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Bethel AME

The congregation of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church celebrated for two days in 1896, after finishing the church at 632 North Fourth Avenue that they had been working on for five years. Built of brick with a stately tower, beautiful stained glass windows, and intricate woodwork, the church was worth the wait.

On Sunday, April 5, 1896, Bethel held three services--morning, afternoon, and evening. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who had laid the building’s cornerstone, served as guest preacher. Turner, then residing in Atlanta, Georgia, had been the first black chaplain in the U.S. Army, thanks to an appointment from Abraham Lincoln. Other guest preachers included Rev. Mrs. G. T. Thurman of Jackson; Rev. James Barksdale, pastor of Ypsilanti’s AME congregation; and, representing the white Methodists, Rev. Camden Cobern of Ann Arbor’s First Methodist Church. The celebration continued the next day with a dedicatory concert and recitations by four elocutionists. “Altogether it was an occasion which will long be remembered by the members of the A. M. E. church,” reported the Ann Arbor Argus.

Building the substantial church was a stretch for a congregation that numbered about forty at the time of the dedication. Bethel AME was an offshoot of Ann Arbor’s first black church, the “Union Church,” founded in 1855. Members built a small Greek Revival place of worship at what is now 504 High Street (with a porch added, it is today a very small private residence), but just two years later, some split off to form Bethel AME. The other Union Church members went on to organize another historic black church, Second Baptist.

Photograph of 632 North Fourth Street, former home of Bethel AME Church

Bethel AME Church was located in this building at 632 North Fourth Avenue from 1895 to 1971.

The AME Church, the first independent black church in the United States, was founded in 1816 by Richard Allen. Born a slave, Allen saved his earnings to buy his freedom. He became an ordained minister and was hired by a Methodist church in Philadelphia to preach the early morning and early evening services. But when his preaching began attracting blacks to the congregation, some of the white members were displeased. Their objections led Allen and his black congregants to leave and found a church of their own.

The church they left was called “Methodist” for its form of worship and “Episcopal” because it was organized under bishops. Allen carried both terms over at his new congregation, and added “African” after the heritage of its founders.

Ann Arbor’s AME congregation was founded by John Wesley Brooks, who was, like Allen, a former slave. Born in Maryland in 1798, Brooks was sold to a New York resident when he was still a child. Slaves in New York at the time were supposed to be freed when they reached age twenty-eight, but Brooks’s owner ignored the rule. When Brooks was thirty, a lawyer named John Spencer successfully argued Brooks’s case and won his freedom.

Brooks stayed in New York another year as Spencer’s employee and moved to Ann Arbor in 1829, just five years after the town was founded. He paid $100 for eighty acres in Pittsfield Township, where he farmed for twenty-five years. He moved back into town, to a house on North Main, at about the same time the Union Church was being organized.

Bearing the same names as John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of Methodism, Brooks must have been born into a Methodist family. The biographical sketch of him in the 1881 Charles C. Chapman county history says, “Mr. Brooks experienced religion at the age of thirteen, and has been a member of the M.E. [Methodist Episcopal] church for 70 years. He was ordained to preach by Rev. Swift, and for five years after his arrival in Michigan was engaged in the missionary work.” Just when Brooks joined the AME Church is not known, but since he was eighteen and living in the East when Allen founded his church, it is likely that Brooks was involved in it before coming to Michigan.

Bethel AME’s church history says that for some time before 1865, the congregation shared worship space with the Quakers at State and Lawrence. It was a natural pairing, because local Quakers had helped escaped slaves on their way to Canada during the days of the Underground Railroad. In its early years, Bethel also worshipped in a small cottage that Brooks owned on the west side of Fourth Avenue.

In 1869 Bethel moved to its first permanent home, buying a lot across the street from Brooks’s cottage and building a wood-frame church. The post–Civil War building boom was providing new job opportunities, and Ann Arbor’s black population had grown to 230. Members of the church held such jobs as laborers (John Britton, Martin and Robert Carson, Stephen Adams), carpenter (Henry Williams), plow setter (John Brown), barber (Lucian Brown), porter (George Brown), and drayman (Henry Smith).

In 1890 Rev. Abraham Cottman, the minister at the time, suggested that the members build a bigger church. The next year they moved the frame building to the back of the lot and laid the cornerstone for the new building. A group of young people formed the Furnishing Club; as soon as the basement was done, they fitted it out for services, and the congregation moved in.

The parishioners, many of whom were skilled craftsmen, continued to work on the sanctuary. Members contributed money for windows, pews, and other furnishings. Two of the stained glass windows are named in memory of early church members John Brown and B. Fassett. Fassett’s husband, a minister, had led Bethel in 1865, and the Fassetts’ daughter, Mrs. John Freeman, paid for the window. According to one local history, O. W. Stephenson’s Ann Arbor: The First Hundred Years, some of the money also came from white businessmen in town (one stained glass window has “Eberbach Hardware” on it).

Bethel nearly lost its hard-won church only a few years after moving in. In the economic depression that followed the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, church members were thrown out of work, the congregation fell behind on its payments, and the mortgage was about to be foreclosed. On the day the foreclosure sale was scheduled, church members sat in court silently praying for a reprieve. Just as the gavel was about to go down, trustee Stephen Adams came running in.

“They were in trouble. They were behind in their mortgage,” says Judy Overstreet, Adams’s great-granddaughter, relaying the story as her grandmother told it to her. “He [Adams] came tearing in with the money. He had put another mortgage on his house [to cover the church’s debt].”

Just half a block away from Bethel, on the corner of Beakes and Fifth Avenue, Second Baptist built its first church. Longtime Bethel member Rosemarion Blake recalls that on summer Sundays when both congregations had their windows open, they could hear each other singing. Blake remembers some funny coincidences--like the time one congregation sang “Will there be any stars in my crown?” and the other, singing a different hymn, responded, “No, not one.”

In Ann Arbor’s early days, blacks lived spread around town, but by the end of the nineteenth century most were concentrated around the two black churches and across the Huron River in Lower Town. The Bethel history explains that the church stood “in one of the few neighborhoods in Ann Arbor where blacks were permitted to purchase property. Consequently, Bethel was ideally situated to provide its congregation and the larger community with services that went beyond being a primary place of worship. Anyone who walked or drove past Bethel--at practically any time of the day or evening--saw a brightly lit church inviting them to come in and participate in whatever activities were taking place.”

“There were always so many activities,” remembers Irma Wright, who grew up in the church in the 1940s. She sang in the junior choir, worked on Christmas pageants with the other kids, and enjoyed the big outdoor dinners in the back in the summer. The basement was used for Sunday school and for meetings and clubs. During the week the church was open for Bible study.

