Jermain Loguen, King of the Underground Railroad

A man named Jarm Logue was born enslaved in Davidson County, Tennessee, in eighteen thirteen. His mother, Cherry, had been born free in Ohio. She was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Jarm grew up knowing that his mother had once been free, and that knowledge did something to him.

At age twenty-one, on his second attempt, he escaped. He stole his enslaver's horse, followed the Underground Railroad north, crossed into Canada, and eventually worked his way into New York State. He studied at the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro. He added a letter to his name and became Jermain Wesley Loguen. He opened schools for Black children in Utica and Syracuse. He became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. He married a woman named Caroline Storum.

When they built their home in Syracuse, they had a room constructed with a hidden purpose. They published their address in the local newspaper, openly inviting fugitives to come. The Loguens would provide meals, a bath, rest, help finding work if someone wanted to stay, and passage north if they wanted to continue. Historians estimate that Jermain and Caroline Loguen helped more than fifteen hundred people through that house.

He was called the King of the Underground Railroad. She was his queen. The title came from people whose names were not written down, because writing them down would have been dangerous.

Loguen was indicted under the Fugitive Slave Act after the Jerry Rescue in eighteen fifty-one. He fled to Canada and was not convicted. He was appointed a bishop of the AME Zion Church in eighteen sixty-eight, one of the highest offices in one of America's most significant Black denominations. He died in Syracuse in eighteen seventy-two.

His daughter Amelia married Lewis Henry Douglass, the oldest son of Frederick Douglass, in eighteen sixty-nine. Two of the most consequential families in antebellum American Black history joined on a Tuesday afternoon in this city.