacks in the Civil War," The Grist Mill 21:4 (1987); Charles Banner-Haley, "Afro-Americans in Upstate New York, 1890-1980:Critical Reflections of a Study in Progress, Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 9:1 (1985), 51-57; Charles Banner-Haley, "An Extended Community: Sketches of Afro-American History in Three Counties Along New York State's Southern Tier, 1890-1980," Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 13:1 (1989), 5-18; James Bilotta, "A Quantitative Approach to Buffalo's Black Population of 1860," Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 12:2 (1988), 19-34; Musette S. Castle, "A Survey of the History of African Americans in Rochester, New York, 1800-1860, Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 13:2 (1989), 7-32; Theodore Corbett, "Saratoga County Blacks, 1720-1870," The Grist Mill 20:3 (1986); Barbara Sheklin Davis, A History of the Black Community of Syracuse: Exhibit and Symposium, Onondaga Community College, Oxtober 1980 ([Syracuse: 1980]); Ena L. Farley, "The African American Presence in the History of Western New York," Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 14:1 (1990), 27-89; Paul Finkelman, "The Protection of Black Rights in Seward's New York," Civil War History 34:3 (1988), 211-234; Kathryn Grover, Geneva (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 199-); Carlton Mabee, Black Education in New York State (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1979); Renee Simson, "A Community in Turmoil: Black American Writers in New York State Before the Civil War," Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 1835-1872. y 13:1 (1989), 57-67; Gretchen Sorin Sullivan, Freedom's Journals: A History of the Black Press in New York State (New York: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1985); A.J. Williams-Myers, "`Hands That Picked No Cotton': An Exploratory Examination of African Slave Labor in the Colonial Economy of the Hudson River Valley to 1800," Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 11:2 (July 1987); A.J. Williams-Myers, "The African Presence in the Hudson River Valley," Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 12:1 (January 1988);

4. The Underground Railroad in Upstate New York

Carol M. Hunter, To Set the Captives Free: Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen and the Struggle for Freedom in Central New York, 1835-1872. New York and London: Garland, 1993.
Emerson Klees. Underground Railroad Tales, with Routes Through the Finger Lakes Region. Rochester, New York: Friends of the Finger Lakes Publishing, 1997.
Milton Sernett, North Star Country. forthcoming.
Carol Kammen,"The UGRR and Local History," CRM 21:4 (1998), 11-13.
Elizabeth Simpson, "Two Famous Abolitionists of Oswego County," Fourth Publication of the Oswego County Historical Society (1940), 81-91; Elizabeth Simpson, Mexico, Mother of Towns (Mexico, N.Y.: 1949); Judith Wellman, "The Burned-over District Revisited: Benevolent Reform and Abolitionism and Mexico, Paris, and Ithaca, New York," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1974; and Judith Wellman, "`Bound with Them': Thirty-Third Publication of the Oswego County Historical Society (1972).
Charles M. Snyder, Oswego From Buckskins to Bustles (Port Washington, N.Y.: Ira J. Friedman, 1968). See also Frieda Schuelke, "Activities of the Underground Railroad in Oswego County," Fourth Publication of the Oswego County Historical Society (1940), 1-14; Charles M. Snyder, "The Anti-Slavery Movement in the Oswego Area," Eighteenth Publication of the Oswego County Historical Society (1955), 2-12.
Caroline Lester, "Negro Residents of Seneca Falls in Bygone Days," Seneca Falls Historical Society Papers (1943), 85-92; Janet Cowing, Seneca Falls Historical Society Papers (1904), 68.
Hugh C. Humphreys, "Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!" The Great Fugitive Slave Law Convention and its Rare Daguerreotype, Madison County Heritage 19 (Oneida, New York: Madison County Historical Society, 1994).
The story of the Jerry Rescue, as it became known, has never been fully told. An early account, based on oral histories of participants, is Earl Sperry, The Jerry Rescue (Syracuse: Onondaga Historical Association, 1924). See also Eber Pettit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad, 50-53, reprinted in Charles L. Blockson, The Underground Railroad (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987), 251-254; Barbara Sheklin Davis, A History of the Black Community of Syracuse, 10-11; W. Freeman Galpin, "The Jerry Rescue," New York History XXVI:1 (1945), 19-34; Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (New York: Henry Holt, ), 295-305; John O'Connor, "The Jerry Rescue," Publication of the Oswego County Historical Society (1952); Elizabeth Simpson, Mexico, Mother of Towns (Mexico, N.Y.: Mexico Independent, 1949), 350-353; Jayme A. Sokolow, "The Jerry McHenry Rescue and the Growth of Northern Antislavery Sentiment during the 1850s," Journal of American Studies 16:3 (1982), 427-443.

