Deliverance: Exploring people and places of the Underground Railroad of NNY

Feb. 20—It's often physical hideouts that come to mind in Northern New York when one thinks of the Underground Railroad.

But the secret network designed to transport fugitive slaves north and to freedom was a system of cooperation that had dedicated people behind it.

"When you think of the Underground Railroad, it's not necessarily houses, but it's the people who were willing to risk their reputation and whatever to help the fugitives," said DeKalb Town Historian Bryan S. Thompson.

Mr. Thompson has given numerous public presentations on subjects such as "The Abolitionist Movement" and "The Underground Railroad in St. Lawrence County."

Now, it's people like Mr. Thompson and retired history teacher and Lowville Historian Charlotte M. Beagle who are working to ensure that Northern New York's heritage relating to the Underground Railroad is not forgotten.

St. Lawrence County was an important link from both the south and east because of the St. Lawrence River and as a gateway to Great Lakes navigation. Slaves headed north into Canada because the British empire abolished slavery in 1834. In 1827, New York became the first state to pass a law for the total abolition of legal slavery.

Those who hid escaped slaves in their houses were called "station masters" of the Underground Railroad. Those who transported the slaves from place to place were called "conductors."

According to Times files, two or three lines of the Underground Railroad came up through the area. One went into Canada near Malone. Another is supposed to have entered Canada in the Thousand Islands region. Escaped slaves are believed to have been hidden in Hough's Cave in Martinsburg, and there were many other places of concealment. Oswego County was also dotted with stations. The Mexico Historical Society operates the Starr Clark Tin Shop and Underground Railroad Museum.

At the Port of Oswego, "ship captains gladly cooperated in the transfer of refugees at the rate of one dollar for one or two persons," according to a 1940 story in the Oswego Palladium-Times about a speaker, Frieda Schuelke, who talked about the "Slave Movement Through Oswego."

The laborer

In August of 1837, the St. Lawrence County Anti-Slavery Society was formed.

In 1852, Martin Mitchel, a pioneer settler of the town of Fowler who became a national speaker, started an abolitionist newspaper, The Laborer, later called the St. Lawrence Free Press, which was quoted often by Frederick Douglass.

One St. Lawrence County community became a beacon.

"Ogdensburg was a known place," Mr. Thompson said. "There were boats from the 1830s, 1840s that left Ogdensburg every day that went around Lake Ontario. And if you go back into the records before the Civil War, when people like Susan B. Anthony did a lecture tour around New York and the Northeast, she made sure to stop in Ogdensburg."

Largely through the influence of such men as Silas Wright of Canton and Preston King of Ogdensburg, who as members of Congress, saw more clearly the evils of slavery than many people, anti-slavery sentiment increased in Northern New York.

But Mr. Thompson said sentiment waned after the Civil War.

"There were strong abolitionists up here," he said. "The thing is, after the Civil War when we lost reconstruction, people started to be ashamed of having been abolitionists because there was so much re-education about Black people, and denigrating them. So much of this history they tried to cover up afterwards, and it's a real shame. By the 1890s, General Newton Curtis claimed in a speech in Albany that St. Lawrence County's support of fighting in the Civil War had nothing to do with the abolition of slavery. It was all about preserving the Union."

Gen. Curtis was educated in DePeyster schools and at Gouverneur Wesleyan Seminary. He became a Union officer during the Civil War and later a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He received a medal of honor for his actions at Fort Fisher, N.C., where he was wounded four times. A statue of the hero stands in Ogdensburg.

"It was so looked down on being an abolitionist by the 1890s," Mr. Thompson said. "But if you go back and look at the records of the time, it's very obvious that it was a major issue in 1861."

Case in point: The Colton family of Richville. Luther Colton and the former Roxy Jane Hamblin had 10 children. In 1862, Luther, 43, and his two oldest sons, Heartwell Henry and Franklin, enlisted in the Civil War. A Rootsweb.com essay by Ed Colton, "Luther Colton and Sons: Tragedy on Land," gives insight, at wdt.me/LutherCandsons.

"Hiram, the eldest of the children left behind at home, was given the honor of driving his father and older brothers to the train station at DeKalb," Ed Colton wrote.

The father and his two oldest sons died in the war.

"Luther signed abolitionist petitions," Mr. Thompson said. "Luther was rumored to be an Underground Railroad conductor. He was an active abolitionist."

