Freedom Road

Feb. 20—STONEBORO — The lunch menu for Saturday's Mercer County Underground Railroad Tour sat down for lunch Saturday consisted of soup, greens, cornbread and sweet potatoes.

It was an attempt to replicate the diet of enslaved Black people, said Peggy Mazyck. But she admitted the spread wasn't fully period-accurate.

"They didn't have it all in one meal," said Mazyck, president and CEO of VisitMercerCountyPA, the county's tourism agency. "But we're going to have it all in one meal."

The tour — organized by VisitMercerCountyPA and the Mercer County Historical Society — put a spotlight on the county's history of opposition to slavery and support of freed Black communities.

Historian and author Roland Barksdale-Hall served as "conductor" for the event, which began at the county Visitors Center, with a musical performance by Monica Jefferson and her son Leon Avery III.

Music, including religious spirituals, were important to Black people during the time period covered in the tour.

"We just wanted to make sure we represented our culture," Jefferson said. "It really lifted the spirit of our people. Even today, it is a blessing."

The tour — which included stops at the Raisch Log Cabin in Sharpsville, safe houses in Mercer, lunch at the historical society's Helen Black Miller Memorial Chapel in Mercer and a stop at the Gibson House (Mark Twain Manor) in Jamestown — aimed to give participants a perspective of life in the early 1800s.

Participants also stopped in the county's historical freed Black communities — Pandenarium in present-day East Lackawannock Township and Liberia in present-day Stoneboro.

Pandenarium, founded about 1848 when a wealthy Virginia doctor purchased land for formerly enslaved people, continued until just about the turn of the 20th century, when many of its residents traveled to nearby towns, including the Shenango Valley, to pursue jobs in growing industrial businesses.

"I was impressed with the communities, especially Pandenarium," said Sue Kochhar of Hermitage.

She is familiar with another form of oppression against her own family. Kochhar's great-grandparents were indentured servants after traveling from India — then a British colony — to the West Indies.

Indentured servitude was a common practice in the British American colonies prior to independence, in which a immigrant would be bound to work as a servant, often for a period of seven years. After completion of the indentured term, however, the servant would be free. That differentiated indentured servitude from chattel slavery in the United States, which kept enslaved people and their descendants in bondage not just for life, but multigenerationally.

Liberia had a rather more problematic ending tale, said Barksdale-Hall. While Pandenarium was populated by enslaved people who had been granted freedom, Liberia sheltered many escapees.

That meant it attracted the attention of slave catchers, bounty hunters who made their money by apprehending and returning escaped enslaved people. and they didn't necessarily need to catch the particular slave they were looking for.

"They would take anyone because they could get the bounty," Barksdale-Hall said.

The slave catchers weren't above bribing members of the Liberia community to help capture escapees. Barksdale-Hall told tour participants about a Liberia resident named "Walter," who helped slave catchers.

Barksdale-Hall's research didn't reveal "Walter's" fate. But the outcome for a second collaborator, named John Mitchell, who may have been bribed not with money, but with whiskey — the records called him an "old drunken" person.

Mitchell was found out, and the retribution was swift.

"The next time Mitchell got into their settlement, they set upon him with sticks and bats," Barksdale-Hall said.

In the end, though, Liberia's demise came not from internal betrayal, but from federal legislation. The Compromise of 1850 amended the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring people to return escaped enslaved people, restricted the ability of free Black people to assert their status in court, and levied severe penalties in the form of jail sentences and fines.

After the law's passage, the residents of Liberia realized their community was in a difficult situation and they traveled north — most of them wound up in Canada.

Many of the people who participated Saturday in the tour were members of St. John's Episcopal Church in Sharon, which is taking part in a program called "Becoming Beloved," a program of the Episcopal Church in the United States.

"We've been looking historically at some of our ties as a church to slavery, to the slave trade, and to ways that we as a church have not always lived into doing what we need to do," said St. John's pastor the Rev. Dr. Adam Trambley.

Learning about the history of slavery — which existed in Pennsylvania, and in Mercer County, well into the 1800s after the state legislature's Gradual Emancipation Act in 1780, which ended the transportation of enslaved people into Pennsylvania and declared children born to enslaved people to be free.

Vicki Barletta, a New Castle resident who attends St. John's, said the Becoming Beloved community project — which takes its name from the writings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King — is providing the congregation with a necessary education on history and racial justice.

"I think slavery is an important part of our history," she said.