Almost all of our ancestors came here because of the lack of freedom where they lived. America was a place where no one could tell anyone else how to live their life. But there was one exception. One group of people did not come here to find the land of freedom: People from Africa were imported as slaves.
In the parts of the United States where slavery was not permitted, Abolitionists were pushing to free the slaves in the “slave states of the South.” Abolitionists created a system of cooperation that was called the “Underground Railroad.” Only in rare cases were any railway trains involved, although one of these cases may have been here in Tyrone.
The Underground Railroad comprised about a dozen different routes from southern states straight north. Using vague wordings, the slaves were told to follow the “drinking gourd,” which actually was the star constellation, the Big Dipper, and pointed them north. “Stations” or “stops” on the route usually were homes where the fugitive slaves would be hidden in the daytime, and when darkness came again, they’d head out, following the North Star, to another place twenty or thirty miles farther away from the plantation.
Historian Susie O’Brien tells us there was a secret room under the floor of the very old building along the tracks at 12th Street, in Tyrone. This room — actually it was more like a box — was the place where fugitive slaves were hidden during the daytime so that bounty hunters sent from the South could not find them and return them for a reward. Tyrone was one of the places along one of the many routes to the safe haven of Canada.
More than 100,000 men, women, and children “traveled” the Underground Railroad in the decades before the Civil War.
The Grave
If you visit the Baughman Cemetery, up the hollow past the Tyrone Sportsmen’s Lake, you’ll notice something unusual. The cemetery is very old, and the area you first see as you approach has no grave markers. This open area once was the location of a church and a school. The school was moved down the hollow and near the site of the circus train wreck, and it was renamed the Main School, for Walter L. Main Circus.
But this vacant, grassy area is there for another reason: an unmarked grave. It’s the grave of a black man who got as far as this area and didn’t go on to Canada. According to the story, as he was dying, he asked that there be no marker because bounty hunters could take revenge on his family back on the plantation if they had this kind of evidence.
The Confirmation
Jim Daughenbaugh, who has been active in the preservation and upkeep of the Baughman Cemetery, has straightened out the facts for us. Indeed, the grave is that of an escaped slave who had made it to this area and stopped at a farm up the valley from “civilization,” as a sanctuary en route to freedom. Sadly, he took sick, died, and was buried.
The families there decided to bury him right next to the little church that was just getting started there. It was the first grave in what would become Baughman Cemetery. The families decided not to mark the location of the grave, fearing that bounty hunters would find out about the runaway slave, come and steal the body for the reward, and get revenge on his family back on the plantation a thousand miles away.
Over the next fifty or sixty years, the cemetery grew behind the church. Then the church was moved from the valley, but no graves were ever placed in the area close to or on the spot where the church once stood, lest they disturb the grave of this heroic black man who wanted freedom so much that he gave up everything to escape.
Let his action for freedom remind us of why our ancestors all came here. Freedom is a priceless heritage.
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