Safe Houses
Preserving Stations on Farmington's
Underground Railroad

Story by Bill Nagler | Illustration by Shana Sureck

Secret closets, trap doors, “hidey holes” in basements and chimneys: Concealed behind the imposing facades of the stately mansions that line Farmington’s main streets are places, still visible today, where runaway slaves could hide from their pursuers.

These hideaways testify to the town’s vital role as Connecticut’s “Grand Central Station” in the Underground Railroad, the network of abolitionists who in the years before the Civil War defied federal law to help thousands of runaway slaves flee to Canada.

Several of Farmington’s leading citizens courageously acted as “stationmasters” for the clandestine “railroad.” Their houses, with the hiding places, served as “stations” to shelter the runaways or “passengers,” in the code of the “underground” movement, which drew on the terminology of the railroads.

For the present generation that owns these one-time stations, the connection to such a notable — and mysterious — part of the nation’s history is something to be treasured. The homeowners say they feel a kinship with those who operated the Underground Railroad, which inspires them to work to preserve their historic houses.

One such station is the Georgian-style, 19th-century mansion now known as the Barney House, at 11 Mountain Spring Road. Its “stationmaster” was John Treadwell Norton, a founder of the Farmington Anti-Slavery Society (the local abolitionist league) and one of the town’s wealthiest residents. Ironically, he made his fortune in part as head of the New York Central Railroad.

“We feel that the Norton family were such a good family, with such good intentions, we could have been them with the same interests,” said Portia Corbett, who with her husband, Tim, purchased the property nine years ago and restored it to private use after years as a University of Connecticut Foundation property. “We would have been here doing the things they did. Because we believed in the same things.”
Had Norton been prosecuted for his efforts to aid runaways, “they could have lost everything,” Corbett said. “His heritage was very simple, very honest and forthright,” she added, referring to Norton’s grandfather, John Treadwell, the last Puritan governor of Connecticut. Norton “was brought up as a simple, ‘you do the right thing’ kind of guy.”

It was Norton, along with two other strong-minded local abolitionists, Austin F. Williams and Samuel Deming, who took the lead in bringing 36 Mende Africans to Farmington after they won their freedom in 1841 in the celebrated Amistad affair.

Williams, a successful dry-goods merchant who lived on Main Street, provided property for a dormitory to house the Africans while supporters raised the money to pay for their passage home to West Africa. Like Norton, he was also a “stationmaster” on the Underground Railroad, and later converted and expanded the dormitory into a carriage house with a trapdoor leading to what appear to be two hidey holes in the basement.

Cynthia Cooper, who with her husband, Martin, purchased Williams’ Main Street house and outbuilding 15 years ago, has labored to restore the once-neglected property. Williams “was thrifty, a good business person and dedicated to opposing slavery — all things that I respect him for,” she said.

Knowing about the heritage of the Williams house “has strengthened my resolve in trying to take care of it and keep it alive so that it will be here in the future,” she added. “I’m trying to keep this house alive for hundreds and hundreds of years to preserve it for future generations.”

Williams’ friend Deming, a legislator, merchant and farmer, supervised the Amistad Africans’ stay in Farmington and was also a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, with a hidey-hole in the basement of his home at 66 Main Street, now owned by Miss Porter’s School.

Marguerite “Peg” Yung, a director of the Farmington Historical Society, said, “It’s very hard to separate the Amistad affair from the Underground Railroad because the Amistad leaders were the masters of the Railroad.” Those prominent in the local Underground Railroad had two things in common, she said. “One was they believed slavery was against the will of God, was a sin. But even more important, they believed if the country continued toward slavery, continued expanding slavery through the territories, democracy could not succeed.”

It was the Amistad affair that “established in Farmington the climate of sympathy that made that town so important a transfer point in the Underground Railroad,” Horatio T. Strother writes in his book Underground Railroad in Connecticut. The friendly Mende, during their eight months’ stay, “won supporters all over town by their constant good cheer,” Strother said.

Farmington already had geographical advantages stemming from the period’s divided state government. “It’s quite logical,” observed Yung. “Farmington was right in the center of the two state capitals. Both Hartford and New Haven were state capitals, rotating every six months — it was easier to go from Hartford to Farmington to New Haven” because turnpikes of the period went through Farmington. Maps show routes for escaped slaves converging on Farmington from Wilton, Hartford, Plymouth, Southington and Berlin, and from the seaports of New Haven and Middletown.

Norton, Williams and Deming in many ways typified Farmington’s leaders in the Underground Railroad. In public, they were prosperous merchants, judges, lawmakers and farmers who ranked among the town’s most substantial citizens, lived in some of its finest houses and worked to support the Mende and local abolitionist societies. And yet in secret they were lawbreakers, defying federal statutes that since 1793 had outlawed the harboring of fugitive slaves and authorized slave owners to chase down and reclaim the runaways.

