Thank you for your interest in the Underground Railroad in Oakland County Project, a multi-community public history project to research and provide access to evidence-based local Underground Railroad history. We’re glad you’re here.
This website is a work in progress, with some information from our displays not yet presented on the site. Watch for updates as we complete this important part of our project, with more details, links to sources, and other information.
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Content Warning: Please note–objects and content on this website reflect the era and culture in which they were created. It is our mission to preserve historical records and make them available to the public. As such, they may contain potentially objectionable content that reflects outdated, biased, offensive, or graphic language, attitudes, opinions, or images that are preserved for historical context, accuracy, or significance, and not for any endorsement of such views or events.
If you would like to learn more, please feel free to reach out to Underground Railroad in Oakland County Project Director Leslie Pielack at the Birmingham Museum, [email protected]. or 248-530-1928. This project is funded in part by Michigan Humanities, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanties.
Oakland County’s Role in the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1830-1860 (Project Findings)
1830s-1840s–Primary and Secondary Anti-Slavery Activism
•Primary (Birmingham, Farmington, Pontiac): Influential settlements with similar political, cultural, and religious interests
•Located on major roads that made it easier to organize
•Abolitionists closely involved in state and county efforts to establish policy and rule of law
•Secondary (Oxford, Orion, Rochester, Royal Oak, Southfield, White Lake): individual abolitionists or smaller groups
After 1850: Activists Network and Go “Underground”
•The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was designed to appease slave states. Freedom seekers could now be detained without proof and re-enslaved, even in free states. Those helping them could be jailed and fined for committing a federal crime.
•Bounty hunters from the South came into Michigan looking for escapees, who now had to cross the Canadian border to be safe.
•To avoid bounty hunters in Detroit, the Underground Railroad network branched out to Oakland County abolitionists to move freedom seekers north to Lapeer toward Port Huron, or east to cross the St. Clair River to Canada.
(The project has identified UGRR activity in the mapped areas; other locations were involved but have not yet been documented.)
Above map graphics by Leslie Pielack, ©Birmingham Museum. (After Farmer, Silas, “Map of the state of Michigan and the surrounding country exhibiting the sections and the latest surveys / compiled from authentic sources by John Farmer.” (1849). In the digital collection UM Clark Library Maps. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/clark1ic/x-000080675/39015091880008. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed October 03, 2024.