On Tuesday, September 24, 1850, six days after President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Act, about forty Black residents of Allegheny City’s Third Ward left together for Canada. By September 26, according to an account in the Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, more than two hundred people had left Pittsburgh. Local newspapers, the same account says, were surprised that the city held so many people who had escaped slavery. That exodus is the best-documented chapter of the Underground Railroad in Pittsburgh. It was reported in the newspapers at the time, and the people who made the decision were the ones with the most to lose. This piece sticks to what can be shown, sorts the real sites from the legends, and says plainly where the evidence runs out.
A Black-led network, not a mystery
The Underground Railroad in Pittsburgh was built largely by the city’s own Black community. By 1850, the city had 1,959 Black residents and Allegheny County about 3,400, according to historian R. J. M. Blackett. About 85 percent lived in the Third, Sixth and Seventh Wards, the area then called Hayti, in what is now the Lower Hill (see our piece on the Lower Hill demolition), according to Ann Wilmoth. A significant part of the community, Blackett writes, were fugitives from Virginia and Maryland who had married into it.
The leaders are well documented. Rev. Lewis Woodson, a barber and minister, came to Pittsburgh in 1831, served as a pastor of Bethel A.M.E. Church (the congregation dates to 1808), taught in the Black community’s own school and, with John B. Vashon, founded the Pittsburgh African Education Society in 1832. John B. Vashon ran a barbershop and bathhouse. John Peck ran a wig-making and oyster-house business. A young Martin Delany studied with Woodson. (Delany has his own post here, so this piece uses him only where he appears in the underground story.) The Pitt library’s exhibit Free at Last? says Woodson, Vashon, Peck and Delany founded the Philanthropic Society to help people escape slavery. Vashon’s bathhouse and barber shop also appear in our post on Pittsburgh’s early Black entrepreneurs.
Blackett, in a 1978 article in the Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, writes that the evidence suggests the Philanthropic Society was a secret society whose aims included protecting the community, helping people held by visiting slaveholders get away, and acting as a link in the Underground Railroad in Pittsburgh and Allegheny City. A Pennsylvania law of 1847 helped: it banned the use of state jails to hold fugitives and gave judges power to issue writs of habeas corpus in such cases.
A word on names. Sources, including the Pitt exhibit and a 1994 Congressional Record tribute, say Woodson, Vashon and Delany belonged to the “Pittsburgh Vigilance Committee.” Historian Samuel Black of the Heinz History Center describes vigilance committees as groups that sprang into action when someone was being seized, sometimes crowding around the person to create confusion so they could reach a safe house. I could not find a surviving record of a formally organized committee under that exact name, and the Blackett passage I could see only in excerpts appears to stress the Philanthropic Society instead. So the safest statement is that a loose, largely Black network of this kind clearly existed, and that the Philanthropic Society is its best-documented form.
Three trials and a rescue fund
The clearest documentary trail is in the courts. Three fugitive slave cases were tried in Pittsburgh without a riot, according to Ann Wilmoth in Pennsylvania Heritage (1977).
The Woodson case. This is not Rev. Lewis Woodson; it is a man arrested as a fugitive who had the same surname. It was tried in March 1851, under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; the Kentucky database gives the date as March 13, 1851. Two slave catchers from Louisville arrived to seize a man who had been living at Beaver under the name Richard Gardner (one account I read gives the first name as Paul). He was arrested and brought before Judge Irwin. The Kentucky database says the claimant’s letter described him as about thirty and of “a very light caste,” and Irwin ruled for the claimant. Police took him out of the jail and toward a steamer at the wharf. A large crowd gathered, but the police held them back, and the Gazette wrote that the first fugitive slave case in Pittsburgh ended “not the slightest riot or confusion having been excited by it.” Then the community raised $600 to buy his freedom. According to the Kentucky database he was back in Pennsylvania in less than six months, and he spoke at an August 1, 1851 emancipation celebration. Wilmoth also dates the case to 1851 and names the claimant as Rhoda B. Byers of Louisville, though she says he was found at Rochester, Pennsylvania, rather than Beaver. She also says John Peck and the Rev. Augustus Green testified that they had known him since 1848. On the year, the sources agree.