Northern New York abounds with such tales of people putting themselves at risk for being abolitionists or being active in the Underground Railroad. The following tales of people and places in the area are just a sampling.

Historic cave

A cave beneath Route 26 just south of the Lewis County hamlet of Martinsburg is known as Hough's Cave, named after Horatio G. Hough, a doctor and farmer who purportedly assisted runaway slaves by hiding them in the cave on his property.

"After dark, Horatio would gather the runaways and hide them in the bottom of a wagon outfitted with a false bottom," Bette Smith Lathan of the Martinsburg Historical Society wrote in a 2020 history column published by Northern New York Newspaper Corp. "After dark, on many a night, the wagon would head north on Route 26 to another safe location, or station, in the town of Denmark."

These days, the cave site is noted by a historical marker, placed in 1931.

"You don't see it when you drive by because it's flat," said Mrs. Beagle, the Lowville historian, of the cave. "I remember one of my students tell me that he had a calf or cow get lost in the cave and they could hear it mooing, but they couldn't find it, so it died. It's limestone there, with an underground stream."

Elsewhere in Lewis County, in addition to Hough's Cave, prominent stops have been said to include the Jonathan Collins colonial home built in 1803 in Constableville. The builder was a Revolutionary War veteran from Connecticut, and his son, also named Jonathan, was a state assemblyman. In the attic of this structure, a 32-by-9-foot room was concealed by thick wall planks to hide its short-term visitors.

'Up to our corner'

The first rest stops out of Oswego County were likely in a 15-room Georgian colonial home in Aspinwall Corners, which is south of Henderson Harbor.

Fugitive slaves "branched north and followed the lake shore up to our corner," Mary Aspinwall Taggart said in a 1932 interview with the Times. "Many were the nights that my father, David Aspinwall, would take under cover until the next night negroes seeking their way along the underground railroad system."

But if any remnants of hiding places remain at the Aspinwall building, they are lost to history. Gary K. and Barbara A. Bowman purchased the historic Aspinwall House and adjacent motel in 2001 and went to work restoring both.

"I've never been able to find anything that would hint at a hiding place or anything," Mr. Bowman said.

There's no physical evidence, but the stories linger in the lake community.

"They had heard stories from grandpa and everything handed down through the years," Mr. Bowman said.

The Aspinwall home has other historic aspects, according to Times files. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, the Civil War general, stopped at the house regularly in 1851 during the six weeks he was undergoing treatment for a digestive disorder at the Henderson home of Dr. Lowery Barney.

Part of the doctor's prescription was hikes between Henderson and Henderson Harbor, and the general would stop at the home for rests. A back bedroom in the home was where the Rev. Seth W. Remington, grandfather of artist Frederic Remington, died on April 18, 1881. The younger Mr. Remington, a Canton native who grew up in Ogdensburg before finding fame as a sculptor and painter of Western scenes, visited the home on several occasions.

"The Aspinwalls lived in a tiny little attic because they, being good ole' Yankees, they had to save the big house for paying customers," Mr. Bowman said.

Elsewhere in Henderson, on Snowshoe Point, a home stands that was built by William Johnson, a New Englander, in about 1810. His son, Capt. Frank Byron Johnson, was a vigorous and outspoken abolitionist. In the 1950s, in the Times' "Old Houses of the North Country" series, it was noted: "A mysteriously ventilated basement chamber, furnished with a bench made from half of a split log with crude legs set in, secretly entered through a trap door in the floor, is considered evidence that the house was a station on the Underground Railroad."

Mr. Bowman grew up in Brownville, which "has its own legends." he said. "But down here in Henderson, you heard a lot of stories from a lot of people and you always took them with a grain of salt, whether they were true or just barroom gossip."

A few miles from Brownville, in Dexter, a renovated home at Route 180 and West Kirby Street rests on a foundation built in 1832 by Jesse Babcock, a wealthy abolitionist who has been identified as being involved in the Underground Railroad. A decades-old historical marker in front of the property notes its association.

"Besides assisting in the escape of the fleeing southern negro slaves, Jesse Babcock had a contract to furnish Union troops with rations at Sackets Harbor in 1862," according to the Times' "Old Houses of the North Country" series.

Key crossroads

In St. Lawrence County, Confederate currency and Civil War tokens convinced researchers that the Chamberlain house, known then as Temperance Tavern, at the small crossroads of Chamberlain Corners near Waddington was an Underground Railroad stop operated by Ralph Chamberlain.

