The Underground Railroad was a 280-year American phenomenon which served as the boldest and most active foil to slavery.  Because the Underground Railroad was clandestine, its safe-house operators and conductors — black and white alike — who ushered people to freedom had to keep their roles hidden.  If caught rendering aid to freedom seekers, they could be and were arrested, convicted of interfering with “property rights,” and sentenced.  All who rendered aid risked all they had to do so, and some lost all they had for doing so.  Because those who rendered aid could still be prosecuted long after the Civil War and the Underground Railroad ended, most took their noble secrets to the grave.

One who didn’t was the author’s great-grandfather Marion Michael who could not be prosecuted because he was a minor when he rendered aid.  Marion Michael told of his family’s work on the Underground Railroad, and his descendants keep this family history quite alive today. An American Family of the Underground Railroad is told by the actual safe-house operators’ descendant who owns the very farm where his ancestors sheltered freedom seekers.  Cooling Springs Farm might be the sole remaining Underground Railroad safe-house in the nation still owned by the same family that used it in Underground Railroad times.

An American Family of the Underground Railroad provides to general reader and scholar alike a wealth of detail about more than fifty Underground Railroad sites in a single county with a map of the sites, and identifies several safe-house operators and a key Underground Railroad conductor there.  With a bibliography of over 200 sources, this book might be the most thoroughly documented work on any single safe-house.  An American Family of the Underground Railroad helps reawaken the nation to its defining heritage of the Underground Railroad.

Peter H. Michael is the owner of Cooling Springs Farm, one of the nation’s few still-existing Underground Railroad safe-houses, and is the seventh consecutive generation of his family there.  His great-great-grandparents and their children used the farm and its spring house as a haven for Underground Railroad freedom seekers through the end of the Civil War.  Mr. Michael and his family have opened Cooling Springs Farm as a historic site for tours and study to the public and to a number of national Underground Railroad and historical organizations.  Mr. Michael is a co-founder and officer of Friends of the Underground Railroad, an international organization which promotes the memory of the Underground Railroad and the preservation of remaining Underground Railroad safe-houses and routes.

Peter Michael is the author of Out of This World, an exposé of the United Nations’ failure to adequately assist poor nations in lowering their population growth rates, and is the founder and president of Michael Strategic Analysis, an award-winning firm practicing strategic planning, market analysis, and litigation support. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland which he attended on academic scholarship, took his MBA at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley where his thesis was published as the cover story of a magazine of national circulation, and completed a post-graduate program in demography at Princeton University which he attended on a Population Council fellowship.

He is married to Vicki Michael, a painter and civic leader.  The couple resides at Cooling Springs Farm near Adamstown, Maryland.

Permitting the party’s escape in the first place was the fact that Frank Wanzer was trusted by his “owner,” Luther Sullivan who Wanzer described to William Still as “the meanest man in Virginia.” Sullivan would send Wanzer alone in a farm wagon into the nearby towns on errands, so it would not have alarmed local whites to have seen Wanzer once again in the familiar wagon that Christmas Eve.  Facilitating the escape was that Wanzer was light enough to pass for white.  And so, it was Christmas Eve, 1855, while the Sullivan family was preoccupied with the holidays, that Frank Wanzer secreted his five fellow freedom seekers into the wagon, took the reins and drove them off to freedom.

The Wanzer party took a longer and more carefully chosen route from Oak Hill to the Michael farms and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad route than they could have.  The most direct route, then and now, would have been straight up what then in northern Virginia was called Point of Rocks Turnpike, today’s US Route 15, which directly borders Oak Hill Plantation, passes through the Loudoun County seat of Leesburg, and crosses the Potomac River at Point of Rocks, Maryland, within a mile of the first Michael farm.  However, this route would have involved 24 miles of escape in unfriendly territory along the area’s busiest thoroughfare and through the largest town thus maximizing the chance of detection and capture before reaching Maryland and the safety of the Michael farms.  Instead, Frank Wanzer guided his party to the crossing of the Potomac River at Conrad’s Ferry sixteen miles from Oak Hill, much of the way on country roads. Reaching Conrad’s Ferry from Oak Hill, it was possible to avoid Leesburg altogether by traveling certain roads. Conrad’s Ferry would have been Wanzer’s chosen destination anyway as it was at the time operated by the son of Bazil Newman, the African-Americans later documented as Underground Railroad conductors.

Once across the Potomac into Maryland, the party avoided the seemingly logical route straight north through Montgomery County, Maryland, toward Pennsylvania.  Here, Frank Wanzer varied by a longer route again, next detouring 16 miles to the west to his stated route along the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad which took the six through the Michael farms on the Potomac-to-Doubs Route.

After resuming their flight north on Christmas Day, 1855, the six continued their journey alongside the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and “came to Hood’s Mill, near the dividing line between Frederick and Carroll Counties, on Christmas day” where they were assaulted by whites.  The two couples defended themselves with guns and knives, drove off the assailants, abandoned their wagon, and fled on horseback for speed.  The two unnamed freedom seekers, riding far enough behind the wagon on horseback to be unaware of the confrontation, were shortly later met by the whites. One of the freedom seekers left behind was shot in the back as he tried to escape on horseback, and died.  The other was captured and presumably returned to Oak Hill Plantation and re-enslaved.  I have made considerable effort to uncover the identities of these two, but without success.  I wonder and wonder more who these two brave ciphers in our nation’s struggle were.

By Wednesday, December 26, the four remaining fugitives — Frank Wanzer, Emily Foster and Mr. and Mrs. Grigby — reached Columbia, Pennsylvania, a friendly Underground Railroad town.