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How do we know that Asa Wing and
Caroline Mitchell Wing were involved with the underground railroad?
In addition to extensive evidence about Asa Wing's work
as an abolitionist orator and organizer, Asa Wing kept a diary.
On December 24, 1850, he recorded that "today a colored
man, his wife and five small girls came to myhouse on their way
to Canada to save their children from the kidnappers." This
family was named Thompson. They stayed with the Wings until December
27,when they left for Mexico.
Asa and Caroline Wing lived in a small house in the Town
of Mexico, on the north side of what is now Route 69 just west
of the intersection with Route 11. Here they could provide a
way-station for fugitives arriving up the salt road (route 11)
from Syracuse, on their way either to Mexico and then west to
Oswego and Canada or north through Bragdon's Place on Route 3
to Cape Vincent and then to Canada through the Thousand Islands.
Asa Wing was born on November 18, 1815 in Sangerfield,
New York. In the 1830s,
he attended Rensselaer-Oswego Academy in Mexico, New York. In
1843, Asa Wing married Caroline Mitchell of Mexico, whose sister
had married Harlow Ames. The two families lived on the same road,
not far from each other. Local legend suggests that the Harlow
Ames' home was also a stop on the underground railroad. Asa and
Caroline Wing had two daughters, Frances and Myrtis. By 1844,
Wing was ardently supporting James G. Birney, Liberty party candidate
for President, and had made a name for himself as a powerful
anti-slavery orator. He spoke throughout central New York, as
well as in 1846 on an abolitionist tour of Connecticut. A Baptist
by training, he left that denomination because he believed in
Christian Union. As one obituary noted, he thought that "The
Christians of a place constitute the church of a place."
From February 1850 to January 1851, he kept a diary detailing
his life. He spent most of his time involved either with his
farm, with the anti-slavery cause, or with his health. He attended
the National Liberty party convention in Oswego in 1850, which
nominated Gerrit Smith for President and Samuel R. Ward, and
African American, for Vice-President of the U.S. Wing's correspondence
with Gerrit Smith in the early 1850s shows him to be an energetic
political organizer. He was most renowned, however, as an abolitionist
orator. People strained to hear him even when increasing illness
kept his voice at a whisper. Asa Wing grew increasingly ill through
the early 1850s. In spite of attempts at cures through water
cures, healthy diets, and steam baths, Asa Wing died on March
8, 1854,only 38 years old.
On September 11, 1855, abolitionists erected a monument to his
memory in the Mexico cemetery. Frederick Douglass eulogized Wing.
"I think I never met a man," he said, "in whom
the fountains of benevolence and sympathy with the injured were
deeper and purer. Certainly I never met with a zeal, more noble,
untiring and invincible than his. . . .He poured out his life
for the perishing slave, pleading for him with an eloquence andearnestness
which could scarcely have been more direct, pathetic and touching,
had his own wife and children been on the auction block."
After Asa Wing's death, Caroline Mitchell Wing moved to the
village of Mexico with
her two small daughters, where she lived in a home belong to
her father. She earned a
living by boarding teachers from the Academy.
Sources:
Asa Wing's Diary and Lecture Notes, in possession of descendent.
Breitbeck, Helen. "Asa Wing House." Architectural Survey
Form. Heritage Foundation
of Oswego.
Gibson, Nicola. "Asa Wing." Unpublished paper, Special
Collections, Penfield Library,
SUNY Oswego.
Simpson, Elizabeth. Mexico, Mother of Towns (Mexico, 1949), 343-348.
Wing
Wellman
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