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MAYBE IT’S THE thrill of underground
tunnels, daring escapes, and border crossings
that gets our adrenaline going. Or maybe
it’s a tinge of shame and sorrow, mixed with
wishful thinking. We’d like to believe that our
ancestors, when faced with a person or family
in need, came to the rescue of freedom seekers
before, during and after the Civil War, hiding
them in an old stone basement.
But the Underground Railroad was neither
underground nor a railroad, and like most
myth and folklore, there’s more to the story
The Underground Railroad, by Charles T. Webber, 1893, illustrates the
plight of slaves and the many people who helped them escape. Image
courtesy of Cincinnati Art Museum
below: Albert and Shirley Deiner’s house at 3506 East Lake Road, built in
1832, had a tunnel that ran from the basement to Four Mile Creek, leading
some to believe it was an Underground Railroad stop. Photo by Pam Parker
February2013
than meets the eye, says local historian and
author Sarah Thompson.
“Some of Erie’s early settlers and prominent
citizens were slave owners themselves — Rufus
Reed, John Grubb, the Kelso family, and
Pierre Simon Vincent Hamot, to name a few,”
says Thompson. Others were at the very least
southern sympathizers.
Competing newspapers revealed a deeply
divided citizenry. And that makes the story of
those who helped even more heroic.
From free black communities to middle-class
“In a nutshell,
black history is
American history.”
— Johnny Johnson
white society, in small villages and on farms,
small groups of ordinary people defied race
and gender — and in some cases, the law — in
what would later be known as America’s first
civil rights movement.
Stand on the ridge overlooking Lake Erie
and ask yourself, how did these people make it?
How did they make it through the wind and
the rain and the snow?
Crossing mountains, rivers and forests,
there were no detailed maps. They called
upon the kindness of strangers, and in most
cases, had to fend for themselves. The road to
freedom was a long, hard road.
Today, you can follow in their footsteps,
thanks to ongoing research by local historians
who are working to document people and
places on the Underground Railroad. Only a
few structures still stand, but once you find your
bearings, you can’t help but sense their presence.
New Jerusalem
A good place to start,Thompson suggests, is
the Erie neighborhood that runs north of West
Sixth Street to the bayfront, from Sassafras
west to about Cherry Street. In the 1830s,
white abolitionist William Himrod, a partner
in a successful local ironworks, bought up
property behind Millionaires’Row, divided it
into small tracts, and sold it to free blacks.They
formed a community known as New Jerusalem,
complete with a church, school and many
private residences. You can read more about it
in Thompson’s book,“Journey from Jerusalem,”
co-written with Karen James, available at the
Erie County Historical Society.
Far from the passive victims described
in antebellum history books, free blacks in
the North, many of them former slaves or
indentured servants, had the reason, and the
resources, to help. They worked as laborers,
started businesses, pursued education and
established churches, which were at the heart
of family and community life. The Wesleyan
Methodist Colored Church, the forerunner
to St. James African American Episcopal
Church, was originally built on West Third
Street, between Walnut and Chestnut. Later,
it doubled as a school.
Imagine what the neighborhood must have
looked like when it was ensconced in a remote
area of the city, separated from downtown
Erie by a large ravine. Suddenly it’s easy to
understand why New Jerusalem became a
hotbed for anti-slavery activity. Enslaved
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