Cheryl Janifer LaRoche - Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad

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FREE BLACK COMMUNITIES AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

FREE BLACK COMMUNITIES AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

The Geography of Resistance

CHERYL JANIFER LAROCHE

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

2014 by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LaRoche, Cheryl Janifer.
Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad : the Geography of Resistance / Cheryl Janifer LaRoche.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03804-4 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-252-07954-2 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-252-09589-4 (ebook)
1. Underground RailroadIndiana. 2. Underground RailroadIllinois. 3. Underground RailroadOhio. 4. Fugitive slavesUnited StatesHistory. 5. African AmericansHistory19th centurySources. 6. Antislavery movementsUnited StatesHistory. 7. frican AmericansAntiquities. 8. Excavations (Archaeology)United States.
I. Title.
F450.L37 2013
973.7'115dc23 2013024073

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

Maps

Map 1. Map of Eastern United States and Canada including free Black communities in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio and six Underground Railroad sites

Charts

PREFACE

This book presents a place-based study of free Black communities in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. The humble settlements of Rocky Fork, Miller Grove, Lick Creek, and Poke Patch highlight Underground Railroad activities using vital elements of what I term the geography of resistance. By using the land as a document and relying on archaeology and community and church histories, in addition to traditional Underground Railroad stories, the lives of the people forming church and community finally connected. From there I began to look for broader examples.

Near the end of my research, Pamela Tilley, historiographer for the lay organization of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, assured me that Reading, Pennsylvania, had everything I was looking for. She arranged a meeting with local historian Frank Gilyard Jr., sadly, now deceased, and his dynamic wife, Mildred, who took me on a tour of their marvelous Central Pennsylvania African American Museum housed in the Old Bethel AME church. It was here in Reading that the pieces of my research came together. The town had it all: the Black church, the ever present William Paul Quinn, documented Underground Railroad escapes, iron forges, waterways and caves for hiding, a cemetery with Civil War gravesall components I had come to recognize as elements essential to how Blacks operated along the Underground Railroad as part of the geography of resistance.

I was grateful that Tilley had traveled east from Texas to help me solve the last parts of a vexing puzzle. She and I spent hours talking about the importance of the AME church beyond its religious functions. We both agree that the magnitude of the influence of the denomination during the historic period of the Underground Railroad has yet to be fully appreciated. I hope this study moves the church beyond the realm of religion and catapults it to a stature equal to its historic importance for the Underground Railroad.

By the time of Tilleys visit, I had been studying African American involvement in the Underground Railroad for more than ten years. I had come to understand a story quite different from the usual fare of frightened fugitives and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices. As I learned the mechanisms behind the stories, I began finding names of Black abolitionists and Underground Railroad operatives, such as New Yorks Charles B. Ray, Illinoiss John Jones, and Pennsylvanias Lewis Woodson, turning up across several states, Black organizations, and social networks. At times, they were members of the Free Masons or attended colored conventions together. They assembled at the Phoenix Society, emigration conventions, and general conferences. Many had been ministers in the rural black churches or independent denominations that animate this study.

This book is divided into three parts. combines family stories and individual narratives with Black community and church histories and the activism of the Prince Hall Masons to place African American families inside these institutional structures.

Combining history and geography fosters an expanded understanding useful for recognizing and recovering African American participation beyond sites normally associated with the Underground Railroad. Redrawing historic maps of Underground Railroad routes to include Black settlements and churches makes visible unrecognized parallel connections between free Black communities and larger better-known abolitionist centers (see

Concentrating on the landscape, Black communities, and Black churches emphasizes the self-determination of free Blacks. Community and church histories bundled with well-worn narratives and brief biographical accounts tie together the lives of seemingly unrelated operators, both Black and White. Within the Black community, an alternative oral, local, and family history was handed from parent to child, from family to family, and from Black historians to the reading public. Each passed along a powerful narrative of Blacks ensuring their own liberation in the midst of constant economic, social, judicial, and educational hardships.

Through this work, my understanding of the Black community expanded from the small rural preCivil War midwestern clusters I had spent a dozen years studying, to include Underground Railroad operatives who were openly meeting with one another at convention, conference, church, and society gatherings convened for worthy and respectable causes. At each of the historic settlements I visited, a community of Black families had once come together, initially meeting in one anothers homes, to lay the foundations for the Black church. Most frequently AME churches, but AME Zion and Baptist churches as well, were magnets binding families to one another, connecting the settlements to the larger world. Beyond the official minutes and newspaper accounts, I began to see that family members, Black institutions, and Black churches, particularly their ministers, were in league with one another.

Throughout my travels, I repeatedly ran across one name, William Paul Quinn, one of the first seven itinerant preachers appointed by the AME Church. Quinn later rose to prominence as its fourth bishop. When I first arrived at Rocky Fork in Illinois, he was listed as the organizer of the small congregation. When I traveled to Lick Creek in Indiana, his name was on the deed for the church. When I came back to Maryland, I found Quinn Chapel less than an hour from my home; Quinn had been active in Frederick, Maryland. Now Tilley was taking me to Pennsylvania to visit Old Bethel AME, which Quinn had helped organize in 1821.

Each one of these churches has a local Underground Railroad story behind it. In the countryside sanctuaries, tucked away on remote land, beyond the ready reach of the outside world, Quinn and other itinerant preachers were sanctioned to move from place to place spreading the word of God and the gospel of liberation.

When archaeologist Paul Shackel first suggested I travel to Illinois to determine whether a small town started by Frank McWorter, a free Black man in New Philadelphia, Illinois, was a viable archaeological site, I could not have anticipated the rich reward that the journey would yield. Over the span of years, my journey has taken me from the African Meeting House in Nantucket, Massachusetts, to the grave of Moses Dickson in St. Louis, Missouri, to an early AME church and settlement in San Francisco, California, looking for historic Black communities, their organizations, and their churches.

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