(gentle music) - [Narrator] Williamsport played an important part in the movement of slaves.

Lycoming County was a vital link in the Underground Railroad.

The slaves came up from the South.

They would come to Lycoming County.

They would go to Trout Run.

Then from there they would go to New York State and then they would go to Canada.

The Underground Railroad was not underground and it was not a railroad.

The Underground Railroad was a human chain of slaves that were traveling, trying to get away from slavery down South.

(gentle music) There were houses that were called stations.

There were people who led the slaves, they were called conductors.

One of the famous conductors was Harriet Tubman.

And Harriet Tubman once said, "I was a conductor for the Underground Railroad for eight years.

I never had my train go off the track, nor did I lose a passenger."

I became interested in slave history because my great-grandfather, Thomas Hughes, who was the first police officer to be killed in the line of duty in Williamsport, came to Williamsport as a slave, and because it's such an important thing for people to know, for people to realize what had happened to these poor people who were brought over here.

All of a sudden, somebody comes into your house, steals you away, takes you to a foreign country.

You don't know the language.

You can't be taught to read and write.

Horrible things are done to you.

It's just, it's not imaginable that this can happen to somebody.

So, I just decided that I needed to look further into how these people around here, how these wonderful people around here helped the slaves escape.

Slaves came from everywhere in the South.

They came up North because they were looking for freedom.

Freedom Road is a road that was very vital to slaves coming into Williamsport because of a man named Daniel Hughes.

Daniel Hughes was a Mohawk Indian, and he was a raftsman who went down to Maryland.

And on his way back up he would often see slaves that were trying to escape and he would bring them to his house.

He was responsible for helping at least a thousand slaves escape.

The House of Many Stairs, it was a stop for the stagecoaches.

There were no two rooms on the same floor.

The house had two parts.

At the top of the steps, there was a door that was like three and a half feet tall that you would have to scrunch down to get in, and that's where they would hide the slaves.

Slaves had to use many modes of transportation to get up North.

Canal boats were an important mode of transportation they would use.

Indian trails were big.

They would come by the streams.

They would come by the rivers.

The Quakers that helped the slaves, they could have died helping.

And they did it because of their religious belief and they helped a lot.

They were vital.

They were really important in getting slaves and hiding the slaves.

My friend Peter Toms once said that his father told him that the South reveals what the North conceals.

And being black, you realize that people do things to black people that they don't do to white people.

I'd walk into a store, I've walked into a store to go shopping and had the clerk follow me so close behind that I stopped dead in my tracks and she ran right into the back of me.

And there'll be people in there stealing, white people, but they don't follow them around, they followed me around.

And it just makes you feel just so bad that there's still so much prejudice around.

Anybody Black can tell you lots of stories that have happened to them that wouldn't happen to anybody that was white.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music)