Download this publication as PDF - WQLN

home & garden
Cyclists on the
Underground
Railroad bicycle
tour hear from
re-enactors
Adrianne Rush,
seated at center,
and Johnny
Johnson,
standing, in
Erie’s New
Jerusalem
neighborhood.
Photo courtesy of
Lisa Gensheimer
Trained as a teacher, Elizabeth returned to Erie and worked at the
Himrod mission school. She married Henry Burley (later spelled
Burleigh), an abolitionist and founder of Erie’s Equal Rights League.
Erie City Council has renamed East Third Street between French and
Holland “Harry Burleigh Way”in recognition of his family’s contributions.
Dedication of the new street sign is expected later this month.
‘True American’ newspaper
Like William Lloyd Garrison, the prominent American
abolitionist and reformer who published The Liberator newspaper in
Boston, Erie’s Henry Catlin used the power of the pen to promote
his anti-slavery views. From his second-floor office in the Lowry
Building at East Fifth and French Streets, Catlin turned out weekly
issues of his newspaper, the True American, from1854 to 1861, for
three cents a copy. “It is a medium of free discussion for all manner
of men and women, except slaveholders, rum sellers, and codfish
aristocrats,” he wrote. Fugitives were sometimes concealed in
newspaper bins until it was safe for them to sail away to Canada.
When Catlin invited abolitionist Frederick Douglass to speak in
Erie on April 24, 1858, an angry mob threatened to run both of them
out of town. Douglass showed up anyway and delivered a speech
entitled “Unity of the Human Race” at Park Hall. Lovisa-Card
Catlin, founder of the Arts Club of Erie who spearheaded the effort
to purchase Frederick Childe Hassam’s painting “Summer Afternoon,
Isles of Shoals” for the community, married the widower Henry
Catlin, “a man of culture,” in 1893.
Catlin is credited with coming up with the name ‘Kahkwa’ for
Erie’s Kahkwa Club, “that having been the name of a tribe of Indians
that frequented these shores when the country was a forest.”
Outliers
Some of the best-documented Underground Railroad cases are
found in sparsely populated areas outside of the city, including
Girard, Harborcreek, Wesleyville and North East. The diaries of antislavery
activist Frank Henry, who lived at 2060 Station Road, now a
three-unit rental property, were the basis of numerous stories by H.U.
Johnson, publisher of Lakeshore Home Magazine, to reconstruct,
(and sometimes embellish) Underground Railroad stories in the
1880s, after the danger of releasing the information had passed.
Wesleyville historian and author Debbi Lyon reports that Henry
and others stowed runaways in the Wesleyville Methodist Church.
www.lakeerielifestyle.com February2013 Lake Erie LifeStyle 15