Thomas Garrett's House: The Stationmaster Who Defied a Nation

At two hundred twenty-seven Shipley Street, a Quaker iron merchant named Thomas Garrett ran one of the most important stations on the Underground Railroad in the entire eastern United States. He was not secretive about it. He was openly defiant.

Garrett was born in Pennsylvania in seventeen eighty-nine into a Quaker family, and his commitment to abolition crystallized early. When he was twenty-four, slave catchers kidnapped a free Black woman who worked for his family and attempted to sell her into bondage in the Deep South. Garrett rescued her and made a decision: for the rest of his life, he would never stop fighting slavery.

He moved to Wilmington, a border city in a border state, precisely because its position on the line between freedom and slavery made it strategically important. From his home on Shipley Street, Garrett helped more than two thousand five hundred enslaved people reach freedom. He worked openly with Philadelphia abolitionist William Still and with conductors further south on the Delmarva Peninsula. His most frequent guest was Harriet Tubman, who had escaped from a Maryland plantation and returned, again and again, to lead others north. Garrett supplied her with food, clothing, shelter, and money raised by abolitionists in Europe and across the country.

In eighteen forty-eight, Garrett and a fellow activist named John Hunn were sued under the Fugitive Slave Act. The verdict went against them, and a federal court stripped Garrett of virtually everything he owned. He stood before the courtroom a ruined man and told the judge that he had never done anything he considered wrong, and that he intended to keep right on doing it. He was in his late fifties. He kept his word for more than two decades.

By the time he died in eighteen seventy-one, newly emancipated Black citizens in Wilmington were pulling him through the streets in an open carriage. They carried a banner ahead of him that read, simply, Our Moses.