By Ed Blanchette
In December of 2016 to March of 2020 the Amish Experience at Plain & Fancy Farm looked to create a bit of tangible and visual history for teachers and students through the wonders of the Magic Lantern Shows at Plain & Fancy Theater. Due to Covid in 2020, the Magic Lantern Shows were discontinued, but those teachable elements from history that were put together by Lancaster County historians Randolph J. Harris and Leroy T. Hopkins, Jr., Ph.D., as a study guide for the Magic Lantern Show at the Amish Experience still remains mostly intact. As we celebrate the 250th year of the constitution “1776-2026”, we here at Amish Country News feel the contributions of this valuable information would be right in line to share with you, our readership. In doing so, we will be sharing multiple parts over multiple issues. In the last issue we visited an Introduction in Part 3 – Now the Under Ground Rail Road Part 4, enjoy.
Who was Involved? “Stationmasters, Conductors” & Spies Revealed!
Passive and active resistance to the “peculiar institution” was shared by people of African heritage and white settlers from Europe and their descendants. In Lancaster County, some Quakers were involved while other religious groups such as Methodists and Lutherans were often united in their hatred of the institution of slavery. Much has been written about the involvement of Quakers such as Daniel Gibbons and William Wright in the efforts to assist escapees from enslavement, but it is noteworthy that African entrepreneurs such as William Whipper, Stephen Smith, and Robert Boston of Bethel AME Church in the City of Lancaster also played key roles in the clandestine work. This aspect has only been examined in recent years.
Historical writers such as Robert Smedley or Wilbur Siebert reconstructed the work of majority community idealists like the abovenamed Quakers but mostly failed to mention the network of African churches and business people who risked life and limb to rescue their enslaved brethren. The grandson of the Columbia’s pioneering Quaker founder, William Wright (1788-1846) was “an uncompromising hater of slavery. “ He is widely credited with establishing the system here of moving freedom seekers from one safe house to another, often among his Quaker relatives. This was an early organizational structure of this otherwise loose movement that became known as the Underground Railroad, which included Robert Loney, a free Black man who “ferried fugitives across the [Susquehanna] river in the night ….and gave them into the care of William Wright.” Smedley, 1883.
In Lancaster County, the most widely recorded routes of the Underground Railroad connect Columbia, Lancaster, and to a certain extent Marietta, with the rural areas in the Southern End of the County and the townships on the border of Chester County. What is not often considered are the African enclaves in Conestoga, Fulton, Little Britain, Sadsbury, and Salisbury Townships that were linked to these localities by family, religious, and business ties. Churches in those communities, notably the African Methodist Episcopal Church, were collecting points for area residents, some of whom owned small businesses: hair dressers, chimney sweeps and other skilled laborers.
The work of the Underground Railroad was of necessity done in secret (with a few exceptions) because exposure meant punishment or worse. “Station masters” on the U.G.R.R. were idealists motivated by a love of freedom and a hatred for a system that was contrary to the values on which the nation had been founded. This humanitarian impulse crossed racial, religious, gender and class lines. Key locations and apparent pathways eastward for thousands of freedom seekers on foot, or sometimes on wagon or train rides, from the western counties of Southeastern Pennsylvania, often through Columbia and across Lancaster County in search of freedom in Philadelphia and other points North. The ultimate goal for many was Canada. From Siebert’s 1898 book based on names and locations recorded in Smedley’s book, 1883; shows how one historical narrative is involved in the creation and development of a newer account of the same historical subject.