Abiel Heywood Wheeler
Abiel Heywood Wheeler transported escaping slaves to train connections.
Samuel Hoar
One of Concord’s leading politicians and chair of the Free Soil Party (opposed to expansion of slavery into western territories), Samuel Hoar was a moderate senator sent to South Carolina to protest the arrest of Massachusetts African American seamen who were jailed when they disembarked their ships in South Carolina ports. He was run out [...]
John Cuming
John Cuming was a country doctor, Lt. Col. in the French and Indian War, and presided over 70 town meetings before and during the Revolution. He could not have done this without help to run his farm, which he found in his slaves Jem and Brister (who proclaimed his freedom after serving in the Revolutionary [...]
Col. Whiting
Col. Whiting was vice president of the state Anti-Slavery Society, and sheltered runaway enslaved people as an active participant in the Underground Railroad. Abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison (who published the antislavery newspaper The Liberator), Wendell Phillips, and John Brown were all guests in this house.
Shadrick Minkins
An important haven on the Underground Railroad: one enslaved man the Bigelows assisted was Shadrick Minkins, an escaped slave working in Boston who was captured for return to Virginia after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Vigilance Committee member Lewis Hayden lead the crowd that rescued Minkins from his hearing in Boston, and brought him to [...]
Mary Rice
Mary Rice was a station master on the Underground Railroad who helped erect and regularly put flowers on John Jack’s grave. Along with Mary Peabody Mann, Mary Rice gathered hundreds of school children’s signatures on a petition to President Lincoln, asking him to end slavery. Copies of this petition and Lincoln’s response will hang [...]