Levi Coffin and the Southern Underground Railroad
Near Greensboro, North Carolina
The community of New Garden in what is now western Greensboro was Quaker territory from the mid-seventeen hundreds. The Friends who settled there came largely from Pennsylvania and Virginia, bringing their theology and, with it, a denominational consensus that had been building across the Atlantic Quaker world for a generation: slavery was a moral abomination, and no Friend should participate in it.
Levi Coffin was born here in seventeen ninety-eight. He grew up on a farm near the New Garden meetinghouse, the son of a family that had never owned enslaved people, raised in a community where the question of slavery was not abstract. Freedom seekers came through Guilford County on their way north. The woods provided cover. The Quaker farms provided food, shelter, and direction.
By his early twenties, Coffin was directly involved. He and his cousin Vestal ran a Sunday school for enslaved people from the surrounding plantations in eighteen twenty-one. Angry slaveholders forced it to close. In eighteen nineteen, the case of a man named John Dimery, who escaped from Guilford County and made it to Indiana through the Coffin network, became the earliest documented instance of Underground Railroad activity in North Carolina.
Coffin moved to Indiana in eighteen twenty-six, frustrated by the limits of working inside an enslaving state. In Newport, Indiana, he and his wife Catherine built a house that became a hub. In twenty years there, he estimated that he and Catherine assisted approximately one hundred individuals per year to freedom. Abolitionists called him the president of the Underground Railroad.
The woods at Guilford College, a few minutes from where you are, still stand largely intact. Historians who have studied the landscape say they are one of the few places in the American South where the physical geography of the Underground Railroad, the tree cover, the creek lines, the pathways, can still be traced on the ground. The silence in those woods is not empty. It is layered with movement.
