JAMESTOWN, N.C. — North Carolina played a prominent role in the history of the underground railroad, the secret system of people known as conductors and safe houses in the area that helped freedom-seeking African Americans escape from slavery.
The Mendenhall Homeplace is tucked away right inside the town of Jamestown, holding a special place in the underground railroad, having the only authenticated false-bottom wagon used in the South.
“And the pottery itself would actually deter people from probing this. So if you took a cane or stick or something, you stuck it in the straw, you would immediately feel this false bottom. You would know that there’s something going on. But people were deterred from doing so because the pottery was worth so much money. If you damaged it, you had to pay for it,” said Shawn Rogers, the director of Mendenhall Homeplace.
The wagon was originally owned by a Quaker named Joshua Stanley, who lived south of Greensboro. The wagon isn’t the only connection Mendenhall Homeplace has to the underground railroad and helping slaves escape to freedom. The former owner, Richard Mendenhall, lived in the home with his family who actively opposed slavery because of their Quaker upbringing.
“The belief in the inner life, the idea that God lives in every person. So if you truly believe in the inner light, that God can inhabit everyone, to be hateful or to be hurtful to another person is to be hateful and hurtful to God, which is the ultimate in blasphemy,” Rogers said.
Mendenhall was one of the founding members of the Manumission Society of North Carolina, a group that fought to free slaves.
“Abolitionist society which used legal means to help African American enslaved people experience freedom. And basically what they did is they exploited loopholes and codes and laws at the time to effect this manumission of emancipation,” Rogers said. “You want to treat African American, enslaved people as property, here’s what we’ll do. We will establish legal trust with those people as the holdings so they could basically live in virtual freedom until they could make arrangements for them to go elsewhere where slavery was prohibited.”
There are more than 17 stops in North Carolina, according to the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.
If you want to visit Mendenhall Homeplace, it’s open Tuesdays through Sundays.