A Multi-Racial Mutual Aid Network: The Underground Railroad in Maine
Prior to the Civil War, Black and white Mainers formed an informal network to assist their enslaved brethren seeking freedom in the North. Some of these self-emancipated men and women settled in Maine, while others passed through to Canada, where they knew they’d be safe from slave catchers, especially after passage of the notorious Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.
In the 1890s, Ohio State University professor Wilbur Siebert tried to map this network, famously known as The Underground Railroad. He sent surveys to elderly abolitionists to learn how it functioned. One of those who responded was a 73-year-old white printer named Brown Thurston, of Portland. Thurston was the son of the Rev. David Thurston, of Winthrop, an abolitionist organizer with the Maine Anti-Slavery Society. The younger Thurston, who founded the local anti-slavery newspaper The Standard and helped found the Maine Press Association, was close to the Black community on Munjoy Hill and was known to shelter refugees from slavery at his home.
Following passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Brown Thurston recalled helping groups of freedom seekers as large as 30 escape by sea to St. John, New Brunswick, and by rail to Montreal after the Grand Trunk Railroad was completed in 1853. The Grand Trunk’s operators only charged them half the fare and gave some free passage to Canada, Thurston told Siebert.
In 1839, a man living Downeast described helping a freedom seeker flee further north: “The fugitive, after breakfasting at my home, went on board the steam boat Nova Scotia at Eastport in high spirits for St. Johns with a letter from Mr. ——— of that place, to his friend in that city, passage paid.”
“There is quite a colony of colored people here, and they very generally opened their doors to fugitives,” Thurston reported to Siebert. “The roads to the provinces often gave passes, but more found free passage in sailing vessels, we furnishing them bedding and some food. The G.J. Railway gave passes occasionally and would always take reduced fares. I have kept at my house one, and sometimes two, a good deal of the time.”
Thurston solicited funds from fellow Portlanders to buy food and clothing for his temporary guests. Surprisingly, he said Democrats gave generously to the cause even though they supported the party that most staunchly supported slavery. In 1895, he wrote to Siebert, “I collected the larger part of the money we needed for this purpose from members of the democratic party whose hearts were better than their principles. I hardly ever was sent away empty-handed, but most generally with their admonition ‘please don’t say anything about this.’”
Bates College co-founder and President Oren Burbank Cheney told Siebert he assisted formerly enslaved people escaping to Canada while working as the headmaster of Parsonsfield Academy in Western Maine in the early 1840s. The freedom seekers would travel westward on a road from Portland to the town of Effingham, New Hampshire, then northward.
As noted in our recent story about the fugitive slave Atticus (Radical Mainers, July 2025), it wasn’t uncommon for enslaved workers to stowaway in north-bound ships. But not all Maine sea captains would protect stowaways. In 1836, Captain Ammi Vining of Durham took out a newspaper ad titled “Caution,” offering a 1 cent reward for information about a 15-year-old enslaved escapee named Benjamin Palmer. Ving frequently sailed back and forth to Cuba, so it’s possible Palmer had been a stowaway on his ship.
Portland mayor, temperance crusader and staunch abolitionist Neal Dow recalled meeting “several” former slaves who’d escaped to Maine when he was a boy. In 1818, when Dow was 14, his parents provided asylum in their home to a Black teenager fleeing slavery. Dow wrote that the young woman had escaped from a plantation near Richmond, Virginia, and an anti-slavery ship captain had brought her to Portland. She stayed with the Dow family for some time while she attended school. Dow said she later married and lived in Portland for the rest of her life, passing away before the Civil War.
“She was bright and intelligent, and became unusually well-informed,” Dow wrote. “She has given her promise to the captain who had brought her to Portland never to reveal either his name or that of his ship, a pledge she kept until her dying day.”
