The local careers of famous abolitionists who lived in the Northampton, Massachusetts village of Florence - Sojourner Truth, David Ruggles, Lydia Maria Child, Charles C. Burleigh, Sr. and their coadjutors - have been carefully detailed over the last decade.  These partisans of William Lloyd Garrison's brand of anti-slavery that called for non-resistance, anticlericism, and women's rights were matched in their zeal by more conservative evangelical abolitionists in downtown Northampton.  Several self-emancipated slaves and their families settled in Florence but Northampton proper was the more principal "station" for fugitives continuing on their way to freedom up the Connecticut River on the Underground Railroad.

Northampton was the birthplace of two of the most prominent evangelical abolitionists: Arthur and Lewis Tappan.  Emancipator editor Joshua Leavitt, born in nearby Heath, practiced law here.  The abundance of interpretable sites discovered in Florence in recent years is matched by sites in downtown Northampton that tell the other side of the abolition story - of the Liberty and Free Soil parties and the Massachusetts Abolition Society.  Sylvester Judd, Enos Clark, J. P. Williston, Moses Breck, Erastus Hopkins all stayed in their churches while they worked for the cause.  Williston founded the Hampshire Herald, the county's only anti-slavery newspaper and installed the nineteen year old Henry S. Gere as editor.  We'll see the homes of Breck, Hopkins and of Timothy Harley, African American barber living on Fruit Street who harbored fugitive slave George Wright.  The tour ends at City Hall, brand new in 1850 when ten fugitive slaves called the town to meet there to resist the Fugitive Slave Law.

Join tour guide Steve Strimer to explore what remains in the built landscape of this pivotal period before the Civil War.

This program is funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
www.masshumanities.org