“The Underground Railroad.

As a great moral upheaval the anti-slavery movement in Mechanicsburg, began in 1833 in this wise:

Jacob R. Ware and Alexander took a drove of horses and sold them throughout the South.  At Vicksburg, while waiting for a boat, they visited a slave auction where a young slave woman was being sold.  Afterward her little boy was offered for sale.  The young mother got down on her knees to her purchaser and begged him to buy her boy that they might not be separated.  The hard-hearted man struck her and pushed her away, saying he would buy what he pleased.

Mr. Ware said to himself, ‘Not if I can help.’  At home he became what was at that time called ‘ a black abolitionist,’ circulating literature, employing speakers, and making his home a station on the underground railroad.  Many hundred colored people passed on this line to a refuge in Canada.

Mr. Ware, fearing imprisonment and loss of property through the operation of the infamous fugitive slave law which made a save catcher of every citizen of the free states, employed Udnah H. Hyde as a brave and skillful conductor to pilot the fugitives to the next station.  Mr. Hyde was able to make the proud boast that he never lost one of the 513 whom he assisted.”

Reference Data:

History of Mechanicsburg, Ohio, by Joseph Ware, 1917, pages 39-40