Underground Railroad Operators: the Palmers of Fitchville, Ohio

Underground Railroad Operators: the Palmers of Fitchville, Ohio

(Excerpts from “Carved Out of the Wilderness”, by Paula Porter Griffin)

During the Revolutionary War, the British sent various expeditions to burn towns along the coast of Connecticut. Some of the towns that were burned included New London, Norwalk, Greenwich, New Haven, Danbury and others. The residents, or “Sufferers” were compensated by granting them land in western end of the Western Reserve, containing 500,000 acres, called the “Sufferer’s Land”, or “Fire Lands”. This area included the present day Ohio counties of Huron, Erie and Marblehead Peninsula of Ottawa County

According to an account written by Rundle Palmer, he came into this area from Westchester County, New York in 1817, and liked what he saw, and returned home. He persuaded his four brothers, Alva, Seeley, Samuel (Father of William F. Palmer, and a doctor), and Linus and two sisters, Delia, and Hannah, to migrate with him. They started out the last of February, 1818 with teams by land, and after many a difficulty, they made their meeting place at Genoa, Cayuga County, NY. After resting a few days, they decided to leave their women and children there with Samuel (possibly at Uncle Abijah Palmer’s home) until warmer weather. They got up a team of three horses attached to a wagon into which they put as many goods as they could get along with comfortably and started for the State of Ohio. Attached to that wagon was Abijah Palmer and his son, Robert, Rundle, Alva, Linus and Seeley Palmer, cousins Elial Palmer, John and James Moe, and Jonathan Sherman. They were ten full grown able bodied men all told. To go by way of Buffalo appeared to be the only practical way. The roads were exceedingly bad, mixed up with rain, snow and deep mud, so that they could make only about fifteen miles a day. Buffalo at this time had not recovered from being burnt in the War of 1812, and the tavern keepers appeared to be very anxious to clutch what they could from travelers and strangers.

From Buffalo, they went up lake Erie, much of the way directly on the lake shore. Most of the inhabitants that were settled along the lake shore had been engaged in the War of 1812. Their language was very uncouth, morals bad and charges high while passing through that part of Pennsylvania.

As per the plans, when the weather cleared, Samuel came and brought the women and children which consisted of his sisters, Hannah and Delia, his brother Rundle’s family and possibly his Uncle Abijah’s family. The following year, a total of twenty-five persons by the name of Palmer, originally from Greenwich, Fairfield County, Connecticut, had settled in Fitchville, Ohio.

Seeley Palmer, being a carpenter, built a home in 1826, a one-story house. (A second story was later added.) This house was one of the stations on the “Underground Railroad”. Fugitive slaves were hidden in the cellar, and Seeley’s children would take food to them. In the cellar was a potato bin with a false bottom in which they could hide.

The Palmers were very strict in their observances of the Sabbath. Before the sun went down on Saturday evening, all the children had to have their shoes cleaned and clothes ready for church the next day – no work was done from sundown on Saturday to sundown on Sunday.

The original owners placed such a high value on their land that the township did not grow very quickly. In 1826, there were about 40 resident families in Fitchville. New Pioneers could buy land much cheaper in other parts of the state or in Michigan. Prices lowered in 1830, and the town began to grow more quickly.

In 1828, Fitchville was detached from neighboring Greenwich, and was organized as a separate township. Rundle Palmer was elected the first Justice of the Peace, and Samuel Palmer was the first clerk.

Rundle Palmer built a home in 1837, known as the “Fountain House”, and it was a famous stop on the Underground Railroad. (Samuel Palmer built a home in 1832, which too served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.) The “Fountain House” was first used as a dwelling, but about 1850, his two sons converted it to a hotel by two of his sons. They ran it as a hotel for about five years, and it was also used as a public meeting place, elections, and a post office, with Rundle as the postmaster. The home had a fan window built into the attic so that one could watch for slaves that came down the river that ran nearby.

In 1830, brothers William, Rundle and Samuel built a sawmill near the center [of town] on the Vermillion River. They were also listed as farmers.

The Congregational Church was established in 1821 with seven members, including Rundle Palmer. Seeley Palmer was an early member of this church. Until 1830, meetings were held in private homes. At this time, a small building was built north of the village. However, about 1842 or 1843, they built a small house of worship in the village, on land belonging to Rundle Palmer. It bore the name “gospel shanty”, because the building was so small. Without a doubt, this was also used by other congregations until their own places of worship could be secured. Rundle Palmer was for many years one of the strong pillars of the church and frequently served in the capacity of minister. His brother, Dr. Marcus Palmer, also served as pastor of the church at one time.

As a historic phenomenon, the Underground Railway here and across the northern United States remains a mystery. The activities of the few abolitionists were highly secret, and by necessity, usually not recorded. It is believed to have started as early as 1820, and was so called because the fugitive slaves were carried concealed in wagons from one town to another in the dark, after the people had usually retired, so as to escape detection; the distance being from five to twelve miles. The driver would know just where the slaves could be accommodated, and would drive along very quietly. The men were not allowed to speak or laugh, and sometimes would even lie down in the wagon if there were not too many of them, for fear of being sighted by some evil-minded person who might direct their master in pursuit of them.

The slaves were always fed and clothes given them if needed before leaving each “depot”. The driver would go cautiously up to the door of the next stopping place and rap softly, when the men of the house appeared to open the door and hear, almost in a whisper “a load of slaves”. “All right,” responded the man, “bring them in”. If the weather was cold, a fire was built to warm them, then they were quietly stowed away as secretly as possible to rest, were kept and fed all the next day, and in the night carried on the next depot.

