William C Goodridge used his home, business, and railroad cars in York to help Blacks escape enslavement through the Underground Railroad. In the brick home across the street, he hid freedom seekers through a trapdoor leading to a hand-dug room beneath the kitchen floorboards. Born enslaved in Baltimore, Goodridge grew up as an indentured servant in York and developed a lifelong abolitionist spirit. After gaining his freedom, he became a barber and expanded a one-chair barbershop into a five-story emporium on the northwest corner of York's Center Square. In the 1840s, he added railroad cars to his businesses, and these became vital to his work as a station master on the Underground Railroad. Because he could not safely keep records of these efforts, many details remain unknown. After his death in 1873, the kitchen trapdoor was rediscovered in the late 1890s, and descendants confirmed that freedom seekers had hidden there. William Goodridge also helped Osborne Perry Anderson, who escaped after John Brown's 1859 Harpers Ferry, Va., raid, continue on through York to Canada.
