(WXYZ) — There are 34 confirmed sites in Michigan linked to the Underground Railroad, and likely many more unofficial sites that aided in the network to help enslaved people seek freedom.
Michigan was often a last stop on the journey north to Canada, which ended slavery nearly 30 years before the United States.
Two sites in Oakland County; the burial site of a formerly enslaved couple and that of an abolitionist, were added to the official Underground Railroad Network to Freedom in 2022; the registry is run through the National Parks Service.
This interactive map lists the sites by state.
There’s another site in Oakland County you won’t find on that list, at least not yet; as rumored history has yet to be verified.
The New Hudson Inn has long been rumored to have aided in the Underground Railroad. It was built in 1831, before Michigan was even a state.
“So much of this is rumored history,” said Amy Allen with Lyon Township’s Downtown Development Authority, walking with us through the Inn’s upper floor.
Longtime Inn employee Tracy Ritter has become an unofficial tour guide of the place, which was renovated in 2016. That’s when rumored history grew even stronger with the discovery for a false floor and hidden room in the Inn’s attic.
Also found during the renovation were artifacts believed to date back to the mid 1800s; shoes, bottles, clothes, and hats.
Many believe that the secret room was used to hide freedom seekers on their way to Canada.
The false floor - now visible above patrons as they enjoy lunch or dinner at the bar.
“It’s amazing because some people are very aware, but then you’ll have customers that have no idea and look up and are like where is there a hole in the floor there?” Ritter said.
The Inn’s owner chose to leave the hole visible - to share with the public the building’s rich history, some of it still being discovered.
New Hudson Inn has a ways to go before it can be officially designated as an Underground Railroad site through the Network to Freedom program. It’s something Allen hopes to see happen once enough documents are gathered and facts are confirmed.
First, is getting the Inn itself designated as a historic place by the State of Michigan.
“It’s going to be probably a year-long process in digging and getting those records,” Allen said.
As for the lengthy and detailed process of being added to the Network to Freedom, director of The Birmingham Museum Leslie Pielack is all too familiar.
She worked to get the two recently added sites in Oakland County, both of which are in Birmingham, added to that registry last year.
Pielack said the biggest challenge is often confirming facts about freedom seekers, who for good reasons in the mid-1800s, weren’t public about their activities and associations.
“The challenge really is, did they leave behind memories, diaries, family traditions,” she said.
Tracking down records for white abolitionists has historically been a lot easier.
However, Pielack said digitized records like Census data and ancestry databases have helped historians greatly in recent years learn more about formerly enslaved people. Available data mixed with oral histories is often used to verify Underground Railroad locations and people who worked within the network.
As for the two locations added last year, an old obituary linked a man named George Taylor to a published interview in 1890s.
“He went into detail about his experience on the Underground Railroad coming to Michigan in 1855,” Pielack said of Taylor, who was African American.
George Taylor and his wife Eliza made their lives in Birmingham. They, along with abolitionist Elijah Fish, are buried in Birmingham’s Greenwood Cemetery.
Both burial sites were added to the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom last year.
Pielack and other local historians are determined to keep growing this network, so that Michigan’s role in the abolition movement has greater visibility.
Specifically, she thinks people will be surprised to learn how much of a role Oakland County played.
“My personal goal in all of this is to see those third and fourth grade students who are learning about local history to be able to go to a source and say “this is my community, these people lived here, or came through here,” Pielack told Action News.
What’s critical, is to gather more stories from freedom seekers, she said. That means finding family connections, and people willing to share their stories and personal archives.
“If we can find their voices that’s what we definitely want to include,” she said.
Thanks to a grant from the Michigan Humanities Council, five Oakland County communities are in the process of working together to gather more records.
Royal Oak, Birmingham, Pontiac, Southfield, and Farmington already have established records of either abolitionists or freedom seekers in their communities.
“If we could bring a subset of these groups that have already found some good leads together into a project that would help that would help tell the story about more than just our community,” Pielack said.
They’re working to create a localized interactive website in the next year, and also a traveling exhibit.
Ritter and Allen are hoping residents in Lyon Township help them on their quest to learn more about New Hudson Inn.
“There’s generations of those families around here and hopefully sooner or later when they’re going through their attic and stuff, we’ll get more actual physical proof,” Ritter said.
Verified records are in no short supply at Second Baptist Church in Detroit, which sits in the Greektown neighborhood.
It was added to the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom in 2018.
Like New Hudson Inn, it too was established even before the State of Michigan, in 1836. Michigan wasn’t granted its statehood until 1837.
“The name of this station here is called the Croghan Street station,” a congregation member said as they walked our crew through the church’s basement, a known station on the Underground Railroad.
The church on Monroe Street is just stone’s throw from the Detroit River, which signified the near-end of an arduous journey.
“If you carried yourself through the network of abolitionist from the south from home to home, business to business, church to church, place to place, this was the last stop for you,” said senior pastor Lawrence Rodgers. “That long journey on foot, trying to find freedom, when you got to Second Baptist, you would sigh with a sigh of relief.”
Second Baptist is said to have helped some 5,000 people on their way to Canada.
The church offers tours to make sure the stories of courage from within its walls are never forgotten.
"I'm shocked sometimes on how many people not only don't know about the history of Second Baptist but also are unaware of the history of the Underground Railroad,” Rodgers said.
The Network to Freedom currently represents nearly 700 sites in 39 states.
To learn more about Michigan’s role in the abolition movement and the Underground Railroad, click here.
