The A.M.E. Zion Church, now known as Trinity A.M.E. Zion at 203 Oak St., served as a place of worship and a safehouse for runaway slaves. The church was founded by Rev. Henry Johnson and others in 1838. Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen, director of the Underground Railroad in Syracuse, was pastor at A.M.E. Zion in the 1860s. As a boy, he tragically watched his mother being sold away. As a man, he preached to a racially mixed congregation and advanced freedom and equity with abolitionists like Gerrit Smith of Peterboro and Frederick Douglass of Rochester.