Did you know that rubbing onions on the feet of a fugitive slave would throw hounds off his or her scent? And that slave children were forced to wear wooden yokes around their necks to carry pails of water or animal feed?
These are just two of the facts I learned at the Blairsville Underground Railroad History Center in the former Second Baptist Church in Blairsville, a town about 43 miles east of Pittsburgh. The onetime home of a predominantly African American congregation is the starting point of a self-guided Indiana County Underground Railroad driving tour that my husband and I recently took.
Before and during the Civil War, prominent Blairsville residents were part of the network that hid fugitive slaves in safe houses — often cellars and outbuildings — to thwart bounty hunters and help the runaways reach non-slaveholding states or Canada and freedom. “There are 48 known safe houses in Indiana County,” said volunteer tour guide Joy Fairbanks. “We’re sure there were others.”
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My husband and I drove the tour for more than 85 miles, winding north to Indiana city, east to Clymer and back to Blairsville, through a mix of small towns, farmland and country roads. Eight of the 23 sites on the driving tour are in Blairsville. Few have signs, and most are private property. Some are mere ruins.
In Indiana, the county seat, we parked at Sixth and Philadelphia streets to see the house where Elizabeth Houston helped slaves without informing her husband. Today, it’s occupied by an engraving shop. We found the spot where a citizen mob formed to free Anthony Hollingsworth, detained by a Virginia slave catcher. A judge freed him the next day, citing lack of constitutional support for the legality of slavery. At Memorial Park, we saw tombstones behind which fugitive slaves hid in 1845. Nearby, the house of physician Robert Mitchell, fined $10,000 for violating slave laws, is now an appliance store.
Denise Jennings-Doyle, who created the self-guided tour, estimates that it’s about a three-hour drive without stops. She said she knocked on doors to inform residents that their places are included. Most don’t mind, but they also don’t welcome strangers in. Some, like insurance agency owner David Graff, tell her that people drive by and point. Graff’s ancestor, John Graff, a successful Blairsville merchant, hid freedom-seeking slaves in a tunnel that ran from the Conemaugh River bank and beneath Liberty Street to a carriage house. “The floor of the carriage house was hollowed out,” Jennings-Doyle said. Alas, the tunnel collapsed decades ago.
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After our tour, we stayed in Blairsville’s oldest building, the 1823 James Campbell House Bed and Breakfast, whose original floors sag and creak. Close to 3 a.m., I thought I saw a shadow moving in the hallway, although we were the only visible guests. I bolted the door to our room.
Campbell House is close to the “public burying ground,” according to a brochure from the Historical Society of the Blairsville Area that lists 120 historic places in Blairsville, noting architectural details and historical snippets. We gawked at Victorians, Queen Annes, a Gothic Revival church and a castlelike National Guard Armory.
It’s easy to walk downtown, although the main thoroughfare, Market Street, will be undergoing repairs until mid-October as part of a plan to provide a grand western entrance from the bridge over the Conemaugh River, which winds around town.
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Blairsville was a stagecoach stop in 1818, and transportation — canals, railroads, highways — is integral to its history. “There was a time when if you went west you had to go through Blairsville,” explained architect James Carmo, executive director of the Blairsville Community Development Authority.
A 1949 dam project to control the river, however, relocated U.S. Route 22 and hastened the decline of downtown. Today, that decline is being slowly reversed. An ice cream store and coffee shop recently opened on Market Street. There’s a plan to connect a riverfront loop trail to regional trails. But Blairsville intends to preserve its “Americana townscape,” Carmo said.
Sure enough, I found some of that townscape, like the cabinetmaker’s sign, “Coffins Made to Order,” directly across from Ferguson’s Funeral Home on Market Street. And there’s plenty at Blairsville’s historical society, where I thought I’d stepped back in time. Visitors get a guided tour through an unimposing house once shared by three families.
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Back near the Diamond, the town center, the historic marker commemorating the Rescue of 1858 is being corrected: The rescued slave was named Richard Newman, not Newton. At community celebrations, 77-year-old Seth Gibson reenacts the scene of Lewis Johnston, a free black man and conductor on the Underground Railroad, helping Newman evade law enforcement officials armed with a warrant to return him to his master.
Like Blairsville itself, the Underground Railroad link is changing, with layers of history slowly peeling back. Joy Fairbanks told me about a California man whose white great-great-great-grandmother, according to family oral history, hid a slave on her parents’ property in Blairsville and later married him.
“There’s so much more history,” said Jennings-Doyle. “We’re just tapping into it.”
Shuman is a former editor at The Post.
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