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Tourists can see a replica of the Yellow Springs train a few blocks away from its original location.
This photo of the original Yellow Springs, Ohio, train station was taken in 1895 or 1896. In 1862, during the Civil War, Moncure Conway led his family's former slaves on a perilous journey by rail from Washington to a free life in Yellow Springs.
ABOVE: Naomi McKee (left) and her sister, Isabel Newman, help keep the family flame alive in Yellow Springs. RIGHT: Evaline Gwinn Morris was the daughter of Julia Gwinn, who was among the former Conway slaves
Jean McKee of Yellow Springs, Ohio, a descendant of one of the former Stafford County slaves who settled
Naomi McKee (left) and her sister, Isabel Newman, help keep the family flame alive in Yellow Springs.
This portrait of Stafford County abolitionist Moncure Conway hangs in his former home in Falmouth, now the residence of Norman and Lanetta Schools. |
Second of a two-part series for Black History Month
YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio--Stafford
County's Moncure Conway took the
hard road to his place in history.
Despite a complicated legacy in Virginia, he's celebrated here as a radical Southerner who led a ragged group of liberated slaves to Ohio, and a better life.
This town's Antioch University, a stubbornly progressive institution founded by Conway's friend and fellow abolitionist Horace Mann, holds Conway's memory in an institutional embrace.
"In the context of Antioch, we love people who live by their convictions," university archivist Scott Sanders said.
Sanders' interest extends to Conway's colorful life, which was marked by melodrama and spiritual skirmishes.
Conway's family disowned him during the Civil War, congregations sent him packing for his feverish anti-slavery sermons, and he traveled constantly, following causes to far-flung cities, from Boston to Cincinnati to Paris.
By the end of his life, in 1907, he had stood up for women's rights, world peace and other humanitarian causes. But he is best remembered for his fierce attacks on slavery. It was a Southern institution he learned from the inside out--in his own family home in southern Stafford County.
His character comes into sharp focus in one act of courage, early in the Civil War.
Conway collected his father's slaves, who, like many blacks in the South, began to scatter at the first glimpse of a blue uniform. He led them on a suspenseful train trip from Washington to freedom and safety in Yellow Springs.
During the journey west, Conway was heroic, principled and humane--all of the qualities he espoused in his many passionate sermons, letters and books.
But when the men, women and children disembarked in this village, in the rolling hills of southwestern Ohio, it wasn't just Conway's moment on the stage of history.
Those 31 former slaves went on to build houses, buy land and establish a church that still hosts worshippers each Sunday. Their community became known as the "Conway Colony."
Some descendants live here still. Others settled throughout Ohio and beyond, spreading out like seeds on a summer wind. They are professors, homemakers, laborers and social workers.
But that's where the story rests today.
It began on a rainy night in a one-room cabin in Washington's Georgetown 140 years ago.
There was a remarkable reunion that night. Conway, the son of a Virginia slaveholder, fell soaked and exhausted into the welcoming arms of the black servants of his childhood.
If he accomplished nothing else, he would lead them to a better place.
Earlier in the year, in the spring of 1862, the liberated Conway family slaves began slipping away from Falmouth, much to Moncure Conway's delight. He was in Cincinnati at the time, leading a Unitarian congregation.
But the ardent abolitionist saw in it "the visible presence of God's angel down there jarring open the prison-doors of those poor blacks," he later wrote, according to John d'Entremont's 1987 biography of Conway, titled "Southern Emancipator."
But the freed slaves had nowhere to go and frequently wandered among Northern troops near the front lines. When word reached him that the slaves were in trouble, Conway had a plan.
He would move his father's remaining slaves to Yellow Springs, where he had friends willing to provide land.
But the problem was safe transport for a vulnerable group of people with little money and fewer rights.
When he got to Washington, Conway looked up his old friend, Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase. But Chase could not offer ironclad protection for Conway's proposed journey through Baltimore, still a slave-holding city and a powder keg of racial tension.
Conway also visited President Lincoln, who commended Conway's courage, but could offer little more than advice for safe passage.
Conway was on his own.
Meanwhile, he found Dunmore and Eliza Gwinn, who had been respected household slaves in Falmouth and were among the first to seize their freedom. Gwinn descendants believe that Conway's mother, Margaret Daniel Conway, taught both of them to read. Conway found them well-established in Georgetown, operating a cake-and-candy store and saving money.
But what about the others?
Conway searched the city, but at the same time set a plan in motion for a dangerous--and expensive--trip to Stafford to find the rest.
On the night before he was to leave, he set out to track down a former slave, now a well-connected freedman in the city, who might have information about slaves' whereabouts.
Conway walked five miles through a raging storm to the far edge of Georgetown. He told of the night in his 1904 autobiography, "Memories and Experiences of Moncure D. Conway."
"I could not identify the house sought," he wrote. "At length, however, I saw a glimmer of light in one little window, and to that I went. As I approached the door, I heard Negro voices within singing a hymn.
"When I knocked, the voices ceased; there was perfect silence.
