“At Mechanicsburg, Champaign County, Ohio, Udney Hyde, a fearless and well-known citizen, acted as agent between the local stations of J.R. Ware and Levi Rathbun, and stations to the northeast as far as the Alum Creek Quaker Settlement, a distance of forty miles. The stations at Mechanicsburg were among the most widely known in central and southern Ohio. They received from at least three regular routes, and doubtless had ‘switch connections’ with other lines. Passengers were taken northward over one of the three, perhaps four roads, and as one or two lay through pro-slavery neighborhoods a brave and experienced agent was almost indispensable. George W.S. Lucas, a colored man of Salem, Columbiana County, Ohio, made frequent trips with the closed carriage of Phillip Evans, between Barnesville, New Philadelphia and Cadiz, and two stations, Ashtbula and Painesville, on the shore of Lake Erie.”
Reference Data:
The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom, by Wilbur Henry Siebert and Albert Bushnell Hart, 1898, pages 69-70
When I was a boy growing up in central Indiana, an old farm house just up the gravel road from us was town down. A secret passage way and a stone walled room beneath the house was found. The men and women who provided the undergound railroad were perhaps the bravest of all time.
Wayne