Escape of Freedom Seekers Patrick and Abraham
Geistown, Cambria County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
In February 1837, two slaves, brothers Patrick and Abraham, escaped from a farm in Bath, Va. As they made their way to freedom, bounty hunters pursued them and they were wounded. Both black and white abolitionists assisted them on their way through Pennsylvania. They were aided here by William Slick, whose farm was a regular stop on the Underground Railroad. Although taken into custody in Johnstown, they escaped without trial or recapture.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In February 1837, brothers Patrick and Abraham escaped enslavement on a farm in Bath, Virginia, and fled north toward freedom as bounty hunters pursued and wounded them. In Pennsylvania both Black and white abolitionists came to their aid, including William Slick, whose farm near here was a regular stop on the Underground Railroad. Though the brothers were seized in Johnstown, they slipped away without trial or recapture.
Why it matters
Their flight puts a human face on the Underground Railroad and the interracial resistance to slavery that stretched across Pennsylvania in the decades before the Civil War.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the decades before the Civil War, the United States was a nation split by a single, irreconcilable question. In the South, slavery was law and property; in much of the North, it had been abolished, but the reach of slaveholders did not stop at a state line. Federal law allowed enslavers to pursue people who fled and to reclaim them even on free soil.
That made freedom a fragile thing for anyone who ran. Bounty hunters—slave catchers—prowled the border regions, and crossing into a free state was not the end of the danger but the beginning of a different kind of peril. A person could breathe free air and still be seized and dragged back.
Pennsylvania sat squarely on that fault line. Bordering slaveholding Virginia and Maryland, it became a crucial corridor for people escaping north, and its towns and farms hid a network of safe houses and secret helpers—the loose, dangerous, and deeply human system remembered as the Underground Railroad.
People & events
In February 1837, two brothers, Patrick and Abraham, escaped from a farm in Bath, Virginia, and turned north toward freedom. Winter is a brutal season to run, and they did not run unopposed—bounty hunters pursued them, and both men were wounded along the way.
As they moved through Pennsylvania, they were not alone. Both Black and white abolitionists came to their aid, a reminder that resistance to slavery crossed the very color line slavery tried to enforce. Near here, they found shelter with William Slick, whose farm was a regular stop on the Underground Railroad—one link in a chain of people willing to break the law for a stranger's freedom.
Even after they were taken into custody in Johnstown, the brothers' story did not end in defeat. They escaped without ever standing trial and were never recaptured. What became of the rest of their lives, the record does not fully tell—but they were last known to be free, and moving on.
Its place in the American story
The flight of Patrick and Abraham puts flesh on the bones of a famous phrase. The Underground Railroad was not a railroad and not underground; it was people—farmers, ministers, free Black families, and ordinary neighbors—choosing, again and again, to help someone they had never met.
Their story also captures something easy to forget: that the fight against slavery was interracial. Here, Black and white abolitionists worked side by side, taking real risks under laws that punished exactly this kind of aid. That cooperation, town by town and farm by farm, was the quiet groundwork of a moral reckoning that would eventually consume the whole nation.
And it is a story of agency. Patrick and Abraham were not rescued so much as helped—wounded, pursued, jailed, and still they kept choosing freedom for themselves at every turn.
If you visit
Stand here and imagine February: cold, exposed country, and two injured men who could not afford to stop moving. The landscape that looks peaceful to you now was, to them, a gauntlet—every road a risk, every stranger a question mark.
The marker names a single farm and a single farmer, but let it stand for something larger. This was one stop among many, one door that opened when it might have stayed shut. The Underground Railroad survives today mostly in place-names and plaques like this one, so read it slowly and let the ordinary setting carry the weight of the choice made here.
This is a meaningful stop for travelers tracing the region's antislavery history. As you drive on toward Johnstown, follow the brothers' path in your mind—and remember that their story, remarkably, ends not in capture but in escape.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Patrick
- · Abraham
- · William Slick
Related events
- · Underground Railroad
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Rosedale Banishment
East Taylor Township, PA
On September 7, 1923, amid rising racial hostility, Johnstown Mayor Joseph Cauffiel ordered every Black and Mexican resident who had lived in the area less than seven years to leave. By some accounts more than 2,000 people were driven out under threat of jail. The episode drew national attention—much of it from Black journalists and activists—prompting a state investigation and a public backlash that helped cost Cauffiel his reelection.
Benjamin Walker Homestead
West Saint Clair Township, PA · est. 2006
In the tense years before and during the Civil War, the Walker Homestead in Bedford County served as a vital station on the Underground Railroad, perilously close to the Maryland line and the reach of slave catchers. Benjamin Walker, Abner Walker, Sr., and George Harbaugh worked hand in hand with African American conductors John Fiddler, Elisa Rouse, and Joseph Crawley, guiding hundreds of freedom seekers from the Pennsylvania border across the mountains and northward toward liberty.
Fugitive Slave Rescue
Blairsville, PA · est. 2004
In April 1858, with the Fugitive Slave Act empowering federal marshals and Southern slave-catchers to reach deep into the free states, the people of Blairsville acted. They rescued a man named Newman from arrest, and local Black abolitionist Lewis Johnson—a conductor on the Underground Railroad—sheltered him. Indiana County had long been an important station on the secret routes north.
The Rescue of Anthony Hollingsworth
Indiana, PA · est. 2002
In June 1845, slave hunters seized a twelve-year-old fugitive named Anthony Hollingsworth and held him in an Indiana, Pennsylvania hotel. Armed townspeople surrounded the building and demanded his release, openly defying the federal laws that protected slave catchers. Judge Thomas White then freed the boy in the courthouse that once stood on this site, a striking act of local conscience against the machinery of slavery.