5. African Americans in Canada

Gwendolyn Robinson, Seek the Truth: A Story of Chatham's Black Community (1989).
Hilary Russell, comp., A Bibliography Relating to African Canadian History (Parks Canada, 1990).
Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen's, 1971).

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1

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1 Stories about many of these people are in print. See, for example, Sarah Braford, Harriet Tuban: The Moses of Her People. repr. Applewood, 1993; Ronald Burke, Samuel Ringgold Ward: Christian Abolitionist (Garland, 1995); Evamarie Hardin, Syracuse and the Underground Railroad (Syracuse: Erie Canal Museum, 1989); Carol Hunter, To Set the Captives Free: Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen and the Struggle for Freedom in Central New York, 1835-1872 (Garland, 1993); William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991); Milton Sernett, Abolition's Axe: Beriah Green, Oneida Institute, and the Black
FreedomStruggle (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986).

2 Emerson Klees, Underground Railroad Tales, with Routes Through the Finger Lakes Region (Rochester, New York: Friends of the Finger Lakes Publishing, 1997) identifies some of these sites. So does Charles L. Blockson, Hippocrene Guide to the Underground Railroad Hippocrene Books, 1994 and The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania, Flame International, 1981. Carol Kammen warns of the dangers of taking these stories at face value in CRM, 1997.

3 Larry Gara, Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, repr. 1996.

4 William Still, Underground Railroad, repr. (Ayer, 1977); Wilbur Siebert, Underground Rairoad from Slavery to Freedom, repr. Ayer, 1974; Eber ettit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad, repr. Ayer, 1977.

 

5 Elizabeth Simpson, Mexico, Mother of Towns (Mexico, 1949), 349.

6 Simpson, Mexico, Mother of Towns, 352.

7 Oswego Palladium, 1882.

8 Hand-written copy of Elizabeth Simpson's hand-written copy of Asa Wing diary, December 24, 1850, Mexcio Historical Society.

9 Swan, Robert J., "An Estimate of Black Underenumeration in Federal Antebellum Censuses, A Test Case: Brooklyn, New York, 1790-1850, Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society 9:4 (1988), 147-166.

10 Quoted in Wilbur Siebert, The Underground Railway From Slavery to Freedom, orig. published 1898, New York: Russell and Russell, 1967, 235-237. For experiences of African Americans in Ontario, see Robin Winks, ; Gwendolyn Robinson, Seek the Truth: A Story of Chatham's Black Community (1989).

 

11 Wellman, "`Pretty Content to Remain': African Americans in Seneca Falls, Waterloo, and Oswego, New York, 1850-1855" New York History (forthcoming)

12 Edwards to Smith, July 17, 1847, Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University; Edwards to Smith, September 20, 1847, noted in Snyder, "The Antislavery Movement in the Oswego Area,"96.

13 John Jackson Clarke, "Memories of the Anti-Slavery Movement and the Underground Railway." Typescript dated December 19, 1931. Clarke Manuscripts. Oswego County Historical Society.

14 Poppeliers, What Style Is It?; Wellman, Landmarks of Oswego County (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987).

16 "Rochester Business Institute Building," Historic Oswego Building Survey Report, typescript, Special Collections, Penfield Library.

17 Hand-written copy of Elizabeth Simpson's hand-written copy of Asa Wing diary, December 24, 1850, Mexcio Historical Society.

18 Charles Smith obituary, Oswego Palladium, April 1,1882. Obituary of Sarah Clark Plumley, Fargo, North Dakota, 1888, as noted in Simpson, Mexico, Mother of Towns, 354.

19 Simpson, 352.

20 Friend of Man, May 16, 1838; July 4, 1838.

 

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