PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — For many generations, local families have passed down stories about Aroostook County’s possible involvement in the Underground Railroad. Now thanks to a group of students from the University of Maine at Presque Isle, that history is on its way to being preserved for community members and future scholars.
In the years before the Civil War, the Underground Railroad served as an unofficial network of people and places that aided fugitive slaves trying to escape into Canada from the southern U.S. Since the northern states had abolished slavery, many freed former slaves as well as white Quaker members of the Religious Society of Friends provided African-American slaves from the south with safe houses along a route that many believe led to Fort Fairfield and then to neighboring Canadian towns.
Recent research has involved UMPI students and faculty members who come from various academic programs such as English, history, political science, math, psychology and environmental science. As part of an interdisciplinary honors seminar, the students first listened to lectures from history faculty to gain background knowledge on the Underground Railroad and the significance its stories have in U.S. history and in African-American history.
The students then used their different academic backgrounds to contribute their own research to the overall course project. History students Evan Zarkadas, of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and Adam Weyeneth of St. Agatha found out that Joseph Haines established the first Quaker community in Fort Fairfield in the 1830s and built the Maple Grove Friends Church in 1859.
After digging deeper into local census records and interviewing descendants of the Haines family, the students discovered that Joseph Haines passed down stories of a trap door at the church, apparently used to hide slaves from bounty hunters, to his twin sons Frank and Fred Haines. Frank Haines then told the story to his daughter, Edith, who lived near the mother of Fort Fairfield resident Ruth Mraz, who has since died.
Two of the people that the students interviewed were Harry and Marilyn Rooper, Quakers Church members from Houlton. Marilyn Rooper said her family passed down stories that a now deceased woman from Oakfield told them about several family homes that were safe houses for the Underground Railroad. Students and faculty then visited the Maple Grove Friends Church, which indeed contains a trap door that has since been bolted shut.
Based on this information, Zarkadas, who is also taking courses for a Geographic Information Systems certificate, created a GIS map of three possible routes that slaves might have used in Maine to arrive in Canada.
“We speculate that northern Maine would have been the safest path for the slaves because there likely weren’t as many bounty hunters as in southern Maine,” Zarkadas said. “One aspect we didn’t have as much time to research was stories about Native Americans helping to bring slaves across rivers into Canada on canoes.”
The other two possible routes would have taken slaves from Bangor to Ellsworth and across the Bay of Fundy into Nova Scotia or from Bangor to Calais, which borders Canada. Zarkadas also read Fort Fairfield census records from the 1850s through the 1860s, curious to find out if any African-American former slaves might have decided to settle in the town instead of moving forward to Canada.
“There was one man that the records say came from South Carolina in 1850, but in 1860 his name disappears from the census,” Zarkadas said. “That’s all I was able to find out about him.”
Another important aspect of the semester-long project involved students Sarah Harris and Kate Asam researching the importance of songs to the fugitive slaves and “conductors,” people who guided slaves from place to place. Though slave masters converted their African slaves to Christianity, the slaves used Christian terminology to their advantage, encoding hymns with symbols told them what landmarks to watch out for in their journey to safehouses.
One of the most famous conductors of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, timed out one of her songs specifically to inform slaves, who would hide in the woods, whether they could continue on their journey safely.
“She [Tubman] had a song with four lines per verse. If she sang the song all the way through they knew it was safe to come out, but if she sang it with an extra verse they knew it was dangerous to show themselves,” said Harris, an English major. “Bounty hunters didn’t realize that when she sang about the ‘promised land’ she was referring to Canada.”
Asam, a history and political science major, noted that even though most of their research sources were oral stories that are not 100 percent reliable, that oral history plays a vital role in preserving and piecing together anecdotes from the past.
“Oral history is more challenging to trace because people did not have recording devices, but it allows you to focus more on individual stories of peoples’ lives instead of just the big treaties or events that happened in history,” Asam said.
The Underground Railroad research was part of the first course of the newly revived honors program at UMPI, through which students take upper-level research seminars that involve students and faculty from various majors. Lea Allen, assistant professor of English, served as the primary instructor for the spring 2019 course, while six faculty members from English, history, science, education and fine art were also involved.
Harris, Zarkadas and Weyeneth were three of the students who helped revive the honors program and are currently discussing with faculty members what research topics they might pursue in next year’s courses. The students are developing final reports on their individual research findings and plan to publish their information on a website that will link to UMPI’s main website.
“We didn’t see as many opportunities to collaborate with students outside our own majors once we finished our general education courses,” Harris said about why they felt inspired to revive the honors program.
Aside from learning how U.S. history played a role in Aroostook County, Asam thinks taking on a research project with students outside her major will help everyone gain the leadership and collaborative skills needed to succeed with people of different backgrounds in the workforce.
“We were able to incorporate perspectives that we never would’ve considered relating to the topic before, like the GIS mapping,” Asam said. “I think that has shown us how all these aspects play a role in history.”