Blondeen Munson has wonderful memories of the ACE youth group (short for “Allen Christian Endeavor,” after the denomination’s founder) that met at the church in the 1950s under the leadership of Harry Mial and Shirley Baker. “It was a really, really important place to be,” Munson recalls. “It attracted not just the Bethel teenagers but kids from Second Baptist and a few black Catholics in the neighborhood. It was really rap sessions. There was lots of talking about life, school. We’d get help with homework, went on hayrides, had parties.”

Mial, who at the same time was running the youth canteen at Willow Run, often organized joint activities to lessen the rivalries between the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti communities, such as taking both groups roller-skating at a rink in Inkster. When he discovered that these weekly excursions were keeping the segregated rink in business, he used the leverage to persuade the owner to integrate it.

In the 1960s Mial was also a leader of the Ann Arbor Fair Housing Association. The desegregation group held many of its meetings at Bethel. “We’d have weekly, biweekly, triweekly meetings there, and no one ever objected,” he recalls. “We were welcome because they supported what we were doing.”

After a year of picketing Pittsfield Village because it wouldn’t rent to blacks, the group convinced the Ann Arbor City Council to pass a resolution banning discrimination in housing and employment. “It was the reference from then on, the enabler,” says Mial.

Bethel’s minister at the time was Rev. Lyman Parks, who himself was very involved in community affairs and was often asked to serve on city boards and commissions. When Parks was later transferred to Grand Rapids, he became even more involved in politics, ending up as mayor of the city. “Ann Arbor whetted his appetite,” says Mial.

Parks’s successor was John A. Woods. “Parks was more aggressive about getting on committees,” Mial says, comparing the two. “Woods was more a seer, a wise man. He would listen and counsel.” Woods’s son, John A. Woods Jr., agrees, calling his father “rabbinical, meaning teacher.” Although different from Parks in style, the elder Woods was equally involved in the community. His son remembers him as “accessible. He lived on West Summit, in the heart of the community. He was seen sitting on the front porch. People knew their pastor was there.

“There was no such a thing as making an appointment. People just showed up. I remember late-night counseling sessions, people distraught because their son or daughter was arrested. He’d do what he could to ameliorate the situation.”

Woods extended his concerns to the larger black community. “Although he had no mantle other than local pastor, he was one of the de facto leaders of the community,” his son says. His wife, Juanita Woods, was a teacher, and he became concerned over tracking in the public schools. The police would call him in to help defuse explosive situations. He also served the community by making Bethel Church available for funerals. “Some churches only bury you if you’re a member,” John A. Woods Jr. explains, “sometimes only if you’re a member in good standing. But his only requirement to be buried at Bethel was that you had to be dead.”

Woods’s biggest legacy may have been his work in shepherding the new church on Plum Street (now John A. Woods Drive) to completion. The church had owned the land across the river near Northside School since 1953 but didn’t decide to build on it until after Woods came and the congregation became too numerous to stay on Fourth Avenue.

“It was a great thing to have the church there. Lots of members lived in the neighborhood. We were sorry [to move], but we had to go on,” says longtime member Pauline Dennard. The building was too small for all the congregation’s religious and outreach activities, and parking was inadequate.

When Munson was growing up, as she remembers, “we didn’t have a large parking lot. We didn’t need it--everyone walked.” But as desegregation opened up new neighborhoods to black residents and people moved farther away, more began driving to church. Some suggested that they stay on Fourth Avenue, tear down the old church, and rebuild, but parking would still have been a problem.

The congregation moved to the new church in 1971, using the education wing for services until the sanctuary was completed in 1974. “It was remarkable,” says Irma Wright, remembering the first time she saw the new building. “There was so much parking. The church looked so big.” Second Baptist also left the old neighborhood in the 1970s, moving to a big new church on Red Oak off Miller.

In August 1989, after a successful fund-raising campaign led by Rosemarion and Richard Blake, Bethel AME burned the mortgage on its new church. John A. Woods Sr. died four months later. “He hung on to see the fruition of his dreams,” says his son.

The three ministers who followed Woods--Clifford Gordon, Archie Criglar, and current pastor Alfred Johnson--have all been active in the community. According to Mial, “Each pastor had to come and get active because it’s an active church. They inherited what their predecessors had done.”

They definitely need the parking space: today members live all around town, and most drive to church. Dennard, whose husband served on city council in the 1950s, running on a platform of fair housing, recalls that back then, housing for blacks “was limited to where you lived in that time. Now, lots of people are living all over Ann Arbor. It’s beautiful.” A scan of the church directory shows members living in every zip code in Ann Arbor, plus a handful from surrounding communities.

New Grace Apostolic Church bought Bethel’s Fourth Avenue building in 1971 and remained there until last September. “They had choir practice in the evening,” recalls Heather Phillips, who lived nearby. “Their music filled the neighborhood. It was great.”

But history has repeated itself: New Grace, too, has outgrown the Fourth Avenue church. Member Bobbie Baugh says the congregation has tripled in size since buying the building and is now close to 100 members.

“We moved because the building was functionally obsolete,” says Baugh. “It was inadequate for our needs. We want to serve the community, reach out to youth, offer weekend activities to people outside the church.” While awaiting completion of its new church on Packard across from Buhr Park, New Grace is renting space for weekday programs at First Church of the Nazarene and holds Sunday services at the Red Cross.

Mike Bielby, himself a neighborhood resident who appreciated the old church’s charm, bought the building and is turning it into four apartments (see Inside Ann Arbor, January). “I’ll have it match the earliest appearance as close as possible,” he promises. Bielby plans to create two handicapped-accessible apartments on the lower floor, where community activities were held; a luxurious three-bedroom apartment in what was the sanctuary; and a fourth apartment in a newly created third floor in the upper area of the sanctuary. He’s already restored the stained glass windows and has pledged to fix up the tower.

As Bielby starts working on the building, he is amazed at what good shape it is in after more than 100 years of use. “The craftsmanship was excellent,” he says.

Trinity Lutheran, 1893-1993

Its founding signaled Ann Arbor's growing diversity

When Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church was built in 1893, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and William, its mission was to give Ann Arbor's Lutheran population the choice of English-language church services. Ann Arbor's original Lutheran church, Zion Lutheran, held its services in German. That left the city's growing number of Lutherans of other nationalities unserved. And by then, even some German Lutheran families were more comfortable speaking English. Longtime Trinity member Gladys Brown remembers that her parents joined the new church because "they wanted their children brought up in an English-speaking church."

