Cynthia Catlin Miller (1791-1883)

Erie, PA · est. 2026

In the early 1800s, Emma Howell, a Black woman freed from slavery, and her husband James Ford, who had liberated himself, owned property at Parade and 12th streets in Erie and ran it as a station on the Underground Railroad. To freedom seekers it was a known place of shelter on the last leg north. Erie's perch on Lake Erie, its nearness to Canada, and its web of abolitionists made it a vital crossing point on the road to freedom.

Erie, PA · est. 1994

Founded in 1874, St. James became Erie's oldest African American congregation, and notably five of its first six members were women. Beginning at 3rd and German Streets before moving to East 11th, the church grew into a center of both worship and community life. For generations it answered the spiritual and social needs of Erie's Black families.

Erie, PA · est. 2019

Born in Erie, Harry T. Burleigh rose to become one of the most influential figures in American music. A gifted baritone and composer, he studied under Antonín Dvořák and set the verse of poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes to song. Above all, Burleigh transformed the spirituals of the enslaved into concert art, championing them as America's only truly original music.

Meadville, PA

Born into slavery in Maryland in 1801, Richard Henderson escaped as a boy and made his way to Meadville around 1824, where he built a life as a barber. From his home on Arch Street he became a fixture of the Underground Railroad, and by tradition the house sheltered some 500 freedom-seekers before the Civil War. In the decades before emancipation, small northern towns like Meadville formed vital links in the secret network carrying people north toward freedom.