Underground Railroad Activities on the Maritime Great Lakes

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in cooperation with the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program, is sponsoring a conference to be hosted at The Charles Wright Museum of African-American History, in Detroit, Michigan, May 31-June 1, 2002.

Have you done research on the Underground Railroad activities in your area? Your sites and your knowledge are too endangered to leave unspoken. Would you be willing to share your work, expand upon it in cooperation with other researchers, and present your work in your words to a national audience? We are contacting local historians, genealogists, architectural historians, folklorists, and preservationists, regardless of whether you work as a college professor or a retired mechanic (one of our organizers has been both at one time or another).

We are contacting every county with shoreline on the Great Lakes. Please share what you have.

The Conference will take as its organizing principle those historic activities associated with the Underground Railroad traversing the waters of the Great Lakes, and is not designed to address the many inland routes leading to that crossing. It is assumed that some research initiatives will not be completed in May, and that some researchers will be presenting a blueprint for future work, or a work in progress.

Proceedings of the conference will form the core of a subsequent published volume on the Underground Railroad in the Great Lakes maritime region.

Therefore, all presenters will be asked to produce a 1-2 page synopsis of their work, plus either a complete manuscript of their work, or allow us to videotape their session as a prerequisite of their presentation. Please contact any of the co-hosts listed below to become a Presenter, and for pre-registration details. Our schedule is limited; please respond no later than March 25, 2002. We look forward to learning from you.

Orloff Miller
Director, Freedom Stations
Nat'l Underground Railroad
Freedom Center
513. 412-6913
orloff@nurfc.org

Diane Miller
Nat'l Coord., Nat'l URR
Network to Freedom Program
National Park Service
405. 221-3749
diane_miller@nps.gov