In an area where about 200 slaves escaped between 1840 and 1860, a 207-year-old church has been recognized as a significant station on the Underground Railroad.
The Union Baptist Church in Blackfork, Ohio, has been added to the National Park Service‘s Network to Freedom Marker Program.
The program “honors, preserves and promotes the history of resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, which continues to inspire people worldwide.”
Founded in 1819, Union Baptist is the longest continuously operating African American church in Ohio.
“This is in some ways where the Underground Railroad began once people successfully got across the Ohio River,” Dr. Andrew Feight said. “This network was interracial. Whites and Blacks working together at times, sometimes by themselves. It was a clandestine secret network because it was illegal to assist freedom seekers.”
Feight is a professor of history and director of the Center for Public History at Shawnee State University. He is also the director of research and outreach for the Appalachian Freedom Heritage Tourism Initiative.
“There’s nothing more powerful than realizing that American history happened right here,” Feight said. “That this history is real, and the struggle for equality was real, the struggle for freedom was real and liberty was real.”
That struggle continues to inspire to this day.
“It’s a blessing when you start thinking about the saints that came before us, how they had to struggle to keep the church going,” Deacon Paul Keels said. “It kind of makes you want to go that extra mile to get here on time Sundays because some of them walk for miles and through all kind of weather just to get here to worship the Lord.”
The Bright Side
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote philosopher George Santayana in 1905.
The National Park Service, members of the Union Baptist Church, and caretakers of the stops along the Underground Railroad are keeping memories alive, for the sake of both history and the future.
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