The impulse that led to Trinity's founding came from Carl W. Belser, a Lutheran minister who taught Semitic languages at the U-M. Concerned that Lutheran college students did not have a church home in Ann Arbor, he began in 1892 to hold informal Sunday afternoon sessions. As the group grew and townsfolk also began coming, he appealed to the Home Mission Board of the General Synod for help in starting a permanent congregation.

The first minister of Trinity was William. L. Tedrow, who came from Indiana to preach one Sunday and was so well liked that the congregation asked the board to let him stay. He took over in February 1893. The congregation was formally organized on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1893, with forty charter members, and by June they had found a building site on the corner of William and Fifth. They moved the wooden Italianate house standing there to the back of the lot on the William Street side, where it became the parsonage. The congregation met at the U-M's ecumenical student center, Newberry Hall (now the Kelsey Museum), while the 400-seat church was under construction. The completed church was dedicated April 5,1896.

The Ann Arbor Register for April 9, 1896, described the new church as "a neat and cozy structure and a great credit both to the pastor and people." Entering from either William or Fifth, people would go down an aisle to the sanctuary, its two identical wings decorated with arch-shaped stained-glass windows. The basement, divided into two rooms and a small kitchen, was used for Sunday school classes and group functions.

Music was supplied by a hand-powered pump organ. Old-timers remember the Christmas when the man who pumped the bellows for the organ agreed to play Santa. In the middle of the service the organ suddenly stopped. It turned out that the glue holding Santa's beard contained chloroform, which had put him to sleep.

The ambitious building plan left the young congregation financially strapped: though the church was designed with a tall central bell tower, it stood empty until 1919, when Saranda Miller, an employee at Muehlig's, gave money for a bell in memory of her husband, Joseph. From then on, the bell rang before each service. At midnight on Christmas Eve, member Gertrude Wagner remembers, the choir would climb a ladder to the top of the tower and sing Christmas carols, the music wafting out over the surrounding homes.

From the beginning, Trinity had a close relationship to the university. Lutheran college students were encour≠aged to sing in the choir or teach Sunday School, and women from Zion and Trinity took turns serving them Sunday dinners. With the increase in university enrollment after World War I, Trinity pastors took on the additional job of student ministry. Af≠ter World War II, with another enrollment jump, the United Lutheran Church bought property at Forest and Hill to build the Lord of Light campus ministry, and hired the Reverend Henry Yoder (pastor from 1932 to 1945) away from Trinity to lead it.

Yoder's successor at Trinity, Walter Brandt, was the last pastor to live in the William Street parsonage. Already an old house when the church was built, it was very run-down by the late 1940's. The congregation renovated the parsonage to make it the parish hall, housing the office, five much-needed Sunday school classrooms, and a caretaker's apartment. They bought a house on Granger for Brandt and his wife, Mary.

At the same time, the congregation decided also to attack the backlog of church repairs that had piled up during the Depression, when there was no money, and World War II, when there were no supplies. Some suggested it would make more sense just to move, but the love of the original building and the importance of the downtown location--especially since Zion Lutheran had just moved out to West Liberty--made them hesitate.

In the end, the decision was made for them. Brandt's successor, Richard Pries, had been on the job only two days in 1956 when he was visited by representatives of the YM-YWCA. The YWCA had for years been based in the former Christian Mack house at the corner of William and Fourth Avenue, and the YMCA had its own building on North Fourth. But the organizations had merged in 1953 and wanted to build a joint facility on the whole block of William between Fourth and Fifth. They needed the church and parish hall to complete the parcel.

Parishioners were shocked. In her history of the church, 100 Years in God's Grace, Mary Sedlander writes, "They were a congregation of 335 people, few of whom were well-to-do. They had only, within the last few years, managed to get their budget balanced and their property in good repair. They had just welcomed a young, inexperienced pastor after having had none at all for six months. Now they were being asked, within a period of two years, to locate suitable property and erect a new church building."

But rather than face being enclosed on two sides by the "Y," they agreed. They bought a piece of land on Stadium from Gottlob Schumacher. U-M architecture professor Ralph Hammett, a Trinity member, designed a modern church very different from the original. He did keep one feature: a central tower, from which Saranda Miller's bell still rings.

Both the "Y" and the church thrived in their new locations. Since the move, Trinity's membership has grown to 1,250, making it one of the city's largest churches. Unlike many Lutheran congregations, Trinity's is ethnically diverse. Current pastor Walter Arnold says that about half the members are not even from Lutheran backgrounds.

Trinity is celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year with a series of events structured to look ahead as well as back. In January they celebrated the past by inviting former pastors and interns and conducting a service with an old liturgy. A March service was devoted to the present, and in April they used a new liturgy and music by contemporary composers. For his sermon, Arnold used Jeremiah 29:11, "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope."


[Photo caption from the original print edition]: Trinity Lutheran in the 1930's (left) and the church parsonage next door. The entire block is now occupied by the Ann Arbor "Y."

