The Underground Railroad was neither underground nor a railroad, but a loosely connected system of safe havens where people escaping the brutal conditions of slavery were sheltered, fed, clothed, nursed, concealed, disguised, and instructed on their journey to freedom. Because those involved faced retribution under civil law and from slave catchers, its details were often kept secret. Ohio was permanently shaped by the thousands of runaway slaves who passed through or settled there. In north central Ohio, people fleeing bondage feared betrayal and capture in an uncertain and dangerous environment, yet the sparse population and geography of Wyandot, Crawford, Seneca, Huron, Sandusky, Erie, and Ottawa counties offered some relief. Villages, Native American missions, and waysides stood seven to ten miles apart, about the distance a male runaway could travel in a night to reach sanctuary. The flat land, with no hills and few ravines, helped runaways quickly reach Sandusky Bay, where they hoped to cross Lake Erie into Canada. Trails into Clyde in Sandusky County followed what is now State Route 101. Local lore tells of an escaped enslaved woman and her child hiding in a shed on the farm of Loomis Ames; when he tried to bring them into his house, they shrank suspiciously into a corner and refused to come out. The woman had no shoes and carried only a few possessions in a cloth bag. Loomis Ames and his wife left food for them until she was finally persuaded to leave her hiding place. The Ames family hired her as their housekeeper, and she remained in Clyde for the rest of her life. Elizabeth "Lizzie" Anderson died on February 11, 1911, and is the only former slave buried in Clyde's McPherson Cemetery.