The Underground Railroad was “the nation’s first great movement of civil disobedience since the American Revolution,” historian Fergus Bordewich writes in the 2005 HarperCollins release Bound for Canaan. “It engaged thousands of citizens in the active subversion of federal law and the prevailing mores of their communities, and for the first time asserted the principle of personal, active responsibility for others’ human rights.”

Many of the specific details of Farmington’s branch of the Underground Railroad — how many hidey holes actually sheltered runaways, how many houses functioned as stations — remain shrouded in mystery. Because the network was intended to be secret, there are few contemporaneous written accounts, and the local organization of messengers, guides, signals and supporters can only be guessed at.

One of the cases that can be documented is Norton’s role in sheltering runaways at his home, because it was recorded in the diary of his son John Pitkin Norton. “A runaway slave has arrived here today,” he wrote on March 6, 1843. “He has had several narrow escapes from his master and has been hunted off from the direct route to Canada. He will probably take refuge here till more moderate weather. He is about 50 years old and has never been permitted to see the inside of a church.”

Other accounts involve another stationmaster, Horace Cowles, a state legislator and successful merchant whose family is connected to many of Farmington’s most distinguished houses. In one case, Cowles taught a daughter to sit on the front steps of his 27 Main Street house and sing a tune if she spotted a stranger approaching, who could be a bounty hunter searching for runaways, according to Yung.

Paula Bauer was aware of Cowles’ prominent role in the Underground Railroad when she and her husband purchased the house four years ago. “There’s a sort of an overall feeling of respect toward the house and the people who’ve been here before,” she said. “Basically we see ourselves as caretakers of the house. The house is sort of permanent — the owners come and go.”

Like several of the other “stations,” the house has a hiding place, a large closet on the second floor. Bauer theorizes that at one time there may have been an opening in the closet wall that could have led downstairs to latched cubbyholes by the fireplace.

Another Underground Railroad stationmaster, Elijah Lewis, was a prosperous farmer. His circa 1770 house, at 1 Mountain Spring Road, next to the Barney House, has a large hidey hole visible in the basement chimney. A quartermaster during the Revolutionary War, Lewis also hid escaped slaves in hay wagons and transported them along the ridge over Avon Mountain toward Canada, according to the historical society.

John Ciszek was aware of the house’s distinguished pedigree when he and his wife, Aimee, decided to buy it last year. “Part of the reasoning behind it, too — it had history to it — we thought it’d be unique to have something like that,” he said. And Ciszek admired Lewis’ role in the Underground Railroad. “It took a lot of guts to stand up and do what he did,” Ciszek said. “I think somehow people forget sometimes you have to question things — just because people said it was OK to own somebody doesn’t mean it was.”

Not all Farmington residents questioned slavery; indeed, opposition to abolitionism was at times so great that there were riots during abolitionist meetings in the 1830s.

“While some were indifferent to the question, and others were vehemently opposed to any change in the laws, a substantial minority of the town was in favor of abolishing the institution of slavery, Christopher Bickford writes in Farmington in Connecticut. But “while their views were not representative of town opinion as a whole, they were responsible for a gradual shift of attitudes on race,” he adds.

Although the Underground Railroad is often thought of as an elaborate network, its organization was more informal than formal until the 1840s, according to Bordewich. Only through the work of abolitionist societies and leaders like Norton, Williams and Deming did it evolve into a much more sophisticated system, with “agents” who penetrated the South seeking out escapees, “conductors” who guided the “passengers” north using coded messages, and an elaborate chain of stationmasters. To preserve secrecy, supporters might only have known network operatives one town over, Bordewich said.

Resistance in the North to Southern attempts to recapture runaways steadily grew so that even a tougher Fugitive Slave Act, approved by Congress in 1850 as part of the Missouri Compromise, proved unable to slow a movement that ended up passing an estimated 100,000 runaways onto Canada and freedom.

“It is hard to believe now, when the North and South are becoming more and more closely joined, that at one time hatred was bitter between the two portions of the country, and that here in quiet Farmington, feeling ran high and the fugitive-slave law was opposed and disregarded by some hot-head radicals called abolitionists,” said an essay in Farmington in Connecticut, The Village of Beautiful Homes, published in 1906. “For us who in this day are at all interested in social questions, it is hard to understand why everyone was not an abolitionist.”

The Farmington Historical Society conducts tours of local Amistad and Underground Railroad sites on the Connecticut Freedom Trail. For more information, call the society at 678-1645 or visit its web site: www.farmingtonhistoricalsociety-ct.org.

Bill Nagler is a freelance writer who lives in Farmington.