The Alum Creek Friends Settlement began with Cyrus Benedict, his wife, three children, and Adam Vanduser in 1809, and Benedict built a cabin near South Woodbury in 1811. Meetings were held in a house from 1813 to 1815, the first log church was built in 1816, and land bought in 1817 for a meeting house and graveyard remains the present church site. The first building of today’s church was erected in 1857. Among the area’s most enduring houses were brick homes built by Reuben Benedict and David Osborne in 1828 and by Aaron Benedict in the 1830s, and the Reuben Benedict house served the community as the Temperance Hotel during the stagecoach era. After the Worthington-New Haven Road was completed in 1825, these buildings and others were used to shelter enslaved people. The Alum Creek Friends became widely known in Underground Railroad circles for skill and success in helping fugitives reach Canada. Those involved included David Osbourne, Griffith Levering, William Taber, Micajah Dillingham, and three generations of Benedicts: Reuben, Aaron, William, a second Aaron, Gardner, Daniel, and Aaron L., for whom Southerners offered a $1,000 bounty. Cousins Mordecai and Livius Benedict drove wagonloads of fugitives to Joseph Morris in Marion County when they were only six years old. In 1835, when a slaveholder and two accomplices came to the settlement to reclaim a mother and her three sons, William Benedict summoned help as Friends gathered for the Quarterly Meeting, and soon 25 to 30 people confronted the slaveholder, including Justice of the Peace Barton Whipple, who read the penalties for kidnapping, a fine of up to $1,000 and 10 years in the penitentiary, prompting the two hirelings to flee into the woods.