NIAGARA FALLS—The role of the Niagara Frontier in the Underground Railroad of the mid-19th century has become a tourist attraction for travelers from the United Kingdom.
Interest in the path to freedom for slaves in the United States has grown so much that a segment on the Underground Railroad is included in school curriculums in the United Kingdom, and a British travel agency is promoting a 13- day tour titled “Slave Underground Railroad Tour of New York State, USA.”
Five travel writers from the United Kingdom made a whirlwind visit this weekend to key Underground Railroad sites in Niagara and Erie counties, and each plans to write about it in newspapers, magazines and websites after they get home.
“It was interesting to learn on this weekend’s visit that some of the escaping slaves in the 1800s were carried in railroad cattle cars, and border inspectors in Canada readily let them pass through because slavery by then had been abolished in Canada,” writer Mary Moore Mason said.
“And, too, the road to freedom was more open than I had thought. It wasn’t just groups of people being hidden in basements. Abolitionists in the Northern U. S. seemed to be widely known, and escaping slaves were kept hidden only to avoid bounty hunters who would return them to the South, where slavery still was permitted,” she said.
Mason is editorial director of Essentially America, a magazine and website devoted to North American travel and lifestyle.
Catherine Naqvi, a writer and marketing executive for Arena Travel of Ipswich, Suffolk, in England, said: “Black history now is a significant field of study in schools in the United Kingdom.”
Her agency is putting together a group tour for next May 5 to 17 that she said will “retrace key parts of the route taken by slaves as they escaped to freedom in the northern states and Canada.”
Travelers on the group tour will hear a talk by Kevin Cottrell, project coordinator for North Star Initiative. North Star is redeveloping Underground Railroad sites in Western New York, including some along the Michigan Avenue corridor in Buffalo, and an interpretive center is to open by early 2013 in the 1860s-era U. S. Customs House on Whirlpool Street in Niagara Falls.
The Customs House was among the group’s stops Sunday, as were Buffalo’s Broderick Park, the boarding location for some slaves escaping across the Niagara River to Canada; First Presbyterian Church in Lewiston, which was among the last U. S. stop for other escaping slaves; and the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, which is near the site of the old Suspension Bridge said to have been used by Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery in 1849 and over 11 years made 13 missions back, guiding more than 70 slaves to freedom.
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