The Underground Railroad in Champaign County / Lewis Adams

The inhumanity of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 led anti-slavery activists in Champaign County to operate the covert Underground Railroad, which helped fugitive slaves escape captivity from the early 1800s to the end of the Civil War. Local guides, known as conductors, used homes, farms, and churches as stations to hide and shelter runaway slaves on their journeys north to freedom. If captured, fugitives were severely punished and re-enslaved, conductors faced large fines and imprisonment, and Free Persons of Color risked being sold into slavery. One frequently traveled route followed the old Bullskin Trace, first a buffalo path, then an Indian trail, running north from the Ohio River to Lake Erie and later becoming U.S. Route 68. Lewis Adams, a free Black man born in 1785 and a founding member of St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, served as an Underground Railroad conductor in Champaign County from about 1825 to 1861. Adams, his sons, and his father-in-law, Francis Reno, guided many runaways through the county, sheltering fugitives at Adams's home in Urbana and later at his farm in Concord Township, also called Muddy Creek. In 1848 Adams's son David moved north to Findlay in Hancock County and also worked as a conductor, guiding runaway slaves along the Bullskin Trace through Ohio to Canada. Other Champaign County operators included William Adams, Cephes Atkinson, Joseph Brand, John Butcher, Peter Byrd, Moses Corwin, Thomas Cowgill, William Jamison, Joseph Reno, David Rutan, Levi Stanup, Joseph Stillgess, and Abner Winder.

Urbana, Ohio · United States