Underground Railroad
Harrisburg, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
In the 1850s this area, known as Tanner's Alley, was important on the Underground Railroad. Fugitive slaves hid at Joseph Bustill's & William Jones's houses, a block apart. Frederick Douglass & William Lloyd Garrison spoke at Wesley Union AME Zion Church nearby.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In the 1850s a Harrisburg neighborhood known as Tanner's Alley served as a vital link on the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers found shelter a block apart in the homes of Joseph Bustill and William Jones, while the nearby Wesley Union AME Zion Church hosted the era's fiercest voices against slavery—Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison both spoke there. It was a hub of Black community and antislavery organizing on the road north.
Why it matters
This corner of Harrisburg shows how free Black families and Black churches formed the backbone of the Underground Railroad, risking everything to move enslaved people toward freedom in the tense decade before the Civil War.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1850s, Pennsylvania was a free state pressed hard against a slaveholding one. The Mason-Dixon Line lay just to the south, and for a freedom seeker traveling north out of Maryland or Virginia, Harrisburg was one of the first major stops on the far side of that border. It sat at a crossroads of rivers, roads, and rail lines that all pointed toward Philadelphia and, beyond it, to New York and Canada.
That decade was the most dangerous the Underground Railroad ever knew. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it a federal crime to help an escaping person and empowered slave-catchers to operate even in free states. Reaching Pennsylvania soil no longer meant safety; a person could be seized and dragged back south from a northern street. Every household that offered shelter was breaking the law and risking ruin.
Against that backdrop, a modest Harrisburg neighborhood called Tanner's Alley became something more than a place to live. It was a working link in a secret network — a spot where exhausted travelers could rest, eat, and gather strength before the next leg of a long and perilous journey.
People & events
The heart of this story is a cluster of homes only a block apart. In them, Joseph Bustill and William Jones sheltered people fleeing slavery, hiding them until it was safe to move on. This was quiet, patient, dangerous work — the kind rarely written down at the time, precisely because secrecy was survival.
Joseph Bustill came from a well-known free Black family with deep roots in Pennsylvania's antislavery world, and he was among the local agents who helped move freedom seekers along the route toward Philadelphia. William Jones, his neighbor, shared the risk. Together their houses formed a small, trusted way station where the network's promises became real: a locked door, a meal, a night's rest.
Nearby stood Wesley Union AME Zion Church, a center of Black community life and a gathering place for the cause. Its walls heard two of the era's most powerful voices against slavery. Frederick Douglass — who had escaped bondage himself — and William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery white editor of The Liberator, both spoke there. To hear them in that sanctuary was to feel the local struggle joined to a national movement.
Its place in the American story
The Underground Railroad has often been imagined as the work of a few famous conductors, but its real strength lay in places exactly like Tanner's Alley: ordinary blocks where free Black families and their churches carried the daily burden of the work. They were not passengers in the story of emancipation — they were its organizers, its risk-takers, and its backbone.
Harrisburg shows how the network actually functioned. Freedom was not reached in a single dramatic dash but passed hand to hand, house to house, community to community, each stop bought with someone's courage. A church that could host both a Douglass and a Garrison was a hub where shelter, worship, and political organizing all lived under one roof.
That this happened in the 1850s, under a federal law designed to crush it, is the point. In the tense years before the Civil War, this corner of Pennsylvania was a small front line — proof that the argument over slavery was being fought not only in Congress but on the doorsteps of neighbors who decided that freedom was worth the danger.
If you visit
Stand at this spot and let the scale surprise you. There is no grand monument here — just a marker on a city street. But that ordinariness is the story. The Underground Railroad rarely looked heroic from the outside; it looked like houses a block apart, like a church at the corner, like people going about their lives while doing something extraordinary in secret.
Let the geography sink in. Picture two homes within an easy walk of each other and a church nearby, and imagine the network stitched between them — the signals, the timing, the trust required when a single betrayal could cost everything. The tension of the 1850s lived in these short distances.
Harrisburg makes a natural stop on a trip tracing freedom's road north through Pennsylvania, and it pairs well with the state's other Underground Railroad sites and its African American heritage landmarks. Come here not for spectacle but for perspective — a quiet reminder that some of the bravest chapters of American history were written on streets that look, at first glance, like anywhere else.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Joseph Bustill
- · William Jones
- · Frederick Douglass
- · William Lloyd Garrison
Related events
- · Underground Railroad
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
C. DeLores Tucker (1927-2005)
Harrisburg, PA · est. 2006
C. DeLores Tucker rose through the civil rights movement to become, in Pennsylvania, the first African American woman to serve as a Secretary of State anywhere in the nation. From that office she championed the state Equal Rights Amendment, affirmative action, voter registration by mail, and lowering the voting age to eighteen. Later she led a high-profile campaign against music lyrics she saw as demeaning to women, African Americans, and children.
William Howard Day
Swatara Township, PA · est. 1997
Born free in New York, the man honored here devoted his life to the fight against slavery, lecturing across the United States, Canada, and Britain on behalf of the enslaved and free Black communities. After the Civil War he settled in Harrisburg, edited a newspaper, and served as a leader in the A.M.E. Zion Church. In 1878 he broke a barrier by becoming the first African American elected to the city's school board, later serving as its president.
Daniel Kaufman
South Middleton Township, PA · est. 2002
For more than a decade beginning in 1835, Daniel Kaufman risked ruin to help enslaved people fleeing north through Cumberland County. His barn and the dense woods nearby sheltered fugitives to whom he gave food and transport. In 1852 a Maryland slaveholder won a widely watched lawsuit against him, and Kaufman was fined the enormous sum of $4,000 for his defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law. He also founded the village of Boiling Springs.
Bethel A.M.E. Church
Carlisle, PA · est. 2009
Founded around 1820, Bethel A.M.E. was among the first African American congregations west of the Susquehanna, taking root as free Black communities built their own institutions in the early republic. The church became a station on the Underground Railroad, and its members included abolitionists John Peck and John B. Vashon, while national A.M.E. leaders like Bishop Daniel Payne were tied to its life. Here faith and the freedom struggle were inseparable.