The Unitarians' Creative Reuse of 1917 Washtenaw

Even Frank Lloyd Wright approved Most church groups that need to relocate either buy a church building abandoned by another congregation or build a new church. But in 1946, when the Ann Arbor Unitarian Universalists left their handsome stone church at the corner of State and Huron, they moved to a house on Washtenaw. According to the church's current minister, Ken Phifer, using houses is not uncommon among Unitarian congregations; he could name five other examples immediately. "The Unitarians don't worry about following any architectural standard," he says. "Every building and every community is different." He links this to the Unitarian belief that "individuals follow their own path." The Unitarians bought the house at 1917 Washtenaw from Dr. Dean Myers, a prominent eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist. Built in 1917 (by coincidence, the year matches its address on Washtenaw), the Swiss chalet-style house was one of the most elegant on a street of distinctive homes. It was well built of sturdy fieldstone and was the pride of its builders, Weinberg and Kurtz. (For years, a picture of the house was featured on the construction firm's checks.) The front entry area was flanked by a formal living room on the west and a library and dining room on the east. Sun rooms on each side were entered through French doors. Next to the dining room was the butler's pantry and beyond that the kitchen and cook's pantry. The bedrooms on the second floor had adjacent sleeping porches over the sun rooms. On the third floor were luxurious guest quarters and a maid's apartment with sitting room and bathroom. In the basement, besides the usual storerooms and laundry room, there was a billiard room with wooden pillars and a fireplace. Myers, who was widowed when the house was built, moved in with his daughter, Dorothy, and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Owens. He was then forty-three years old and at the peak of his career as an innovative eye surgeon. He was also active in community affairs, serving on city council and the school board and as chair of the county Democratic party. An avid golfer, Myers helped lay out the first nine holes of the Barton Hills golf course and was the first player to make a hole-in-one there. For the first six years in the house, Myers got by with day help, but in 1923, when he married Eleanor Sheldon, the housekeeper at Betsy Barbour, he decided it would be better to have a live-in maid. On the recommendation of friends, he sponsored a seventeen-year-old immigrant girl from Swabia in southern Germany. Carolina Schumacher (she married Gottlob Schumacher in 1930) cooked, washed, and ironed for the family. Mrs. Schumacher still remembers her first day. She had to enter through the back door because Washtenaw was being paved and was covered with straw. She remembers Dr. Myers as "nice looking, tall and bald headed, always smiling." (He used to say, she recalls, that "you can't have brains and hair too.") The house was grandly furnished, with oriental rugs throughout and a grand piano in the living room. Before dinner, Myers liked to sing, accompanied by Dorothy at the piano. The Myerses entertained frequently, often other well-known local doctors, like Albert Furstenberg and R. Bishop Canfield, and sometimes visiting out-of-town doctors. Mrs. Schumacher left the Myerses' employ when she and her husband started the Old German restaurant. After Mrs. Owens's death and Dorothy's decision to move in with a friend, Dr. and Mrs. Myers stayed in the big house until 1946, when they moved to Hildene Manor, the gracious Tudor-style apartment building at 2220 Washtenaw. Dr. Myers died in 1955 and his wife a few years later. The Ann Arbor Unitarians had been in their church at State and Huron since 1883, and the decision to move was a difficult one. Parishioners--including the children of Jabez Sunderland, the minister under whom the church had been built--realized the historic value of the old building, both architecturally and as a repository of memories. But it had deteriorated, inside and out, and the costs of repair far exceeded the church's resources. The Depression and then World War II had depleted the membership; when Ed Redman took over the ministry in 1943, there were sixteen contributing member families. Don Campbell, then the church treasurer, says that the old church "was like a barn--cold, hard to heat, dirty." Services were held in the library, which was easier to heat, because it was rare for more than thirty-five people to show up. Ironically, it was Redman's success in bringing the membership back up that sounded the death knell for the old church. He attracted young families, many with children, and soon the church could not provide the needed Sunday School space, even spreading out to the parsonage next door on State Street. When, in 1945, the Grace Bible Church offered the Unitarians $65,000 for the old building, they accepted the offer and began to search in earnest for a new home. The following year they bought the Myers house for $46,000. On February 3, 1946, Redman gave his last sermon in the old church. It was entitled "Sixty-Four Glorious Years.'' After a few months in Lane Hall, he delivered the premiere sermon in the Myerses' former living room, calling it "Birth of a New Age." The house took on an entirely new identity. Church social events were held in the old dining room, while the Sunday School met in the second- and third-floor bedrooms. The Redmans had planned to live in a parsonage on Packard, but they found the house too small (Redman and his wife, Annette, had five children) and preferred to live closer to the action. A parsonage addition was built at the back of the house, one floor in 1948 and a second in 1955. By the fall of 1951, it was obvious that the church was outgrowing its house. Redman, in his recollections published by the church in 1988, wrote, "The worship services could not be contained in the original living room space of the chalet. John Shepard had installed storm windows in the side porch, and it was quite fully occupied except in the most severe weather. The entry hallway provided additional seating space extending all the way into the original sun room. And the main stairway was also often occupied!" The church began collecting money for an addition, receiving pledges for $40,000. George Brigham, a prominent architect on the U-M faculty and a church member, was hired to design the addition with an auditorium upstairs and a social hall and kitchen downstairs. According to Redman's memoir, Brigham's charge was "safeguarding the architectural integrity of the existing chalet and the design of additions, which would pick up on the theme of the chalet to create a total facility blending in a unified way with its landscape." Redman continues proudly: "That the goal was substantially achieved by Professor Brigham was attested when the renowned Unitarian architectural master Frank Lloyd Wright expressed one of his rare approvals by exclaiming, 'That's good!' " Today the church stands as completed in 1956, except for a change in the roof line to make the building easier to heat. The section that was the Myers house is used for offices: dining room for main office, master bedroom for minister's study, Mrs. Owens's bedroom for the religious education director's office. The sun room off the living room is the library. The National Organization for Women rents an office on the second floor, and the old parsonage is often rented during the week by preschool groups. The carriage house where the Schumachers lived is now home to a Salvadoran refugee family sponsored by the church. The Unitarian Universalist church continues to thrive in the space, with a membership of 416, not counting children. Phifer, who fell in love with the building the moment he saw it, says, "I never heard anyone say anything but praiseworthy about it." Grace Bible eventually outgrew the old church at State and Huron, moving to an ambitious new complex on South Maple Road. The building sat vacant and deteriorating for several years until it was finally restored as the offices of Hobbs and Black architects. It was an ideal solution: Hobbs and Black got a showpiece office, and the building a proud, well-heeled tenant. "It's beautiful, but it cost an arm and a leg," Don Campbell says of the restoration. "The church didn't have that kind of money."


[Photo caption from original print edition]: The Unitarians' additions have been so subtly done that today's expansive church (above) looks surprisingly unaltered from its days as a private home (right).

The Underground Railroad in Ann Arbor

In the years before the Civil War, a handful of local abolitionists helped fugitive slaves make their way to freedom in Canada.

A few days since we had the rare pleasure, in connection with many of our friends in this place, of bestowing our hospitalities upon six of our brethren, who tarried with us some sixteen hours to refresh themselves, on their journey to a land of freedom.
--Signal of Liberty, May 12, 1841

The Signal of Liberty was the weekly newspaper of the Anti-Slavery Party of Michigan. "This place" was Ann Arbor, where editor Guy Beckley produced the paper from an office on Broadway. The Signal of Liberty was one of a series of Michigan papers that in the years before the Civil War called for the abolition of slavery in the United States. On May 12, 1841, it also provided a rare glimpse into Ann Arborites' practical efforts on behalf of escaped slaves: an article by Beckley and Theodore Foster recording an escape on the Underground Railroad.

An issue of the Signal of Liberty

An issue of the Signal of Liberty, Ann Arbor's abolitionist newspaper.

"Believing as we do that it is morally wrong to continue our fellow beings in involuntary servitude, it is with the utmost pleasure that we aid and assist them in their flight from southern kidnappers," Beckley and Foster wrote. They described the fugitives as "from twenty-one to thirty years of age--in good health and spirits and apparently much delighted with the prospect of a new home, where the sound of the whip and clanking of chains will no longer grate upon their ears and mangle and gall their limbs."