Sometimes Southerners brought enslaved domestic servants with them when they visited Maine, unwittingly providing opportunities for them to flee. In November 1835, a slaver named Ambrose Crane of St. Marks, Florida, sent a letter accusing Hallowell abolitionist Ebenezer Dole of “stealing” his wife’s “property” by providing asylum to a young African American girl who served as the Crane family’s nanny while they were visiting the Kennebec River village the previous August. Crane warned Dole that if he didn’t return her, it would cost him three times “the value of the girl.” He further threatened to publicize Dole’s “nefarious transaction in every state in the union” and “offer such a reward as will probably give me the pleasure of seeing you here when I could get more for exhibiting you a month than you have made all your lifetime.” There’s no historical evidence that the threat worked.
According to historian Eric Foner, Siebert believed the Underground Railroad was a “very organized system” and ignored replies to his surveys that contradicted that thesis. Based on his correspondence with white Maine abolitionists, Siebert concluded that the Underground Railroad ran along a few specific land and sea routes through this state (those described above). He pronounced it a “great and intricate network.”
But in his 2015 book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, Foner described the network “not as a single entity but as an umbrella term for local groups that employed numerous methods to assist fugitives, some public and entirely legal, some flagrant violations of the law.”
Siebert had identified 3,200 station agents, but nearly all of them were white. As we’ve previously documented in this column, Black Mainers helped Black asylum seekers escape to freedom throughout the early 1800s. White historians in the late 19th and early 20th century too often left out the role of Black Mainers in the abolition movement, and few of the surviving Black conductors were interviewed.
Foner also revealed that the network wasn’t entirely “underground.” Many Northerners didn’t do much to hide the fact they were harboring “fugitives.” In fact, Foner describes the Underground Railroad as a “quasi-public” institution. He points out that very few of its agents were prosecuted for their activities north of the Mason-Dixon line, because Northern officials were not disposed to enforce those laws. Abolitionists boasted so often about foiling slave catchers that the National Anti-Slavery Standard newspaper warned they were revealing too much about their methods to the enemy.
The public accounts of those who’d experienced slavery could move the masses to sympathy and action more effectively than white abolitionist lecturers could. For example, in April of 1839, a man who’d escaped bondage spoke in Hallowell about “his own sufferings” and “related many fearful cruelties which he had witnessed inflicted upon his fellow slaves,” according to the anti-slavery paper Advocate of Freedom. The meeting was reportedly well-attended and orderly, with the exception of some “badly trained boys” who heckled the man. In the 1840s and ’50s, more famous figures like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth lectured here.
Several Black families who attended church at the Abyssinian Meeting House in Portland were involved in the Underground Railroad. One of the church’s founders, Reuben Ruby, was a member of the Portland Vigilance Society, a group of Black and white abolitionists that formed to help freedom seekers following passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.
Charles Frederick Eastman, a Black barber who once owned a secondhand clothing store in Portland, was also an Underground Railroad agent. Born in 1821 in Portland, Eastman was self-educated and a voracious reader. He was known for his large collection of valuable books. His 1880 obituary noted his keen interest in natural history, and that as a taxidermist, “he preserved many rare birds and small animals, which form a part of an interesting museum in his house.” Eastman was a devoted Abyssinian member whose leadership helped keep the struggling church afloat. According to his obit, “no man did more for the poor fugitives escaping from slavery than he.”
“As a man he was looked up to by the people of his own race, and respected by all who knew him,” the remembrance continued. “For years he labored for the emancipation of his own race, and when that was accomplished, he gave his time to the building up of his church and the education and training of his children.”
One of Eastman’s descendants, June McKenzie, grew up hearing about her ancestor’s work on the Underground Railroad from her mother, Florence Eastman Williams, who was Eastman’s granddaughter, according to the book Maine’s Visible Black History. McKenzie currently serves on the Abyssinian Meeting House board, which is in the process of restoring the historic church.
The Abyssinian’s first full-time pastor, Rev. Amos Noe Freeman, married Charles Frederick Eastman and his wife, Harriet Stephenson, at the church in 1842. Freeman himself was a known Underground Railroad agent after he left the Abyssinian to serve as pastor for the Siloam Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, New York. Freeman worked with the wealthy abolitionist Lewis Tappan to hide and transport freedom seekers, including a young girl fleeing slavery.
Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
