The Underground Railroad: From Enslavement to Freedom

We often think of the Underground Railroad as a series of dark tunnels, secret caves, and farmhouse basements, used to conceal enslaved people making their way north during the Civil War. And, in some places, that’s just what it was!

But more than merely a collection of hidden passageways, the Underground Railroad was a movement, a carefully planned system that created a bridge between a life of degradation and oppression to the realization of freedom.

The Underground Railroad was not clandestine places as much as it was people – free blacks, white abolitionists, and former slaves, working together to bring enslaved people north, often as far as Canada, to eventual safety and the promise of a new birth of freedom.

Join the Lincoln Depot Museum as we welcome Paul and Mary Liz Stewart from the Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, NY to share not only the history of the Underground Railroad as it made its way through New York, but of their findings specifically in Albany, and the restoration work they have performed to preserve the home of Stephen & Harriet Myers – two ordinary people who were the Underground Railroad in Albany, and who used their home as a station along the road to freedom.