According to a follow-up story on May 19, the escaped slaves successfully completed the final leg of their journey to freedom in Canada. "We take great pleasure in announcing to our readers that they have all landed, as we intended they should, safe on British soil," Beckley and Foster wrote. Today's Canada was still a group of British possessions then, and slavery had been abolished in all British territories eight years earlier, in 1833. In Michigan, slavery was illegal, but slaveholders still had the right to apprehend escapees; in what is now Ontario, however, the attorney general had ruled that any person on Canadian soil was automatically free.

That promise made Canada the destination of choice for blacks who escaped slavery in the South. The Underground Railroad was a network of sympathetic northerners who helped the fugitives on their way once they reached the free states. There are several stories about the origin of the Underground Railroad's name, but all point to situations in which slave hunters had been hot on the trail of fugitives, only to have the prey disappear as completely as if they had gone underground. Extending the metaphor, the escapees were referred to as "passengers" or sometimes "baggage," while the helpers along the way were "conductors" and the stopping points "stations."

Susan Hussey, the daughter of Battle Creek conductor Erastus Hussey, explained in a 1912 interview, "Passengers over the Underground Railroad were of one class--fugitive slaves. They traveled in one direction--toward Canada. There was no demand for return trip tickets."

Two of the railroad's "lines" crossed in Ann Arbor, and from the Signal of Liberty article and other sources we know that fugitives passed through here on their way to Canada. But beyond that, there is much we do not know and probably never will.

Of the millions of slaves held in the southern states, only a tiny fraction escaped to freedom. There is no record of how many reached Canada; the generally accepted figure is about 40,000. Yet this comparative handful of people played a critical role in bringing the tensions between North and South to a head. It was one thing for northerners to know in an abstract way that southerners kept slaves. It was quite another to be compelled by federal law to send fellow human beings back into servitude.

"Worse than horse thieves"

A very early act of the U.S. Congress, in 1793, set down procedures for identifying escaped slaves and returning them to their “owners". As the abolitionist movement gained strength in the North, a number of states passed laws intended to hinder enforcement of the federal "fugitive slave" law. Nonetheless, helping a slave escape remained a federal crime until 1864.

Presumably for that reason, Beckley and Foster were vague about where the "six brethren" stayed and exactly who assisted them. Had the helpers been caught, they would have faced fines or jail sentences. The fugitives would have been returned to slavery in the South, where they would probably have been severely beaten in a warning to other slaves.

Beckley and Foster also knew that their neighbors in Ann Arbor were divided over abolition. An Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1836, and some religious groups, particularly Quakers and Wesleyan Methodists, were devoted to the cause. Ann Arbor's First Congregational Church was founded in 1847 by former members of First Presbyterian, who broke away in part because they wanted to take a stronger stand against slavery. But there was also a significant number who were not supporters of the cause.

"Our neighbors accuse us of being 'worse than horse thieves,' because we have given to the colored man a helping hand in his perilous journey," Beckley and Foster wrote. "We are also held up as transgressors of the law and having no regard for the civil authority."

As late as 1861, a speech by Parker Pillsbury, a noted abolitionist, was broken up by a mob. Speaking at a church at 410 North State Street (still standing, the building is now a private residence), Pillsbury had to escape out a back window, followed by his audience. The attack so unnerved other area churches that most of them closed their doors to another anti-slavery speaker, Wendell Phillips, when he came to town later that year. (The Congregationalists agreed to let him speak, but only after a special vote of the trustees.)

Despite those mixed feelings, no record has been found that Ann Arbor residents ever returned a fugitive slave. Slaves were in more danger from their former owners, and from bounty hunters, who sought to collect large rewards for their capture. The situation worsened after 1850, when a new Fugitive Slave Act was passed. It swept away all due process for blacks accused of being runaway slaves, increased penalties for helping escapees, and made it a crime for local law enforcers not to return slaves.

Even free blacks, of whom there were 231 in Washtenaw County in 1850, were not safe from the slave hunters. Laura Haviland, an abolitionist from Adrian, wrote about one such case in her 1881 memoir, A Woman's Life. In the 1840s, Haviland writes, she helped a fugitive couple named Elsie and William Hamilton. The Hamiltons left Adrian after their former owner appeared and tried to recapture them, moving to several other places, including "a farm near Ypsilanti for a few years." According to Haviland, the Hamiltons had left Ypsilanti by 1850, but their former owner, believing they were still there, sent his son north to capture them. The son didn't find the Hamiltons, but he did find a family of free blacks, the David Gordons, who came close to the description he had of the Hamilton family. Claiming the Gordons were the Hamiltons, the slave owner's son demanded their arrest. Antislavery activists helped the Gordons confirm their freedom.

Paths to freedom

Most of the fugitives who passed through Michigan came from states directly to the south. (Slaves escaping from the more easterly southern states could go through Pennsylvania and New York, or on a ship along the coast.) "The fugitives came from various localities in the slave states, but most of those who passed on this line were from Kentucky, some were from Missouri and occasionally from the far south," reminisced Nathan Thomas, the conductor from Schoolcraft, south of Kalamazoo, in a letter he wrote in 1882. In another 1841 article, Foster and Beckley mention a fugitive "from the lead mines of Missouri."

The line Thomas was referring to went east and west across the state, roughly along the route of today's 1-94. Fugitives usually came north from Quaker settlements in Indiana to Cassopolis, near Niles, where there was another Quaker settlement. They then traveled east through Battle Creek, Jackson, and Ann Arbor. A north-south route came from Toledo (where James Ashley, founder of the Ann Arbor Railroad, was an active member) to Adrian, an important hub where Haviland and a group of fellow Quakers ran a school, the Raisin Institute, for students of all colors. Refugees traveled from Adrian to Clinton and thence through Saline to Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti. From Washtenaw County, fugitives went on to Detroit, where they would cross the Detroit River at night in rowboats. Later, when the Detroit River was too closely watched, the route shifted northward to cross the St. Clair River.

By the time the fugitives hooked up with the Underground Railroad, they would have done the hardest part by themselves: getting out of the South. "Their travel with some rare exceptions was entirely by night and generally on foot until they passed from the slave to the free state," wrote Thomas. "[They] generally received friendly aid to only a limited extent from persons residing in the slave states. But success depended mainly upon their own efforts. They obtained food at night from the Negro quarters during their passage through the south."

Once fugitives arrived in free states, help was easier to get, although they still had to avoid bounty hunters. "They did not bring much property with them; and their clothing was generally barely sufficient to cover them from suffering. The most destitute cases were relieved by their friends after their arrival in the free states," Thomas recalled. Stations were at intervals that could be covered on foot in one night, usually every fifteen or sixteen miles. There conductors could hide the refugees or arrange for others to do so, feed them, and see to their passage to the next station.

