In greeting members of a full-house audience, David Thomas set the scene for the evening’s topic, the Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania.
“Think of your journey here tonight. It’s a little drizzly, a little dark out there,” Thomas, president of the Whitehall Borough Historical Society, said. “Now think of what it was like in the 1850s to go from Virginia to Canada without a GPS. Many of them didn’t even know how to read or write. Following maps was impossible.”
With that, he introduced speaker William Switala, a 52-year borough resident, retired educator and author of three books about the Underground Railroad, a term that “came along as an attempt to explain escape routes that enslaved people used,” he explained.
His Black History Month talk in the Whitehall Borough Building community room represented the first of four speaker programs scheduled by the historical society for 2025.
As far back as the 1700s, Black seekers of freedom were risking their lives to flee subhuman treatment because of skin color.
“It reached a point even that George Washington wrote to some of his colleagues that they really needed to do something about this,” Switala said, “because he was losing enslaved people from his plantation who were escaping and going north.”
Eventually, Northern abolitionists established a series of networks – mostly on a localized, countywide basis, according to Switala – in aid of such efforts.
“They began using railroad terminology. For example, if you moved from point A to point B, you were traveling a line, like a rail line,” he said, and people who ran a safe house for travelers were known as station masters. “The person who helped you get from point A to point B was called a conductor.”
Geographically adjacent at the time to three states where slavery was legal – Delaware, Maryland and Virginia – Pennsylvania served as a primary passage for fugitives heading toward the then-British colony of Canada, which outlawed the practice along with the rest of the United Kingdom in 1838.
“Life in Canada was exceptionally good,” Switala said. “As a matter of fact, when the Civil War ended, not many of the people who had escaped slavery into Canada came back to the United States.”
Deterrents to freedom
Life below the border was perilous for slaves on the run, even in places where Blacks ostensibly were guaranteed freedom.
In addition to the general hazards of surreptitious 19th-century travel, professional slave catchers were on the lookout to collect rewards offered by owners.
Being returned to the South routinely meant severe punishment. For example, Switala described a practice known as the paddle.
“It was a device that looked much like a cricket bat or a fraternity paddle with holes drilled in it,” he said. “They would take the offender, man or woman, strip them naked and beat them soundly on the back and legs with the paddle. Because of the holes, that would raise welts.”
Then the welts would be burst by a whipping from a cat-o’-nine-tails.
“They would finish by dumping a bucket of highly salted water on the person’s wounds,” Switala said, while fellow slaves were forced to watch as a deterrent to trying something similar.
Escapees who made it as far as free states like Pennsylvania still were subject to capture, thanks to the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The law imposed a fine of up to $500 – more than $16,000 today, adjusted for inflation – on anyone who helped a fugitive anywhere in the fledgling United States.
“That didn’t seem to slow anything down,” Switala said. “As a matter of fact, it picked up speed in the 1840s, so much so that Southern senators in Congress pushed a bill through called the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which increased the penalty. For each slave you helped escape, you were fined $1,000 and given six months in a federal penitentiary.”
Nevertheless, plenty of Northerners risked financial ruin and incarceration, including residents and business owners in the South Hills.
“Brentwood had an Underground Railroad site – unfortunately, it’s gone – the Point View Hotel. It broke my heart when they tore that place down,” Switala said about the building’s 2006 demolition, more than 180 years after its construction.
As has been documented since as early as 1900, fugitives hid in the basement. They subsequently sneaked through wooded areas to the South Side Flats, from which they were transported across the Monongahela River.
Pittsburgh to the rescue
Further help was on the way in Downtown Pittsburgh from the likes of John Vashon, a Black man who operated a bath house and barbershop off Market Street.
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“All the barbers were free Blacks, and Vashon had trained them in interrogation techniques,” Switala said. “Frequently, a Southerner coming up to do business would bring a personal slave as an attendant. And usually, the slave would have to stay in the room while the businessman went out,” often for a shave and a haircut.
Vashon’s barbers would engage such customers in conversations along the lines of:
“Oh, you’re from the South. Oh, where in the South? Yeah, that’s great.
“Did you come alone? Oh, you brought your slave with you.
“Where are you staying? Oh, Merchant Hotel. That’s a great place. You know, I think the rooms on the east side of the hotel are … Oh, you’re on the south side of the hotel. Third floor? That’s a good … Oh, you’re on the fourth floor, Room 420. OK.”
Such pertinent information was passed along to Black staff members at the hotel, with a predictable outcome.
“The guy would come back,” Switala said. “The slave would be gone.”
He spoke about other Pittsburghers who offered assistance to fugitives, including John C. Peck, who ran an oyster house on Fourth Street: “His waiters would engage people in conversations to find out where they were staying.”
The Rev. Lewis Woodson hid runaways in the basement of Pittsburgh’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and businessman Charles Avery funded construction of the Allegheny Institute and Mission Church, later known as Avery College.
“When they tore the building down to complete Route 28 and the ramps onto the Veterans Bridge, they found a network of rooms underneath this building in which he hid slaves. He would take them through a tunnel to the Allegheny River,” Switala said, and from there they would travel north.
Often, he explained, fugitives were transported to blend in with the residents of Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods of the day, Arthurville and Hayti in what became the Hill District.
“I’ve read stories where a slave would escape and change his clothes. All he wore when he was a slave were blue pants and a red shirt. He’d put on a blue shirt and black pants, and the owner wouldn’t recognize him,” Switala said.
“There was a lot to this adage that white people can’t tell one from another.”