In the mid-1800’s, several safe houses in the Sodus Point area, including the old Cohn Farm, the old Sodus Fruit Farm, what is now Maxwell Creek B&B, and Silver Waters B&B, were used to harbor freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. From the old Sodus Point ore dock, a schooner sometimes picked up enslaved people on its way to Canada. Captain George Garlock (1832-1906) ran the sail-only freight schooner Free Trader out of Sodus Point, New York. This two-masted, one-deck, 46-ton schooner, with a squared stern, carved head, and a crew of four, carried lumber or ore across to Canada and could leave day or night depending on the weather. When Garlock saw a small rowboat offshore with people on it, he would stop and pick them up. These fugitive slaves came from the Cohn Farm and Old Sodus Fruit Farm, also called Old Swales Farm, and gathered at a bluff overlooking Lake Ontario now known as Freedom Hill. By day they watched for the schooner, and at night they used a lantern to attract its attention before rowing out in a small boat. Once aboard, they were stowed away until the vessel reached Canada. Garlock then returned with grain from local gristmills or with whatever he was bringing back from Canada. Frederick Douglass of Rochester, New York, and Harriet Tubman of Auburn, New York, were well-known African-American abolitionists in the region. Austin Steward, once enslaved, spent a year in Sodus Point and later became a free man, author, and abolitionist; in Twenty-Two Years A Slave and Forty Years a Freeman, he devoted a chapter to his experiences in Sodus Point and wrote that the Underground Railroad, though a disgrace forced by the laws of the country, afforded a means of escape to many.