Slaves had been escaping during all of their captivity, but the number rose after the War of 1812, when returning soldiers spread the word about how close Canada was. According to Thomas, the line he worked on did not help its first fugitive until 1836. "The second [fugitive] in the fall of 1838 came from the far south through the Quaker settlements in Indiana," Thomas wrote. "He spent the winter with old father Gillet [Amasa Gillet of Sharon Township] in Washtenaw Co. and went to Canada the following spring. Others followed and the underground railroad was gradually established through the state." According to Thomas the line had no overall president, but the management was entrusted to one person in each area. He went on to list them, including Guy Beckley in Ann Arbor.

Erastus Hussey of Battle Creek, interviewed in 1885, explained that he was recruited as a conductor in 1840. He named the other major conductors on his line, including those in Washtenaw: "At Dexter we had Samuel W. Dexter and his sons. At Scio was a prominent man, Theodore Foster, father of Seymour Foster of Lansing. At Ann Arbor was Guy Beckley, editor of the Signal of Liberty, the organ of the Liberty party [an antislavery party that ran candidates in 1840 and 1844], who published the paper in connection with Theodore Foster. At Geddes, was John Geddes, after whom the town was named and who built a large flouring mill there."

Photograph of Samuel Dexter's mansion

Among the places slaves might have hid is Samuel Dexter’s mansion just outside the village of that name.

Turning to secondary sources, we can add more names to the list of participants. Starting in 1892, Wilbur Siebert, a professor of history at Ohio State, interviewed as many survivors of the Underground Railroad as he could find. His 1898 book, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, includes a list of stationmasters by county. For Washtenaw he lists, besides those already mentioned, Moses Bartlett, Ira Camp, Joseph Fowler, Jotham Goodell, Harwood, John Lowy (probably the afore¬mentioned John Lowry), and Ray. Chapman's 1881 History of Washtenaw County adds more: Asher Aray, Richard Glasier, James Morwick, Sylvester Noble, Russell Preston, and Eber White. Research by Carol Mull, underground railroad historian, has revealed that Rray” and “Asher Aray” were the same person.

Twentieth-century sources in newspapers, articles, and oral traditions include still more names and places, but many of these are not verified--and people's very fascination with the railroad is largely to blame. Its history combines the drama of life-and-death pursuit with reassuring images of interracial cooperation and white resistance to slavery. Because the idea of the Underground Railroad is so compelling, many stories have been told about it that appear to rest on little more than imaginative speculation.

History and myth

In Ann Arbor's one-time black neighborhood north of Kerrytown, it's common to hear that the Brewery Apartments at the corner of North Fifth Avenue and Summit Street were a stop on the Underground Railroad. Twenty-five years ago, there was even an unsuccessful campaign to locate a museum there. Yet, no nineteenth-century evidence links the building to the railroad. The story appears to have arisen when neighbors noted the cellars extending from the building in the direction of the Michigan Central tracks, and speculated that they might have been dug to smuggle fleeing slaves to and from passing trains. Though escaped slaves occasionally traveled by train, the extensive cellars were built for a much more mundane purpose: storing beer.

There are many similar stories, in which a family tradition or a physical quirk in a building is cited as evidence of participation in the Underground Railroad. Most are probably groundless. When it comes to the Underground Railway, "unfortunately it seems very clear that there's a lot more mythical belief than reality," EMU historian Mark Higbee told the Ann Arbor News in 1996.

"The Underground Railroad is the sort of thing that in the 1880s and 1890s people liked to say they were involved in, or their parents were involved," adds another historian, John Quist. "It's just hard to find contemporary verification and there's a lot of embellishment going on."

The Underground Railroad did exist. Clearly, escaped slaves passed through Washtenaw County, and some were helped by people here. However, it is impossible to go much farther with definite details of when they came, who they were, where they went, how many there were, or where they ended up. Reconstructing the local Underground Railroad is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle when some pieces are missing and the remaining pieces can be put together in several different ways.

In evaluating the historical evidence, first-person accounts written at the time are assumed to be the most accurate source of information. Unfortunately, because of the railroad's clandestine nature, few records were kept. In rare cases, conductors kept notes and hid them, but none have been found in Washtenaw County except for some references in the Signal of Liberty, which are intentionally obscure.

Next in value are accounts written by participants after the fact, including those of Hussey, Thomas, and Haviland. Written many years after the events described, these tales may have been embellished in retelling, but there's nothing to suggest that they were made up out of whole cloth. It adds credibility that the three memoirs do not contradict one another.

Last in the order of reliability are stories passed on by word of mouth and deductions based on physical evidence. But while such stories in themselves prove nothing, they should not automatically be assumed false, either. Like Bible stories used to prompt archaeological digs, they can help direct research in useful ways, even if the original tale is not confirmed.

With specifics so cloudy, trying to assess the size of the Underground Railroad locally is largely guesswork. No nineteenth-century source tried to estimate how many fugitives were helped in Washtenaw County. The nearest number comes from Erastus Hussey, who claims in his memoir to have helped about 1,000 fugitives who reached Battle Creek.

Some of the people Hussey assisted presumably stayed in the free black communities of mid-Michigan. Most, however, would have continued east through Washtenaw County on their way to Canada. Since an unknown additional number arrived by the southern route, it seems reasonable to take 1,000 as a working figure for Washtenaw County as well.

The movement was at its peak from the mid-1830s to the mid-1850s. Dividing the 1,000 figure evenly over that twenty-year period suggests that an average of fifty escaped slaves a year may have passed through Ann Arbor with the aid of the Underground Railroad. But who helped them, and where did they stay?

Conductors on the railway

He was considered by many to be at least a very eccentric character, but as history has shown since, it was the entire American nation that was more eccentric than good, old John Lowry.
—Judge Noah Cheever. describing a Saline farmer active in the Underground Railroad

After the Civil War, many people wanted to claim connections with the Underground Railroad. When the railroad was active, however, only individuals with strong convictions and considerable courage were prepared to aid escaped slaves in defiance of both social convention and federal law. So it's wise to view the lists of local participants compiled after the fact by Siebert and the county history with some caution. Whether from boasting, forgetfulness, or confusion, some names on the lists may be inaccurate. At a minimum, though, they provide a picture of the people who were believed in the late nineteenth century to have been part of the Underground Railroad.

Dr. Charles Lindquist, director of the Lenawee County Museum, has done a lot of research on his county's role in the Underground Railroad. He suggests the best strategy to identify participants is to "find corroborating evidence--if they lived in places supposedly involved, if they were Quakers, if they subscribed to the Signal of Liberty, if they were active in the Anti-Slavery Society.