"On another knock a voice demanded, 'Who is that?' I answered, 'A friend! Moncure Conway.'
"There was a wild shout, the door flew open, and there I found all my father's Negroes."
Conway's tearful reunion with the slaves went on through the night. Men, women and children straggled in one after the other, soaked to the skin from the 60-mile trip from Stafford.
"The elements had pursued them like blood-hounds," he wrote. "They were tossed about by destiny, but still able to raise their song in the night."
As the tears dried, the complexities of their situation grew.
At the time, railroads required a $3,000 bond for each slave it transported, to insure against escape and possible legal problems with an outraged owner.
Conway's pockets weren't so deep. But he worried more over the dangers of the trip ahead.
"And there was still a potential pro-slavery and Confederate mob in Baltimore," he wrote, "through which at the time a journey to Ohio must be made."
In Baltimore, his group arrived with a jumble of baggage and no transportation to carry them from station to station within the city. That was reserved for whites.
"The sensation we caused was immediate; hundreds of Negroes of all ages surrounded us, and became so mixed up with mine, especially the children, that it was hard to distinguish them," he wrote.
"For a few moments there was danger from these Negroes."
But whispers passed from the Conway slaves to the churning crowd, turning hostility to cheers. "they were presently conveying us with our baggage in wagons, making a procession across the city," he wrote.
"But the procession was too triumphal. It excited attention in every street, and when we reached the station we had an ugly crowd of whites to confront."
Conway had a three-hour wait for the next train, with no assurance his party would board when all was said and done. Forgetting familiar Southern ways, he led the slaves into a waiting room in the depot, where the railroad men quickly turned them out on the street, saying they had "no room for niggers."
The hostile crowd continued to harass and humiliate them. Finally, the gates opened and the exhausted party boarded.
"I observed that the Negroes would neither talk nor sleep," Conway wrote. "They were yet in a slave state, and every station at which the train paused was a possible danger."
But at an outlying station, the train crossed a line invisible to all but the former slaves.
"At last, when the name of a certain wooding-up station was called out, I observed that every eye danced, every tongue was loosened, and after some singing, they all dropped off to sleep."
When they finally reached Yellow Springs, they set up temporary quarters in a barn.
They built plank houses on the edge of a glen north of the village, along the Little Miami River.
Years later, Conway wrote with a lingering proprietary pride about the resettlement of his former slaves.
"The labor of the Negroes was in demand," he wrote. "Dunmore with his sixty dollars and some little assistance was able to set up a home for himself and his large family, where they carried on various occupations.
"Many of our Negroes had been house servants, and had better manners than most of the coloured people in Ohio."
Thoroughly modern Jean McKee, 51, rifled through computer printouts of family trees and old photographs in a conference room in the Yellow Springs library last fall.
She is a fifth-generation descendant of Dunmore Gwinn's sister, Julia, who also took that train ride to Yellow Springs.
McKee is the keeper of the family flame. It's a family with branches spread to Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati; to California, Vermont and Colorado, and back again to Virginia.
On the face of it, they are like members of any family who are proud of who they are and where they have been. But McKee and her Yellow Springs-area relatives cherish their uniquely American story.
"Knowing where you came from, it gives you grounding and it gives you a sense of pride," McKee said.
Flanked by her mother, Naomi McKee, and her aunt Isabel Newman and cousin Ruth Jefferson Wright, McKee tried to piece together snippets of memory and old newspaper clippings to get a glimpse of the lives that played out between the generations.
"She's worked on this for more than 25 years," Naomi McKee said.
The trail of the written word fades into often-told stories by the late 1800s. But the original colony and how it fared is documented.
"They were all related in one way or another," McKee said of the Conway slaves, who stuck together in Ohio as they had in Virginia. "They seem to have done very well when they got here."
Moncure Conway returned to visit the Gwinns' colony in 1875. He wrote: "Dunmore had a good house, five well-kept acres, poultry and pigs; he and his family were the coloured gentry of the region."
McKee said that when he grew too feeble to farm, Dunmore sold the property to his daughter and lived there until he died at 84.
The Gwinns were the leaders of the Conway Colony, as they had been in their enslaved life in Falmouth. They had 14 children, many of whom came along to Ohio. Their descendants marvel at their resilience.
"Their faith was unbelievable," McKee said.
The Gwinns helped found the First Anti-Slavery Baptist Church, now First Baptist, and were among the first trustees. Today, the church remains in the family.
"Some family members still worship there," McKee said.
Eliza, in particular, was known for her piety and passionate praying during Sunday services. Conway called them "shouting Methodists." He mistook their denomination, but not the faith that bore them through many trials.
The story of Dunmore and Eliza Gwinn, and the other freed slaves who came to Yellow Springs, is in Jean McKee's hands now.
And she wonders about Stafford, the first home of Moncure Conway and the slaves he led to hope and liberty.
"I'd like to visit there," she said. "I'd like to see where they're from."
JUDITH JONES, former Free Lance–Star community news
editor, is a free-lance writer living in Columbus, Ohio.
