The Underground Railroad
Monument to the Underground Railroad
1977. By Oberlin College student Cameron Armstrong (Class of 1977)
on the campus of Oberlin College in Oberlin Ohio
This monument in the historic town of Oberlin symbolizes the culmination of the journey toward freedom that was undertaken by up to 100,000 slaves escaping bondage in the South to the free states of the northern US and to Canada from the early 18th century through about 1860.
The Underground Railroad was in reality neither underground nor was it a railroad. The term "underground" in this context meant illegal...the activities of the travelers and those who helped them had to be concealed. It was a network, marked by blazes on trees, arrangements of rocks at the side of paths, and coded messages from citizens, of secret routes, dangerous river crossings, and safe houses operated and maintained by abolitionists who hid the slaves during the day and sent them further north each night.
Although the escape network had routes all over the east and midwest, as well as in the South, Ohio had the most active network with around 3000 miles of routes leading from dozens of Ohio River crossings out of Kentucky and Virginia, always following the North Star to the towns and cities along Lake Erie's shores, where the slaves were smuggled by night across the Lake to the Canadian shore. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 many of these refugees returned to enlist in the Union Army, and after the war settled in our communities among the families and businessmen and clergymen who had helped them find freedom. Large numbers of their descendants still anchor our towns to the past.
To this day, there are many locations throughout Ohio, especially here in the counties bordering Lake Erie, where you can see the safehouses...old farmhouses with outbuildings with secret cellars, churches with hidden passageways and tunnels, basements of businesses whose owners were sympathetic to the effort to get these fugitive slaves to freedom.