"It was definitely illegal, so they were very secretive," Lindquist adds. "It was impossible for there to be just one place [for fugitives to stay in each town]. They'd have to have different places, not a pattern, or they'd get caught." Lindquist also notes that it would have been easier to hide in the country than in town.

The list below is an educated guess about the local participants in the two Underground Railroad lines that passed through Washtenaw County, compiled through use of the Siebert and county history lists and Lindquist's rules of thumb.

The East-West Route

Amasa Gillet: When fugitives entered Washtenaw County from the west, Gillet's farm in southern Sharon Township may have been their first stopping point. Nathan says that Gillet sheltered the second person to pass down this line of the railroad. The 1881 county history calls him "an anti-slavery man" and concurs that "his house was known as a station on the 'Underground rail way.'" Gillet was active in the Anti-Slavery Society and was an important member of the local Methodist church.

Samuel Dexter: The founder and namesake of Dexter village is identified as a conductor by Erastus Hussey. Local Quakers enjoyed the irony that the Dexters could entertain visitors on the porch of their southern-style mansion while hiding fugitives inside. The Dexter house, known as Gordon Hall, still stands on Dexter-Pinckney Road just outside the village.

Theodore Foster: Foster's antislavery work is well documented. A schoolmaster and store owner in the hamlet of Scio, where Zeeb Road crosses the Huron River, Foster was an active member of the Anti-Slavery Society, was editor with Guy Beckley of the Signal of Liberty, and was named as a conductor by Hussey. In the 1950s. Foster's grandson, also named Theodore, set down a story he had heard from his father, Seymour, about a game of hide-and-seek when Seymour was a boy. "Some youngsters ran into the basement and attempted to tip over an oversize barrel or hogshead," Foster recounted. "Upon doing so, they were much surprised and frightened to discover a colored man squatting there. The frightened children ran to their mother with tales of their discovery and Mr. Foster's children became aware of the meaning of their father's night rides and calls by strangers at the back door. They often heard someone knock at the door after dark and their father would hitch up the horse and be gone most of the night." The Foster home is no longer there.

Eber White: A farmer and one of the founders of Ann Arbor's First Methodist Church, White lived on what was then the western edge of the city. According to the county history, "in slavery days [he] was a prime mover in the underground railroad, and many a slave after reaching Canada has thanked God for the help given him by Eber White and his trustworthy friends." White's house at 405 Eberwhite (on the corner of Liberty) has been replaced by a modem house; the land he farmed is now the neighborhood around Eberwhite School.

Sylvester Noble: The county history says that Noble was a member of the Underground Railroad, as does his obituary, which states that "during the days of slavery his sympathies were strongly engaged on the side of the oppressed and his house was frequently made a station on the underground railroad." His home at 220 West Huron is no longer standing.

James Morwick: "During slavery days he was a prime mover in the famous Underground Railroad," according to the county history. An architect, Morwick lived at 604 East Washington, in a house that is now a student rental.

Robert Glazier: Glazier (sometimes spelled Glasier) "was considered one of the best 'conductors' on the route," according to the county history. "He has assisted in passing many a slave into Canada where they would be safe from their cruel master. His 'route' lay from Ann Arbor [east] to Farmington and on one occasion he made a trip to Adrian with William Lloyd Garrison." Supporting evidence is that Glazier was a member of the Michigan Anti-Slavery Society and a devout Quaker. Glazier's house, which began as a log cabin, still stands at 3175 Glazier Way.

John Geddes: Hussey names Geddes as a conductor. His role was challenged almost as soon as Hussey's 1885 interview appeared, however, when an Ypsilanti newspaper article asserted that Geddes "never had anything to do with it [the Underground Railroad]." Historian Quist, whose U-M doctoral dissertation looked at antislavery efforts in Washtenaw County, found no record that Geddes was an active abolitionist.

Besides Hussey’s mention, the main other evidence is that Francis Monaghan, who worked for Geddes as a farmhand and bought the property in 1885, passed on to his descendants stories he heard from Geddes about his involvement in the Underground Railroad. But in recent years, both Geddes’ letters and diary have come to light and people who have read them say they contain no references to the underground railroad or abolitionism or slavery or even radical politics.

Photograph of the Huron Block on Broadway

Guy Beckley published the Signal of Liberty above his brother Josiah’s store in the Huron Block on Broadway.

Guy Beckley: Beckley published the Signal of Liberty from an office above the store of his brother, Josiah Beckely, on Broadway, across the street from the Anson Brown Building on Broadway (which today houses the St. Vincent de Paul store). His home, just a few blocks away at 1425 Pontiac Trail, is the Ann Arbor structure most identified with the antislavery cause; it's where school buses stop on historical field trips. A specific spot for hiding fugitives has never been found in his house, although a back part has been torn down. It's possible that because Beckley was so publicly identified with the Underground Railroad, fugitives were hidden elsewhere if a danger was perceived. An ordained minister, Beckley moved to Ann Arbor in 1839, remaining active in the abolitionist cause until his death in 1847.

Josiah Beckley: A farmer and brick maker, he was supposed to have played a less active role in the anti-slavery movement than his brother, helping mostly with funding. His two Ann Arbor houses are strong possibilities for Underground Railroad sites:

* 1317 Pontiac: Former owner Fran Wright says her deed research established that Josiah Beckley bought the land in 1835 and probably built the house the next year. Present owner Jack Kenny says that there is a hiding place at the back of a downstairs closet big enough for three or four people. Jerry Cantor, who grew up on the north side, said that when he was a boy he was told that fugitive slaves hid in the barn on this property.

* 1709 Pontiac: Former owner Deborah Oakley says that her deed research established that Josiah Beckley bought the land in 1827, the year he came to Ann Arbor, and built the house sometime between 1831 and 1843. Josiah probably built the house in the late 1830s, moving there from 1317 Pontiac. We know he resided there when he died in 1843. Present owner Martha Wallace says there is a false wall in the basement "made with brick the same generation as the house--old and crumbly" that may have concealed a hiding place for fugitive slaves.

The Southern Route

Prince Bennett of Augusta Township is not mentioned in any of the nineteenth-century accounts of the Underground Railroad, but a strong oral tradition suggests that he was a conductor. Barbara McKenzie, Bennett's great-granddaughter, says that she was told that "Underneath his front porch there was a trapdoor that led to a room where you could put runaway slaves." Bennett, whose home on Tuttle Road no longer stands, certainly was an abolitionist: a founder of Augusta's Evangelical Friends Church, he was active in the Anti-Slavery Association, and his obituary describes him as "a prominent anti-slavery man of olden times."