The slaves would appear in all shades from very black to nearly white. It made no difference if a little girl had flaxen hair and blue eyes, if her mother was a slave, she too was the same as any animal to be sold on the “auction block”. The greatest wonder was how so many slaves caught on to the way of escaping, especially having the Ohio River to cross…

There are said to have been between 2800 and 3000 miles of Underground Railroad in Ohio, so efficiently operated that during a period of forty years, the loss to southern slave owners amounted to twenty thousand dollars. Along the Ohio River, there were 23 communities from which runaway slaves were helped on their way across the state of Ohio. The fie principal outlets on Lake Erie to which the fugitives were taken across the lake were Ashtabula Harbor, Fairport Harbor, Cleveland, Sandusky and Toledo. There were 123 miles of routes to Richland County, 120 miles in Huron County and 108 miles in Lorain County.

The area around Savannah, Ashland County, Ohio, (a few miles north of Ashland, and a few miles south-west of Fitchville) contained a number of places of refuge for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. The Anti-Slavery sentiment among the Scotch Presbyterians was so strong that at the risk of heavy penalties, fines and even the taking of their farms, they followed their vision of service to fellow human beings in bondage. They harbored the runaway slaves during the day, and at night took them to Greenwich, Oberlin, or even as far away as Sandusky. The people that concealed these slaves knew that they were disobeying a law made by man, but they said “they were obedient to a higher law made by God.”

It is important to note that most folks in Ohio did not share the same degree of sentiments. The operators of the Underground Railroad had to do their work in absolute secrecy. Today, we have no idea what a burning issue slavery was in the hearts of some of the people in Fitchville. An account from an old newspaper, “The Enterprise”, published in Greenwich, Ohio, gives this account of an anti-slavery meeting.

“One cold morning in December 1836 or January 1837, while on my way from my boarding house to the little log hut, or turkey-pen-of-a-schoolhouse in which I was teaching the young ‘ideas’ of Greenwich ‘to shoot’, I was overtaken by a stranger on horseback, whose first salutation was ‘have you hard the news? That old rip of a wench-loving hypocrite, Palmer, is nailed at last. A whole band of n-----s was found secreted in his garret (attic) last night by their master from Kentucky. They will be taken to Norwalk today for examination and without doubt will go where they belong’, then he added ‘Old Palmer ought to be tarred and feathered and sent with them.’

The news proved to be true. Twelve human beings guilty of no crime, except the color of their skin were making a life effort to get beyond the boundary line of ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ In their flight they had found a friend and resting place in the home of Rundle Palmer, one who feared God and loved humanity. Here they were arrested and taken before a “Justice” at Norwalk (the Fugitive Slave Law was not then in existence) and on oath of their master, they were remanded back to slavery. At least 90 percent of the newspapers in Ohio justified the act (that is, returning the slaves). At least 99 percent of the voters in Huron County said it was right.

Once there were two strangers who came to the Mansion House Inn, and asked for a room with a south window. They got one and there they spent most of their time looking out the window towards the Fountain House and river, or walking up and down the road in front of the house. One day they were rewarded for their efforts for they saw two slaves out back of the Fountain House where they were getting some exercise. These two slaves were captured and taken back to the South, but hundreds more managed to escape for every one that was captured.

A tunnel was built from the basement of this house down to the Vermillion River and fleeing slaves, walking in the water to obliterate their trail from bloodhounds, found a ready and safe entrance to the Fountain House. In the early 1900’s when State Route 13 was graded and improved, the tunnel was destroyed.

Preston Palmer, son of Samuel Palmer and a nephew of Rundle Palmer was an unflinching abolitionist and a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and at times concealed as many as ten to fifteen slaves around the house until they could be taken on to the next step. Mr. Palmer often told of slaves being hidden in an attic room whose only entrance was behind his great-great-grandmother’s bed. When word came that inspectors were coming to check, great-great grandmother was very ill and in bed, and couldn’t be moved. This home, as well s the homes of his uncles, Rundle and Seeley, were all built upon “Sufferers Land”, given to their grandfather, William Rundle of Greenwich, Conn., by the state legislature of Connecticut on the 2nd of May, 1792, for his losses during the Revolutionary War. The lumber for these houses was all sawed in their own sawmill.

Seeley Palmer’s home, located on the north side of present Route 162, about ¾ of a mile east of Fitchville, was also one of the stations of the Underground Railway. He was a conductor and an ardent anti-slavery advocate and many a slave owed his liberty to Mr. Palmer’s plans and skills in deceiving the enemy.

One cold and very snowy, sleety night, when slave hunters were expected the next day, and Seeley Palmer was so very sick, his wife, Nancy Post Palmer, who was a very small and petite lady, with the help of some of her children, hitched a team to a sled, attached a large limb to the back of the sled to drag behind to cover their tracks, put into the sled the five Negroes taken from a secret room and covered them with hay and started about midnight for Clarksfield (probably a twenty hour round-trip)., not knowing until she reached home whether her husband would be alive or dead. Most of the slaves who passed through Fitchville were taken in a northeasterly direction toward Clarksfield.

William Duff, in his “History of North Central Ohio”, says Ezra Garrett of Savannah took slaves from his home on the Fitchville Road to Fitchville. The tavern keeper there was safe, but there were some people in the village who could not be trusted, so he usually took the runaways to the home of a Mr. Palmer, two miles north of Fitchville.” We are not certain to which one of the Palmers he referred to as there were several living in the general area. The Palmers were all noted abolitionists, so it could have been any one of the families.