Love your posts, matteo.

The Undergroud Railroad ran through the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Many old houses that have been torn down were found to have hidden rooms, tunnels, and lots of physical evidence of the UR. One of the streets in Stroudsburg is rumored to be named after the first slave to get freedom in our town, Sarah Street. But that is probably just local BS. Amazing stories abound about this subject where I am from.

The topic of supposed underground railroad sites can get really complicated for historians.

Though it's certain that the UR functioned with great effectiveness, often there is not much evidence to support the designation of a house or building as an Underground Railroad-related site. That's no surprise since it was a secret activity.

The UR ran everywhere, and every community in the East and Midwest has its legendary UR houses and inns. Homeowners and business owners often ask musueum folk and academics to come take a look at their funny cellar-hole and confirm a belief or bit of oral tradition that it was a slave hiding spot. But old houses are odd. They often contain crawlspaces and walled-off rooms; sometimes that's just happenstance, sometimes it's a modern misinterpretation of a space that once had a specific purpose, like a cold-cellar or a buttery. Tunnels were not all that uncommon in larger colonial estates with outbuildings, especially where winters were fierce - (see Monticello). It would be very unusual for people to build special hiding places - usually they just used existing resources like barns and attics if fugitive people needed to be kept from view.

The UGRR is rightfully celebrated because the tale of courage and heroism is so inspiring; but much of the would-be site identification is wishful thinking. We all prefer to celebrate and identify with the kindly righteous folk who helped the slaves than to remember the entrenched and publicly supported system of oppressive laws that kept slaves moving along through the North, and the broad majority that did nothing to combat slavery. Though very notable, the number of whites participating in the UR was never really large nor widespread.

The National Park Service has so far conclusively identified only 64 places that have strong evidence of harboring fugitive slaves.

None of this is meant to downplay the importance of the UR, which truly is one of the greatest illustrations of moral courage and civil disobedience in the name of justice that this nation has ever produced. Just wanted to point up that sometimes the celebration of it, in the words of the Rokeby museum, "is troublesome, because it takes the spotlight off the true heroes—the fugitives—and shines it instead on their white assistants."

We all assume we'd have been the 'good guy' if we lived in another time. I wonder! And the UR gets huge play in schools and museums partially because it's the feel-good story, when still it pales in comparison to the real and harder to accept story of the long existence and toleration of a system in which people were property.

In any case, most of the time when someone says their house was a UR stop, it's hard to prove. Though certainly, many were.

Good lookin' out, Matteo.

The collecting of ex-slave interviews did not begin with the Works Progress Administration. In 1929, Fisk University of Tennessee and Southern University of Louisiana sponsored field trips with the aim of bringing to light the memories of elderly African Americans who had experienced firsthand the final years of slavery. Five years later, Lawrence Reddick, a veteran of the Fisk project, submitted a proposal to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration that called for the hiring of black white-collar workers to undertake another round of collecting. This project resulted in the transcription of 250 interviews from Kentucky and Indiana.

Although not the first, the WPA's efforts were certainly the most concerted and the results the most voluminous.

and, thanks Miko

(whoops, I should add that not all 64 are slave refuges -- some are related historic sites)

Rochester, NY where I live was one of the Northernmost stops on the UGRR for those on their way into Canada. But despite that, and also being the home of Frederick Douglass*, the Underground Railroad does not get a lot of attention here. There's one house near me that has a marker in front of it, but that's it. The house itself has been partitioned into office space and there's nothing else to signify its historic past.



*Even local attempts to establish a Frederick Douglass museum have sputtered, despite corporate support.

Is Frederick Douglass' house preserved as a historic house? As in offering tours and such?