BEAVER COUNTY & REGION

• • Beaver County provided pivotal role in Underground Railroad circuit
  • History of Beaver County, Pennsylvania and Its Centennial Celebration (Volume 2), by Joseph Bausman. 1904.
  • The Underground Railroad in Beaver County (From The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania by Charles L Blockson, Milestones Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 1995)
  • New Brighton was ‘hub of the Underground Railroad’
  • Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania (William J. Switala)
  • From Bondage to Freedom | Underground Railroad carried many through region’s communities
  • Richard, Jacob Fraise, Thomas Henry, and A Warner. History of Beaver County, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia and Chicago, A. Warner & co, 1888. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/01010445/
  • St. John African Methodist Episcopal Church, Bridewater
  • How did Pittsburgh’s oldest Black church form? What was its role in the Underground Railroad and fighting slavery?

  • Ancestor’s work on Underground Railroad an act of faith (Ellwood City Ledger (2013)

MERCER COUNTY

• • Unearthing the Forgotten Past at Pandenarium, Site 36ME0253
  • Pandenarium: Unearthing Black Settlers’ Stories
  • Secret passage: A haven for escaped slaves grew in Mercer County and was a stop on the Underground Railroad
  • BLACK HISTORY MONTH – A look at the historical site where freed slaves settled in Mercer County
  • Patriots in Pandenarium
  • Marker notes settlement of freed slaves – Some Pandenarium residents returned to South to fight for Union

PEOPLE

• • William Still, Abolitionist, UGRR Conductor, Historian
  • The Harriet Tubman Home National Historic Park
  • “Harriet Tubman Home”
  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  • National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Discovering the Underground Railroad (Profiles of Freedom Seekers)

ORAL HISTORY, SLAVE NARRATIVES

• • Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States (aka, WPA Slave Narrative Collection) (see references)
  • Slave Narrative (see references)
  • Lay my burden down : a folk history of slavery (Benjamin Albert Botkin) (Available at Geneva College McCartney Library)
    • Summary: In the 1930s, the last decade when many men and women who were born under slavery and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation still lived, the New Deal’s Federal Writing Project made an extraordinary and important decision. It sent interviewers to ask these African-American survivors: What does it mean to be a slave? What does it mean to be free? Even more, how does it feel? B.A. Botkin compiled nearly three hundred of these narratives to create a rich, unvarnished portrait of lives lived half slave, half free. In it, people who experienced the seasonal rhythms of plantation life … who were eyewitnesses to Lincoln, Douglass, and Tubman … who had their consciousness shaped by bondage … and who felt the anguish of the lash have their memories brought to life again. Their voices reach out across the decades and teach us what they know–our history and our legacy in their telling of an indelible truth. (Back cover)
  • Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism? – In the 1930s, the federal government sent (mostly white) interviewers to learn about slavery from former slaves. Can we trust the stories they brought back?
  • American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology
  • The Underground Railroad (William Still) (full audiobook) 
    • Often called “The Father of the Underground Railroad,” Still helped as many as 800 slaves escape to freedom, interviewing each person and keeping careful records, including a brief biography and the destination of each person, along with any alias that they adopted, though he kept his records carefully hidden. Still worked with other Underground Railroad agents operating in the south and in many counties in southern Pennsylvania. His network to freedom also included agents in New Jersey, New York, New England and Canada. Harriet Tubman traveled through is office with fellow passengers on several occasions during the 1850s. After the Civil War, Still published the secret notes he’d kept in diaries during those years, and his book is a source of many historical details of the workings of the Underground Railroad. (summary adapted from wiki)
    • “Slave Narratives – An Adaptation of Unchained Memories”

MULTIMEDIA

• • Voices on the Underground Railroad – a collection of short narratives that Cornell University students have written and mapped on to documented and rumored underground railroad stations and safe houses in Central and Western New York.
  • Video: Beaver County’s Underground Railroad Legacy
  • Video: Underground Railroad Safe Houses in Beaver County
  • Online Book: The Underground Railroad Records (William Still, 1872)

LANGUAGE AND LEXICON

• • “Freedom Seekers” (National Park Service)

GENERAL

• • National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
  • Freedom Seekers: The Transgressive Constitutionalism of Fugitives from Slavery
  • Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
  • “Underground Railroad: The William Sill Story”
  • Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom
  • Survey of Sites Relating to the Underground Railroad […] in Niagara Falls and Surrounding Area
  • The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism since Emancipation
  • Encyclopedia of the Underground Railroad
  • Myths: Who Really Ran the Underground Railroad? (Henry Louis Gates)
  • Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance
  • Fugitive slave laws in the United States

HISTORIOGRAPHY

• • New Social History