The program administered by the U.S. National Parks Service recognizes historic places, facilities, and educational and interpretive programs associated with the Underground Railroad.
"We look for all ways to tell the story of people who were escaping," said Sheri Jackson, Northeast regional manager of the network, "where they stayed, and who provided any kind of assistance: money, clothes, horse and wagons, whaling ships, and the railroad."
Forty-nine sites and programs in Pennsylvania and two in New Jersey have been awarded recognition since the commemorative network was begun in 1998.
A century and a half ago, the 70-mile stretch of the Keystone Corridor was part of the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. The railroad made up the easternmost section of the Main Line of Public Works, a 400-mile corridor linking Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
A trio of African American businessmen and abolitionists - William Whipper, Stephen Smith, and William Goodridge - used rail cars owned by their companies to secretly transport freedom seekers who'd crossed the Mason-Dixon line into central Pennsylvania. They rode on to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, says historian Randolph Harris, a consultant and former director of the Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County who prepared the application. For many, the final stop was Canada.
Philadelphia became a hub of the Underground Railroad because of its large free African American community and renowned abolitionist movement, says historian Charles L. Blockson, founder and curator emeritus of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University.
Pennsylvania, which had outlawed slavery in 1780, became a destination for freedom seekers as well as a thoroughfare to points north.
