Article ID: 9702170298
Published on February 16, 1997 The Blade, Toledo, Ohio as part of Black History Month
 

RUNNING ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM

Toledo may have had several stops on the Underground Railroad

HIS was a quiet life spent toiling in the shipyards of Perrysburg. Or so it seemed in the 1840s.

Today, there is evidence that ``Old Joe'' Langford, one of the few African-Americans who lived in the Toledo area before the Civil War, was actually a conductor for the fabled Underground Railroad.

In the summer of 1845, one story goes, Mr. Langford learned that the case against a captured slave would be heard in a local courtroom. He headed down to the docks and appealed to some ship carpenters for help.

Soon, 40 supporters had gathered in the courtroom. Taking advantage of the distraction of a heated legal argument, the men managed to thrust themselves between the slave and his captors. That was when Mr. Langford signaled for the slave to run for the door.

Outside, Mr. Langford's own horse was waiting to carry the man north to Canada.

``There goes a free [man] or there will be a dead horse!'' Mr. Langford reportedly shouted as his trusty steed thundered off into the distance.

The tale of ``Old Joe'' Langford - drawn from the local histories Perrysburg Revisited and Story of the Maumee Valley - is one of the many tantalizing remnants of what historians suspect was once a thriving Underground Railroad network in the Toledo area.

Concentrated in Ohio, Indiana, and western Pennsylvania, the Railroad spirited an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 slaves to freedom in the years before the Civil War. The Toledo area, with its pockets of fierce anti-slavery sentiment and easy access to interstate waterways, was a logical link in the Underground Railroad system.

But because it was illegal to aid escaping slaves - with penalties of up to two years in prison and $3,000 in fines - few reliable records remain. And after the Civil War, when the anti-slavery forces emerged victorious, there was incentive to embellish stories, perhaps even to remember acts of heroism where none existed.

``It's become a point of honor'' to claim an underground station in your hometown, says Ted Ligibel, a professor of historic preservation at Eastern Michigan University. ``On the east coast, it's, `George Washington slept here.' Here, it's, `We were part of the Underground Railroad.' ''

Some stories weren't recorded until 50 years after the fact. Many change from one account to the next.

University of Toledo history professor Charles Glaab likes to point out that one rumored site of the Underground Railroad, a building in downtown Toledo, was actually constructed after the Civil War.

And, on a more serious note, Wilmington College history professor emeritus Larry Gara says that, because whites tended to write the Railroad's early stories, the very significant contributions of free blacks often went undocumented.

But however flawed our understanding of the Underground Railroad in the Toledo area is, and probably must remain, local teachers, historians, and owners of historic homes continue to hear the call of a shadowy world of secret passwords, daring midnight escapes, and larger-than-life heroes with nicknames such as Night Hawk.

``A lot [of the Railroad's history] ends up being folklore and legend, which isn't a negative in my mind,'' says Dr. Ligibel.

``It just adds to the mystique and the uniqueness of it.''

In the 1840s and '50s, when the Underground Railroad was in its heyday, Toledo was a city on the rise, its economy fueled by access to the new Miami and Erie Canal, its port clogged with huge sailing vessels.

Solid blocks of buildings, several stories high, were beginning to emerge in the downtown area.

But that's not to say that the city was urban in the modern sense. As late as 1842, a bear killed a steer near what is now the corner of Starr Avenue and Arden Place in East Toledo, according to local historian Larry Michaels.

The people who risked fines and imprisonment to help slaves escape to Canada appear to have represented a fairly broad cross-section of the emerging city.

One of the most likely Underground Railroad participants was Toledo congressman Richard ``Dicky'' Mott. Maumee's William Merrit, a politically active member of the African-American community, probably also played a significant role.

Many tales involve sympathetic judges and public employees, and nearly all involve nameless, faceless men and women working behind the scenes to help foil the slave catchers.

East Toledo's feisty first postman, Elijah Woodruff, who often had to bring his mail across the Maumee River by  rowboat, was probably the city's most active Underground Railroad conductor, according to Wilbur Siebert, one of the rare historians who researched the Railroad in the 1890s.

In the fall of 1850, Mr. Siebert writes in The Mysteries of Ohio's Underground Railroads, Mr. Woodruff hid a slave in a thicket west of the Maumee River. Then, while three men, including the sheriff, hunted for the slave on the east side, Mr. Woodruff led him north.

In another Toledo tale, a captured slave was held in a hotel on Summit Street. Some unidentified women supplied the fugitive with a disguise and contacted Jim Conlisk, a daring abolitionist and reputed gambler who sometimes drove a sleigh carrying runaways across a frozen section of Lake Erie. Mr. Conlisk arrived with a horse and sleigh and drove the fugitive up to Monroe, a stop on the way to Canada.

At one point, Mr. Siebert writes, none other than Toledo's 14th mayor, Mavor Brigham, joined forces with Mr. Conlisk.

They arrived at the elegant Indiana House hotel on Summit Street with cutting tools and freed a slave chained in one of the rooms. Using a ladder, the two Toledoans whisked the fugitive out of the hotel and drove him by buggy as far as Blissfield, Mich.

