The Richland History Group will monthly highlight notable aspects from the area’s past.

At sunrise on an average day in the 1850s, a traveler in Richland Township might have seen an ordinary farm wagon passing north toward Butler. Its wagon bed was covered with a tarp, as farm wagons often were.

But a few hours before, when the night was darkest, the wagon was silently loaded in Bakerstown village with an unusual cargo. It may have held a family or a group of adults who only knew each other as fellow “passengers” on the most dangerous journey in America: the Underground Railroad.

In the two decades before the Civil War, many slaves were helped to escape to freedom by a growing network of Abolitionists. But after 1850, federal law required free states to help return runaway slaves, so even in the north transporting runaways became dangerous. Now Pennsylvania wasn’t far enough; they had to head for Erie and Canada.

The railroad had no road, of course. It was “underground” only through a network of people committed to keeping the “passengers” absolutely hidden from sight. Runaway slaves traveled mostly on foot and at night, staying away from roads, using creeks to navigate.

Cities were places to avoid, so the routes went around them. A walker who crossed the Allegheny River could follow Deer Creek to Bakerstown, but as the network grew stronger, there was a faster, safer way.

In 1857, the Pennsylvania Railroad bought land and began laying track. Bennett Station in Millvale doubled as an underground “station.” From Millvale, Thomas McElroy drove passengers in a covered wagon up the Evergreen Plank Road to Bakerstown.

Bakerstown today hardly looks like a town because some of the old buildings, such as its old hotel, have been demolished. Modern Route 8 bypassed Bakerstown, carrying commercial development over its head. Perhaps because commercialization passed it by, two of the old buildings used in the Underground Railroad are still in fine shape.

One is a large brick building at the crossing of Bakerstown and Heckert Roads. It has been used for various businesses, now a bakery with the bricks painted white.

About a quarter mile east on Bakerstown Road, the 1831 William Brickle House (more recently called the Hull House) is now part of the Benedictine convent. A narrow stair to the attic still takes a visitor to the same space where passengers on the Underground Railroad waited for their last long wagon ride.

In Bakerstown, the postmaster and school teacher was James Jones. He may have been the leader in the village’s role in the runaway network. Perhaps as proprietor of a store in the brick building he could manage the hideaway spaces in attic or cellar. A farmer named Gilland, who lived just north of the village, used his wagon on the next stage north.

From Bakerstown, they followed either the Packsaddle Trail (now Bakerstown Road) or the Butler Plank Road (now Route 8).

Work began in 1852 to upgrade the “Butler and Pittsburgh Turnpike” (a former Indian path widened in 1822) into the Butler Plank Road (completed in 1856), a major highway with split logs to keep vehicles from sinking into seasonal mud.

Thankfully, in 1862 the Emancipation Proclamation put an end to slavery in the United States while many Pittsburgh area men were serving the Federal Army in the Civil War.

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