In the early 1800s, Jabez Wright, an early Huron County judge, purchased a large tract of lakeside land on the north side of what is now Cleveland Road and built an eight-room farmhouse there that later served as a station on the Underground Railroad, aiding fugitive African-American slaves to freedom through a sixteen-foot-wide, ninety-foot-long tunnel beneath the house; escaped slaves entered through a trap door in the basement, exited into a corn crib one hundred feet from Lake Erie, and waited there for rowboats carrying them to vessels bound north to Canada. After the passage of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, a nationwide push to modernize aging urban areas led Huron to begin demolishing thirty-eight buildings along Main Street in 1969, and the federally subsidized urban-renewal project, completed in 1975, reshaped much of downtown by adding the modern-day boat basin; removed structures included the Harbor Inn, the Huron Dairy, the Vermillion Rubber Company, and many homes, and although many citizens opposed the changes, the project went forward and the boat basin became downtown Huron's centerpiece.