Calvin Jones, 1853. A Pittsburgh waiter was accused of having escaped four years earlier from a master in Memphis. Witnesses, including Martin Delany, testified that they had known him longer than that. The court found for Jones, and a crowd outside congratulated him.
George W. Farris, 1858. Here the defendant was white. George Shaw was charged with kidnapping Farris, a bricklayer and fugitive slave, by luring him into Alabama and handing him to his owner. A jury found Shaw guilty. The defense then moved for a mistrial because a juror had fallen ill and the trial had continued with eleven, and after an appeals court ordered a new trial, a second jury found him not guilty.
The white allies, and the press
White allies are documented too. Rev. Charles Avery, who founded the Allegheny Institute (later Avery College) on the North Side, presided at a mass meeting against the Fugitive Slave Act in the Diamond on September 28, 1850, according to the Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine account. Two days later Allegheny’s mayor, Hugh S. Fleming, presided at a similar meeting in the market house. Our post on Allegheny City tells the larger story of that city. The Pitt exhibit adds that in the 1850s the number of Black residents of Allegheny County fell from about 3,450 to about 2,725, as people left for Canada and elsewhere.
Jane Grey Swisshelm, who founded the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter in 1847 or 1848 (sources differ), argued that a “higher law” justified resisting the Fugitive Slave Act. A scholarly article on her rhetoric in Pennsylvania History says her chief target during the crisis was Robert Riddle, an antislavery newspaperman who urged obedience while calling for repeal. Riddle printed her paper, a biographer notes, and they disagreed fiercely about the law. It is worth remembering that Swisshelm wrote and argued; the people who hid, fed, testified and bought freedom did the dangerous work.
The sites: five confirmed, many rumored
Samuel Black says the evidence confirms five Underground Railroad stops within Pittsburgh city limits: Martin Delany’s home, John Vashon’s barbershop and bathhouse, the Monongahela House Hotel, Avery College, and the Bigham House on Mount Washington. Most are gone. Only the Bigham House, the 1849 home of abolitionist lawyer Thomas Bigham, which is now the Chatham Village clubhouse, still stands, and historian David Vater calls it one of the very few documented stops left in Allegheny County. Writer William Switala lists more stops, so scholars disagree about the total, and Black adds that evidence of someone hiding a fugitive once “doesn’t mean their home was a stop on the network.”
The best-documented building in the region is just outside the city. The F. Julius LeMoyne House in Washington, Pennsylvania, is a National Historic Landmark. Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne, who also taught Martin Delany medicine, was an antislavery leader from 1834, and the landmark nomination says the house was a center of antislavery activity and a safe station. The National Historic Landmark nomination also explains the Black-led network in Washington County that LeMoyne joined. Even here, the record varies. LeMoyne’s sheltering of fugitives is well documented before 1850, according to the nomination as summarized by Wikipedia, and is much less documented afterward. Stories such as a family tradition that as many as 25 fugitives stayed at once, from his children’s recollections, are family memory rather than records.
Tunnels and secret rooms
Here the evidence is thinnest. Historian Fergus Bordewich writes in a Dickinson College essay that there is no evidence tunnels were ever purpose-built for the Underground Railroad, that nearly all tunnel stories date from long after the Civil War, and that the supposed tunnels turn out to be sewers, cisterns, mine shafts and old cellars. Wilbur Siebert, who interviewed hundreds of participants in the late 1800s, recorded no secret tunnel.
Pittsburgh has its own examples. The owners of the South Side’s Morning Glory Inn told Pittsburgh City Paper that their building has a 15-foot tunnel from the basement to a chamber under Sarah Street, but the building was finished in 1862, after the war began, and they suggested Prohibition was a likelier use. A WPA-era history of Allegheny City, as quoted by the same paper, said remains of “old tunnels” could be seen at the Felix Brunot mansion; I could not check that source. Treat every tunnel story in Pittsburgh as unproven.
What remains
What remains is mostly the paper trail and a few buildings: court reports, the Gazette’s coverage, the Bigham House, the LeMoyne House and the markers. The Heinz History Center’s long-term exhibit From Slavery to Freedom includes an interactive look at Pittsburgh-area safe houses. The lasting record of the Underground Railroad in Pittsburgh is less about hidden rooms than about a community that organized in the open to protect its own, and about the families who could not stay.