"That's the kind of place where abolitionists grew out of," Mr. Thompson said. "It was people like Ralph Chamberlain who didn't have as much connection to the national banking system. Merchants had to be able to buy cotton cloth and things like that and they didn't want to mess up their business, so they were less likely to be committed abolitionists than the more independent farmers in the rural areas."

From Chamberlain Corners, one destination was Ogden Island, across from the village of Waddington — a ferry ride away to freedom in Morrisburg, Ontario.

Mr. Thompson said that his research also indicates that there was a jump-off location at Myers Point in Lisbon, a location flooded by the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

According to Times files, the point was located near the Myers family home at Point Rockaway, near the now-Iroquois Dam. Slaves were apparently hidden in a small stone building on the edge of the estate, awaiting boats.

In 1979, then-Waddington Historian Pauline Tedford told the Times that she talked to a man whose grandmother lived in the area and remembered that children used to take soup down to the runaway slaves.

In another river-related Underground Railroad stop, according to Times records, a historian for the town of Cape Vincent, Nellie Casler, wrote in 1906 that there was a house with a hidden room on Grenadier Island that was maintained by a Mr. White. The house and its hiding place is said to have come into use again decades later, for the bootleggers of Prohibition.

Help, 'brother churchman'

The Times has reported over the years of an Underground Railroad stop in St. Lawrence County on Somerville-Gouverneur Road, now Route 11. In the 1850s, a home there was owned by John Johnson, an abolitionist and an ancestor of the Johnson family, which has published the Watertown Daily Times for the past four generations.

Among other suspected stops in the county was the "Doane-Roberts house" in Richville. In a Times article from 1915, Charles J. Holmes of Watertown recalled his father operated a station at the house:

"Under cover of night my father carried one of these fugitives from our place to the next station north ... He possessed no top buggy, therefore asked one of his brother churchmen for the lend of his."

But the "brother churchman" refused.

"My father then went to another brother, somewhat tinctured with Unitarianism, who cheerfully gave him his top buggy," Mr. Holmes told the Times. "The Unitarian brother, who was at that time connected with a Presbyterian church, was subsequently excommunicated for his liberal views."

A 'splendid team'

In 1931, the Times printed the recollections of Antwerp resident Mark D. French, who wrote that he was born Marquis LaFayette French, because his father, Samuel French, "was a great admirer of that wonderful man who came to our aid in the Revolution."

"My father was a great friend of the Black man and thought that slaves were often mistreated," Mark French wrote. "He was a believer that if the slaves succeeded in getting away from the plantations and into the free states, they ought to have their freedoms."

Samuel French did his part to ensure that, as his son wrote about his dad's work as a conductor in the Underground Railroad. "Father had a splendid team that could make good time on the road and he had purchased a double buggy that was one of the best in the community," Mark French recalled.

In one incident, Mark French recalled "the night there was delivered to father a negro woman with a baby."

The baby had been ill on the runaway trip, and died upon reaching the "last lap" of Antwerp.

"The mother felt badly, but there was no time for mourning," Mark French wrote. "Father stepped to his tool house and took out a spade. He motioned for the people to get in and the woman carried her dead babe in her arms. Father knew he had to pass a cemetery and when he reached the place, he stopped the rig, got over the fence and in a back corner of carefully removed sod from a grave. The grave was opened, the baby put in with a blanket over it, the grave closed and the sods put back so any chance (a) visitor coming over the place would never know the ground had been disturbed."

"With the child quickly buried, the party rushed on to reach the next station as quickly as possible."

Heading north, options included, on the Gouverneur run, the home of prominent abolitionist Myron Cushman on Rock Island Road. Then came Richville, where a house built in 1831 by Chauncey Doane, farmer and cheesemaker, provided hiding in a small room in the juncture above three fireplaces.

There was the sidestep to the Currie house at South Russell, a cut through Canton, and finally a long-awaited stop at Waddington.

Near Waddington, fugitives found "Temperance Tavern," or the Ralph Chamberlain house. A Times story in 1979 quoted local legend that slaves hid behind furniture stored in closets under the eaves of a third-floor ballroom. More protection was offered in archways and cellars of the house erected by Waddington founder David Ogden.

Apparently, one final stateside stop was "Station 206" in the town of Constable, leading to land border crossings in the Fort Covington region — a route, the Times noted in 1968, "where the international line runs much of the way through woods and swamp."

Times archive librarian Kelly Burdick contributed to this story.