Oberlin, Ohio was a key junction on the Underground Railroad, where at least five routes connected paths from slavery to freedom, and no fugitive in Oberlin was ever returned to bondage. Freedom seekers lived openly in the town and were supported by its vibrant African American community and Oberlin College, which had welcomed all students regardless of color since 1835. Faculty and students, both black and White, worked together to assure safe passage on the Underground Railroad, proclaiming their loyalty to “a higher law.” In 1858, town residents rescued John Price from slave catchers who had taken him to nearby Wellington in an effort to return him to enslavement, and because of this incident Oberlin was heralded as “the town that started the Civil War.” In 1859, Oberlin’s African American lawyer and activist John Mercer Langston recruited John A. Copeland and Lewis Sheridan Leary, two of the town’s prominent young men of color, into John Brown’s band of twenty-one raiders in the attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Leary was killed during the unsuccessful attempt to bring about emancipation through a slave insurrection. Before his hanging in Charleston, Virginia on December 19, 1859, Copeland wrote to his family in Oberlin, “how dear brother could I die a more noble cause?” Oberlinites later memorialized Leary, Copeland, and co-conspirator Shields Green with the only monument erected for any of the five African Americans who fought with John Brown, and that monument stands in Oberlin’s Martin Luther King Park.