Alex Haley

Town of Lansing, NY

Born free in New Jersey in 1789, Peter Wheeler was kidnapped as a boy and sold into slavery, ending up in the small Finger Lakes hamlet of Ludlowville in 1801. New York was then in the slow process of abolishing slavery, and a network of sympathetic neighbors—including abolitionists Thomas and Henry Ludlow, for whom the village was named—helped him flee bondage in 1806. Wheeler's story is one of countless individual struggles for freedom that played out across the early-republic North even as the institution of slavery lingered.

Springville Township, PA · est. 2001

Born in 1840 to parents who had escaped slavery, Jonathan Jasper Wright grew up in Springville and went on to become the first Black lawyer admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania. He stood with Frederick Douglass in the fight for the vote and legal equality, and in 1870, during Reconstruction, he was elevated to the South Carolina Supreme Court—the first African American to sit on a state's highest court. His rise from a runaway slaves' son to the bench marked a breathtaking, if fragile, moment of possibility.

Loyalsock Township, PA · est. 1993

Daniel Hughes, a Black raftsman who steered timber down the Susquehanna River, used his travels to a darker purpose for slavery's defenders: in the years before the Civil War he guided fugitives from Maryland to his home here, sheltering them before they moved north to freedom along the Underground Railroad. Hughes gave part of his land for a cemetery, where nine known African American veterans of the Civil War are buried. Known as Freedom Road Cemetery since 1936, the ground honors both the escape network and the men who later fought for the Union.

Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1947

Stephen Foster, the songwriter often called the father of American popular music, spent time along the Susquehanna at Towanda and Athens, and tradition holds that the nearby community of Camptown gave him the title for one of his best-known tunes. Written in the mid-19th century, the bouncing, nonsense-refrained song became a fixture of American parlors and stages. This quiet corner of Bradford County thus lent its name to a piece of the nation's musical memory.