And then there was Aunt Laura. The abolitionist and educator Laura Smith Haviland, whose statue has stood in downtown Adrian since 1909, didn't just operate an Underground Railroad station. She once went so far as to travel south disguised as a fruit picker to aid an escaping slave.

While Michigan rightly claims her, Mrs. Haviland ventured south to Toledo and Sylvania in one of the more colorful incidents recordedin her 1881 autobiography, A Woman's Life Work.

Shortly after her husband's death in 1845, Mrs. Haviland learned that an African-American couple working her farm might be introuble. Elsie Hamilton, an escaped slave, and her husband, Willis, had received a letter from a man claiming to be Mr. Hamilton'sfriend and former owner, John Bayliss.

Mr. Bayliss had freed Mr. Hamilton and aided in Mrs. Hamilton's escape from the South, hiding the couple in his attic for five weeks.

Now, the letter claimed, Mr. Bayliss lay dying in a Toledo hotel. He wanted the Hamiltons to come see him before it was too late.

Convinced the letter was a trap, Mrs. Haviland persuaded the Hamiltons to stay in Adrian. She, her son, Daniel, and a freeAfrican-American student named James Martin would go instead.

It was late at night when Mrs. Haviland finally gained entrance to the sick man's hotel room. He didn't look like the descriptions ofthe Hamiltons' good friend. Mrs. Haviland took his pulse and found it healthy and strong.

Trapped in a hotel room with three slave catchers, Mrs. Haviland agreed to write a letter luring the Hamiltons to Toledo. Only, she asked, could she please include a request for some clean clothes?

The slave catchers agreed, and Mrs. Haviland added a paragraph asking Mrs. Hamilton to bring along the good black dress - an itemof clothing Mrs. Haviland didn't own. There was also mention of a nonexistent south bedroom. Mrs. Hamilton got the message; sherefused to budge from Adrian.

The next morning, Mrs. Haviland, her companions, and the increasingly frustrated slave catchers boarded a train to Adrian. When the train stopped near Sylvania, the slave catchers approached and one threatened Mrs. Haviland's friend, James Martin.

``We'll see you sometime,'' he said. ``You too, young man,'' he said to Mrs. Haviland's son. Then he turned to Mrs. Haviland, pointing his gun toward her face as he called her names and demanded the return of his ``property.''

When the slave catcher started waving his pistol again, the conductor intervened. ``What are you doing here, you villainous scoundrels?'' he cried. ``We'll have you arrested in five minutes.''

Apparently taking the threat to heart, the slave catchers fled for the woods.

``And the last we saw of these tall and valiant representatives of the land of chivalry,'' Mrs. Haviland would later write, ``were their heels fast receding in the thicket.''

It was about 1955, and Toledo attorney Theodore Vogt was using an iron rod to test his backyard for soft spots that might stop a lawn mower.

Suddenly the rod, which normally stopped short a few inches into the ground, slipped down a full five feet through soft earth. Mr. Vogt tried again, and again the rod went down fairly easily.

Over the years, the metal rod mapped an area of loosely packed earth leading from his 1839 home to a creek bed below - the same path a rumored Underground Railroad tunnel would have taken out of his basement.

And there was another discovery.

Thirty years ago, when Mr. Vogt and his wife, Marie, founder and artistic director emerita of the Toledo Ballet, were adding a back porch, they found a bricked-over doorway deep in the basement. A doorway which suggested a ``hidden room'' to hide runaway slaves.

Did this mean that the Underground Railroad stories involving the Vogts' home were true?

Local historians take the possibility that the house was a station seriously, although most stress that the claim is based on oral tradition rather than official documents.

``That one has long been rumored to be on the Underground Railroad,'' says Dr. Ligibel, the professor of historic preservation. ``And rumored is the operative term. But that's part of its mystique. It has an air of mystery because people really don't know.''

Oral tradition also places the House of Four Pillars in Maumee as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

One of the reason that's credible is that the man who lived in the house, Alexander Anderson, had a brother who was very active in the anti-slavery movement, says Marilyn Wendler, director of the Maumee Valley Historical Society.

Most of the other likely stops are gone now, among them Elijah Woodruff's house, the old Perrysburg Journal building, and the Harroun farm in Sylvania. When the Mott House was torn down in 1911, there was talk of a trap door in the kitchen leading down to a tiny hidden room.

But schoolchildren still visit the Vogt House, occasionally asking to see the ``railroad tracks.'' And the bricked-over entrance to the alleged secret room can still be glimpsed over the top of a wall in the basement.

Mr. Vogt is very much the lawyer as he peppers discussion of his house's Underground Railroad past with phrases such as, ``but that's conjecture.'' Mrs. Vogt, on the other hand, displays a ballet director's sense of drama.

She sees fugitive slaves hiding in the secret basement room, he sees them sleeping upstairs in ordinary beds. But both, in their own ways, are drawn to their home's mysterious past. ``It's been interesting to us because it's a friendly house,'' says Mr. Vogt. ``It gave haven to people who needed it.''