It was a tightly guarded secret, kept from Pauline Copes Johnson until after her parents’ death. Today, she can praise the life of a woman she simply calls “Aunt Harriet,” but in her youth, her family feared intolerance and was too afraid she would tell the whole town about her famous ancestor.

“She changed this world,” Copes Johnson said. “She put her life on the line every day, every time she went to the South to gather up slaves and bring them back north.”

 

As the great-grand-niece of Harriet Tubman, Copes Johnson is one of the oldest living relatives of the famous abolitionist. Tubman lived in Auburn, N.Y. — just 40 miles north of Ithaca — for more than half a century. From Auburn, she made more than a dozen trips south and helped hundreds to freedom on the Underground Railroad — a complex and highly secretive system of safe houses by which more than 100,000 slaves escaped slavery between about 1810 and 1850. For some runaways, the dangerous flight moved through Ithaca.

 

The names of most freedom seekers have since been forgotten, their footsteps faded with time. Even as they made the journey, the details fell into folklore, as those who were brave enough to help struggled to cover their tracks. Because of the secrecy, today’s historians adamantly question the stories of the Underground Railroad.

But Jenny Masur, a regional coordinator at the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, said even though many documents were destroyed — or in most cases, never kept — historians are able to piece together a record of the passage. It’s a meticulous job of sifting through personal letters, court trials, plantation records, runaway ads, slave narratives, newspaper articles, memoirs and military documents.

The networks were mostly local, Masur said. Small communities of abolitionists would pass runaways onto other communities in a random patchwork en route to free states, Canada or a close seaport. The routes passed through small towns and larger hub cities, such as Philadelphia; Boston; Oberlin, Ohio; and New Bedford, Mass., Masur said.

“They might tell [runaways] the name of a person,” she said. “They might tell them a place. And then sometimes, there was someone who would say, ‘I’ve got a horse. Let’s leave right now.’”

The stories of that collaborative struggle have become more than just a solitary part of history, Masur said. Strung together, they embody the value of freedom that moves through America’s narrative and work as a precursor to future civil rights movements.

“It’s not just African-American history,” she said. “It’s a history of cooperation between various ethnic, racial [and] religious groups.”

At the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn, a few individuals are dedicated to keeping that history alive. Copes Johnson worked there as a tour guide for nearly 10 years, passing on the story of an aunt she didn’t know she had until she was 25. More than half a century later, now 81 years old, Copes Johnson travels to schools and conventions around the country, raising awareness about her aunt’s life.

Tuesday, the anniversary of Tubman’s death, is New York state’s Harriet Tubman Day, but Copes Johnson is pushing for a national holiday in honor of her ancestor, as well as more recognition in the town Tubman called home.

“We haven’t got a statue here in Auburn, and she lived here,” she said. “I can’t understand that. But anyhow, we’re going to keep trying.”

In Ithaca, there was a small group of abolitionists who, like Tubman, helped freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad during the 19th century. Most runaways came to Ithaca from Elmira, a town just 35 miles south with a more active abolitionist community and large black population. The town was a convenient stop, located on both the Chemung Canal and the rail line.

Ithaca was not an ideal stop on the Underground Railroad, Tompkins County Historian Carol Kammen said. There were devastating obstacles — no train tracks in the surrounding area, a small black population that couldn’t easily absorb newcomers and a community that in general was not sympathetic to the cause.

“Ithaca was a democratic, copperheaded city by [and] large, which does not mean that there were not lots of abolitionists here,” Kammen said. “But this was not going to be a safe place for people [to hide].”

Suspicion in small towns like Ithaca ran heavy. Change, like a new girl working in the kitchen or an extra hired hand on the farm, was noted immediately.

“If you so much as take a horse out on the road, your neighbors are going to notice,” said Mary White, a historian at the Tompkins County History Center.

Still, it is believed that slaves made their way safely through Ithaca, with routes most likely running up the sides of Cayuga Lake, White said.

St. James African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, located at 116 Cleveland Ave., was a central location of the town’s abolitionist community. Prominent leaders in the anti-slavery movement such as Frederick Douglass and Tubman visited St. James, said Roland Lynch, the church’s historian. Jermain Loguen, a former slave and famous abolitionist, was minister from 1846 to 1848.

“This was a major station house,” Lynch said. “The ministers probably had some clandestine roles in, or some direct roles [in], finding safe houses for [runaways] in this area.”

During a childhood game, Ithaca resident Jacqueline Melton Scott said she uncovered a hidden crawl space at St. James that she believes was used to hide slaves. It was the 1940s, and since then the building has been reconstructed.

“I was hiding from my cousin, and it was a loose board,” she said. “I think that there was a double wall, and that loose board was where people could be put, could be hidden.”

But local historians agree it is improbable that the church itself was used to house runaways, as it was an easy target for slave catchers. Most likely, St. James’ involvement was directorial, coordinating safe houses in the surrounding area.

Another story of Ithaca’s Underground Railroad involvement comes from George A. Johnson, a young boy whose family moved to Ithaca in the 1840s. This account is found in a 1903 biography of Ben Johnson, a prominent lawyer and the fourth president of the village of Ithaca.

“Occasionally I visited Mr. [Ben] Johnson in his office and informed him that several runaway slaves had arrived during the previous night by the way of the ‘underground route,’ and that they must have shoes and clothing and money for their passage toward Canada,” George A. Johnson said.

He said Ben Johnson would then reply that he was “a law-abiding citizen” and that he could not take part in such an unlawful act.

“But he would hand me a five or a 10 dollar note and tell me to take it and buy tickets and send the runaway slaves back to their masters,” George A. Johnson said.

The lawyer knew that money would help them move “on toward the North Star,” George A. Johnson said. His father was a barber who most likely helped disguise the runaways before they were put on a steamboat and moved up Cayuga Lake. He said more than 100 slaves made their way safely through Ithaca in this manner.

There are other stories of Underground Railroad activity in Ithaca, but as each generation passes, they fall further into folklore. They may be true, Kammen said, but there is little way to confirm the claims of hidden cellars and secret passageways.

“We don’t know,” she said. “We really don’t know. There is no evidence because it is an illegal activity.”

But Copes Johnson is continuing the slow process of chronicling a history that time has blurred. In summer 2004, she traveled to Africa in an attempt to find the story of a woman named Modesty, a woman she believes to be Tubman’s grandmother. She thinks Modesty was part of the Ashanti tribe in what is present-day Ghana. While there, she visited Elmina Castle, a Portuguese fort that became an important stop on the slave trade.

“I saw where the dungeons were, and I went in the dungeons,” she said. “You had to almost crawl in there. And that’s where they kept our ancestors.”

As Tubman’s only relative who still lives in the Auburn area, she said she has felt an obligation to know everything she could about those who came before her. In Africa, she tried to trace that lineage further and fill in more unknown details of her past.

“I had asked people but nobody knew about [Tubman’s] grandmother — but they did know about Aunt Harriet,” she said. “They said she was a brave and courageous woman.”