The famed Underground Railroad is a network of sites where resistors housed and helped those escaping slavery. Memorialized as the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, you can tour more than 695 confirmed locations relating to the Underground Railroad in the US. They run the gamut from graves and archaeological sites to churches and other locations and are located in 39 states, plus Washington DC and the US Virgin Islands.
And now there are more: last month, the National Park Service added 16 new sites to the registry, as reported by Smithsonian.
The new additions are found in 11 different states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, New York and New Jersey.
In Michigan, Iowa, Maryland, New York and Ohio, the new sites are burial grounds. In Florida, the Marianna Expedition site on Santa Rosa Island commemorates when 600 enslaved people joined a Union general’s march and thereby gained their freedom. In Louisiana, Kentucky and Maryland the additional listings are plantations or homesteads from which enslaved people embarked. Note: some of the new sites are on private land and not open to the public.
There’s also a ‘Destination Freedom Underground Railroad Walking Tour’ in Pennsylvania, a jail site in Maryland, a church in New Jersey, and an interpretive center in Ohio in an area where many Underground Railroad activists lived.
In Massachusetts, a new addition to the registry is an 1897 memorial created by artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens which honors the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. This regiment was one of the first Black fighting units from the North in the Civil War. According to the National Park Service, the 54th regiment fought at Fort Wagner and helped “erode northern public opposition to the use of Black soldiers and inspired the enlistment of nearly 200,000 African Americans during the war.” Colonel Shaw was white, the son of abolitionists; his mom talked him into accepting the colonelcy which he originally rejected.
Finally, a New Jersey addition to the list is an actual Underground Railroad site, the Huntoon-Van Rensalier memorial site. According to the site’s website, “In the mid-1800s, Josiah Huntoon and William Van Rensalier, white and black together, were not only abolitionists helping escaping slaves, they broke racial barriers by living in the same neighborhood and being close friends all their lives.” The memorial stands on the site of Huntoon’s home where escape routes were mapped and people were given sanctuary.