Michigan Street and the Last Crossing

In eighteen thirty-six, a group of African American men met in a brick schoolhouse on South Division Street and incorporated what would become the Second Baptist Society of Buffalo. Nine years later they built their own church at five-eleven Michigan Street, in a neighborhood that was becoming the heart of Buffalo's Black community. The congregation built it themselves, on their own land, with their own money. Many of them had escaped slavery.

The Michigan Street Baptist Church sat close to the Niagara River and the Canadian shore. It was, for thousands of people making the final leg of the Underground Railroad's most dangerous route, the last safe house before freedom. Fugitive slaves were reportedly hidden in the church before being transported by boat across the Niagara River after dark. Some accounts identify a network of contacts in Buffalo who helped direct escapees to the church, including workers in the neighborhood who would quietly steer people toward what locals called the Black Church.

Frederick Douglass spoke from its pulpit. So did Henry Bibb, who had himself escaped slavery and become an abolitionist. The church was known in the anti-slavery network across the eastern United States as a place of reliable sanctuary.

By the late nineteenth century, the congregation had grown and moved to a larger building. The eighteen forty-five structure on Michigan Street stood empty for decades, nearly lost to time and decay. A long restoration effort has worked to bring the building back.

The church is a museum now, and a working archive. Researchers are said to have been excavating the grounds, looking for evidence of the people who passed through here on their way to something they could not name until they had it: the right to remain where they chose.