John Lowry: In 1899, Judge Noah Cheever, who had been in Ann Arbor since 1859, published a book called Pleasant Walks and Drives about Ann Arbor. Cheever recommended stopping at the farm of John Lowry [probably the John Lowy listed in Siebert], explaining that "Mr. Lowry's house was one of the stations to the underground railroad and he assisted a great many slaves on their way to Canada. ... Mr. Sellick Wood, lately deceased of our city, told me that when he was a young man he drove a number of loads of fleeing negro slaves from Mr. Lowry's home to the Detroit River and saw that they were safely carried across to Canada." Lowry's house, now gone, stood on the west side of Ann Arbor-Saline Road, near Brassow.

The route to Canada

From Ann Arbor, the next stop to the east was Ypsilanti. A. P. Marshall's Unconquered Souls: The History of the African American in Ypsilanti, includes a discussion of the city's involvement in the Underground Railroad. Marshall says that George McCoy transported fugitives in wagons with false bottoms and gave them shelter in his barn, while Helen McAndrew hid them in either her octagon house or her barn. Both of these homes have been torn down. "The only house we can absolutely verify is the Norris house," Marshall says. Mark Norris lived at 213 North River Street and was a prominent early settler whose role in the Underground Railroad is documented in letters retained by his family. Others have suggested that fugitives were hidden in Ypsilanti's black church, but Marshall is doubtful. "The church was in an old livery stable and didn't have a basement. It's the first place [slave hunters] would look."

Going north out of Ann Arbor, up Pontiac Trail from the Beckley houses, or straight north from the Geddes and Glazier houses, fugitives would pass the hamlet of Salem. While no contemporary evidence has been found that Salem residents aided the fugitives, The History of Salem Township, published in 1976, lists seven possible Underground Railroad sites, based on older documents and stories told by local residents. The hamlet's support for abolition is indisputable: in the 1840 election it led the county in voting for the antislavery Liberty party, giving the abolitionists sixty-three votes, compared with fifty in Ann Arbor and twenty in Ypsilanti.

Photograph of Guy Beckley's home at 1425 Pontiac Trail

Guy Beckley's home at 1425 Pontiac Trail.

From Ypsilanti, the former slaves originally traveled east through Plymouth, River Rouge, and Swartzburg to Detroit. When that route became too closely watched, the line shifted northward, passing through a string of towns--Northville, Farmington, Birmingham, Pontiac, Rochester, Utica, Romeo, Richmond, and New Haven--on the way to the St. Clair River. Finally, the fugitives were smuggled across to Canada by boat.

Living legacies

It is estimated that 40,000 former slaves and their families were living in Canada at the time of the Civil War. About half of them eventually moved back to the United States. They came over a period of decades to rejoin family, to return to a warmer climate, or to pursue jobs or education. In her memoir, Laura Haviland mentions a former slave named John White who after emancipation "removed to Ann Arbor, Michigan to educate his children."

Many Ann Arbor families trace their descent to these black Canadians. The local black Elks Lodge, according to member William Hampton, "was formed by a group mostly from Canada." Several well-known historic figures, including Charles Baker, co-owner of the Ann Arbor Foundry, and Claude Brown, who ran a secondhand store in the Main Street building that now houses Laky's Salon, came to Ann Arbor from Canada.

At least three Ann Arbor families have connections with North Buxton, a remarkable settlement in the middle of southwestern Ontario, near Chatham. North Buxton was founded in 1849 by William King, a minister who married the daughter of a southern plantation owner. When King's wife inherited her family's fifteen slaves, King freed them, buying land in Canada for them to resettle. They became the nucleus of a black community whose residents grew a wide range of crops, owned and operated businesses, ran hotels, organized churches, and published a newspaper. Their schools were so good that white people from neighboring communities sent their children there. And they claimed a number of firsts, including the first black Canadian elected to public office.

Ann Arborite Ruth Spann's great-aunt came from North Buxton, and Lydia Morton's great-grandfather lived in nearby Fletcher. Viola Henderson's great-aunt, Mary Ann Shadd Gary, ran a school in Windsor for black refugees. After the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made life more dangerous near the border, she moved inland to North Buxton, where in 1853 she became the first black woman in North America to edit a weekly newspaper. After the war, she returned to the United States, where she was the first black woman to graduate from Howard University Law School.

Dwight Walls, pastor of the Greater Shiloh Church of God in Christ in Ypsilanti, is descended from John Freeman Walls, a former slave from North Carolina, and Jane Walls, the white widow of his original master. The Wallses escaped the South, reached Canada by boat from Toledo, and settled in Puce, Ontario. Dwight Walls's grandfather moved to Detroit to work after World War II, but his family still has many Canadian connections. He reports that a number of black Ypsilantians have Canadian roots, including the Bass, Perry, and Kersey families, as well as the Grayer family of his mother.

Descendants of the original settlers still live in North Buxton, although only two families still farm and the children go into Chatham for school. Artifacts from the original settlement, including King's bed and many photographs, can be viewed in the Raleigh Township Centennial Museum. In Puce, Walls's cousins run the John Freeman Historic Site and Underground Railroad Museum, which includes the log cabin his ancestors lived in and the graveyard where they are buried.

Amherstburg, where many fugitives arrived by rowboat, honors their place in black history with the North American Black Historical Museum and Cultural Centre. These and several other sites--including the homestead of Josiah Henson, the man believed to be the model for Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin--form the African-Canadian Heritage Tour.

Sites in Michigan are harder to find. In Battle Creek, the store where Erastus Hussey once hid runaway slaves is gone, its place noted by a historical marker. Another marker tells the story of the Merritts, a Quaker family who hid slaves. In nearby Schoolcraft, Nathan Thomas's house still stands. Privately owned, it is periodically opened to the public. In Cassopolis, there's a historical marker on the former site of the Quaker meetinghouse, once a key center for fugitives entering from Indiana.

Researchers A. P. Marshall and Charles Lindquist, and Mary Butler, archivist for the Historical Society of Battle Creek, all speak of the frustration of working with such ephemeral evidence. But more information may come to light through a U.S. Parks Service project to identify and mark Underground Railroad sites on which the Guy Beckley home has been listed. The larger than expected attendance at the National Underground Freedom Center, which opened in Cincinnati in 2004, also shows that there is an increasing interest.

The period of slavery is an enormous blot on American history. The Underground Railroad was a heartening exception, in which people of all races worked together to help slaves to freedom. Retelling the story, we celebrate the courage and ingenuity of those who escaped, the kindness of both blacks and whites who helped them on their journey, and the ability of the fugitives to start life over in Canada--and, for many, yet again in the United States.