Underground Railroad

March 21, 2023 - Scott Mingus has written 28 Civil War and Underground Railroad books and numerous articles for Gettysburg Magazine and other historical journals. He has appeared on C-SPAN, C-SPAN3, PCN, and other TV networks. Mingus writes a blog on the Civil War history of York County, PA. Scott discussed the events that led to the origins of the Underground Railroad in York County.

You can just look at a map and know that York County’s rails — our roads — were busy with harried Underground Railroad travelers in the decades before the Civil War. There’s that expansive 45-mile-wide border with the South, the Mason-Dixon Line where North meets the South. Then, large numbers of enslaved people in northern Virginia and Maryland lived near our county’s southern border. In 1860, 29.6 percent of Montgomery County’s population and 21.5 percent of Howard County’s census were enslaved. Those Maryland areas touch Carroll and Baltimore counties, which border York County. So large populations of enslaved people were only one county away from freedom north of the Mason-Dixon Line. When the freedom seekers arrived in York County, they could cross the Susquehanna River to increasingly friendly Underground Railroad stops as they headed toward Philadelphia, then New York and Canada. Or they could go due north through York County and then sparsely populated northern-central Pennsylvania to safety in Canada. So many York County residents would have been presented with a wrenching choice when receiving a knock on their door in the middle of the night.  There before them would be one or more desperate men and women seeking help in gaining their freedom. A decision about harboring or helping the freedom seekers would not have come easily for many York County residents. If they did either, they could be subjected to fines, imprisonment, or both.  A small group of Underground Railroad conductors in southeastern York County helped freedom seekers go north to York or east to the Susquehanna River crossings. The Quakers included members of the Bradley and Jones families at Fawn Grove and the Kyle family at Delta & Peach Bottom. The free Blacks in the Peach Bottom area or across the river in Lancaster County included Henry and Charlotte Grant, as well as Elijah Starkey, Isaac Waters, Isaac Fields, and Thomas Clarke. They were risking a lot. Everything, really.