Jim McClure| York Daily Record

Tour historic 18th century Mifflin house in 2016

The Mifflin House is a stone Hellam Township farmhouse with much of its original interior, as it was in the 18th century

Paul Kuehnel, York Daily Record

A member of the audience who had sat through my hourlong Riverfest presentation on a 90-degree Sunday showed he caught my big theme.

Big moral decisions confronted those living in York and Lancaster counties in the Civil War era.

After I had finished my talk on the Underground Railroad and Hellam Townships preserved Mifflin House, he told me that he was glad that I had concentrated on matters of right and wrong in the 1860s and before.

We need that today, he said. Particularly today.

He was saying that a consideration of thorny issues from the past might help us in this day of sorting through complex matters being brought to bear in the public square.

His remarks were gratifying and indicate that people are hungry to understand serious history, even under a withering sun on the green lawn of the John Wright Restaurant in Wrightsville.

I presented about 10 decision points facing people in the Civil War era, leading with a case that likely confronted countless York County residents at night: At their door, many would have faced distressed individuals or families of freedom seekers, enslaved people in flight from bondage using the loose network of safe houses called the Underground Railroad.

The context is that aiding such weary travelers could have been an act of civil disobedience, a willful breaking of state or federal law. It could have meant imprisonment, fines or both.

I asked the Riverfest audience to use the four Ds as a memory device.

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Would they have denied the weary traveler, simply closing the door? Or even reported him to authorities. Would they have delivered the freedom seeker, inviting him in for food and lodging and then safely guide him along his way?

Or would they have delayed or distributed aid, offering a measure of help without unduly risking exposure of family and farm to legal authority? In this case, a property owner might say that the traveler could stay on the edge of his property and rest for a couple of hours and then proceed alone to a known safe house. Or give biscuits and milk to restore strength but ask them to be on their way.

Well return to these options deliver, deny, distribute or delay in a minute.

A sampling of other decision points that I presented at Riverfest:

If you were enslaved in Maryland or northern Virginia, do you run for freedom and face the threat of a beating or death or stay enslaved and live in bondage?

Those two states are useful in this discussion because they were homes to large populations of enslaved people and proximate to the Mason-Dixon Line. About 87,000 enslaved people were listed in Marylands census in 1860 and about 491,000 in Virginia.

York County would have been a destination, with its 40+-mile border with Maryland and promise of multiple routes to the Susquehanna. Relative safety awaited those crossing the river.

Maps show York County as host to major Underground Railroad routes, and historian Scott Mingus has identified at least 20 safe houses in the county.

York County would not have offered real safety from enslavers, so a freedom seeker would not gain liberty until reaching Canada or having traveled a considerable distance from the Mason-Dixon Line.

State and federal laws aside, the majority of York countians in the Civil War era were not in accord with the war or the practice of freeing enslaved people. In other words, county residents would have offered a mixed bag of assistance, if any, to freedom seekers.

A.B. Farquhar, a factory owner who hired a substitute to serve for him in the Civil War, gave insight about the county view of slavery. He wrote in 1922 about John Browns raid on Harpers Ferry and its failed goal of causing a slave insurrection. Farquhar said that enslaved people did not understand revolt, that they were, in the main, more interested in three meals a day than in political theory .

But there was a worthy minority Society of Friends (Quakers), free Black people and others who risked everything to aid those on the run.

S. Morgan Smith, a Moravian pastor who served as a Union Army chaplain in the war, was one of those who preached abolition. Smith like Farquhar, a noted York County industrialist after the war asked in a sermon one Sunday: Who are the persons who unjustly bind with the fetters of bondage and oppress him to the day of his death?

The milewide Susquehanna was a mighty big river for weary bands of travelers to cross without aid.

A survey of fords and ferries was undertaken in 1777, when the Continental Congress members in York feared British troopers would splash across the Susquehanna and capture them. Twice, the survey noted that guides would be needed to steer British raiders across at Wrights Ferry, running between Wrightsville and Columbia: The river is fordable in low water, but it is so wide and the bed so full of rocks and stones that the ford is only of service to those persons who know it perfectly well.

In the years before the Civil War, Robert Loney was one such person who knew it well. He came to York as a free man in 1819, lived in Columbia and knew the tricky river like the back of his paddle. He would guide freedom seekers across, working at great risk with the Mifflin family, who operated a safe house on a hilltop outside Wrightsville.

The Quaker family of Jonathan and Susanna Mifflin came to what is today known as Hellam Townships Mifflin House in the early 1800s.

With their son, Samuel, they operated what one newspaper account in 1913 stated: The house occupied a commanding position and was one of the most noted (Underground Railroad) stations in the country. One account tells about 13 freedom seekers gathered in their parlor for two days because the uncrossable Susquehanna was swollen with rain.

The Mifflin House also served as a Confederate artillery position in the Battle of Wrightsville in late June 1863. In that fight, the Union Armys initial plan was to blow up one span of the milelong covered bridge to stop the attacking Confederates from crossing.

One freedman fought the enemy with a cigar.

One old negro to whom was entrusted the duty of igniting the fuse sat very cooly on the edge of the pier smoking a cigar, Mingus wrote, citing a newspaper account at the time.

He faced 1,800 seasoned Confederates without panic.

In contrast, the day before, Farquhar, part of a group of panicking city fathers facing the Confederate invasion force, had sought out the enemy and cut a preliminary deal to surrender York.

Alone, and without authority to speak for the council, Mingus wrote, he rode off (to Abbottstown) in the early afternoon.

About 15 years ago, excavation had started in three places at the base of Highpoint, starting a sweeping land-use controversy known as Lauxmont. An order from government came for the developer to stop this high-end residential development on this prime river view property.

After years of complex litigation, Highpoint and Native Lands county parks emerged for public use. That started a cascading series of heritage projects that included Long Levels Zimmerman Center and the designation of the river region as the Susquehanna National Heritage Area, under the National Parks Service.

The Susquehanna National Heritage Region recently teamed up with Preservation Pennsylvania and the Conservation Fund to save the Mifflin House from demolition.

Instead of being cleared for warehouse use, the Mifflin House farmstead will become a regional welcome center and Underground Railroad historic site. Early planning calls for a trail to run from the house to the Susquehanna, replicating a possible path that freedom seekers took to meet up with Robert Loney.

At Riverfest near the end of my presentation, I asked the audience about which of the Ds they would choose if faced with that knock at midnight from a stranger on the run.

One member said he would seek a way to help in some way but would not put his family at risk from imprisonment or fines the middle ground of delaying and distributing.

Another audience member, a Quaker, said she would go the full route in helping a freedom seeker an act of delivery.

To the question of whether any audience member would deny or refuse any aid to a struggling traveler at the door, not a single person raised their hand.

With these cases from history after benefiting from examples in which weve done the right thing were now in a better position to not be deniers, to make a right moral decision.

Arent we?

Sources: Scott Mingus The Ground Swallowed Them Up and Guiding Lights: Underground Railroad Conductors in York County, Pa.

Jim McClure is the retired editor of the York Daily Record and has authored or co-authored nine books on York County history. Reach him at jimmcclure21@outlook.com.

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What would you have done if a freedom seeker had knocked on your door? - York Daily Record