Chesterhill Quakers and the Underground Railroad

Morgan County, Ohio, was one of the quieter stations on the Underground Railroad, and the Quaker community at what is now Chesterhill was at the center of it. Elias Bundy and fellow members of the Monthly Meeting, which began in eighteen thirty-nine, sheltered freedom seekers moving north toward Canada despite the federal fugitive slave laws that made such assistance a crime.

The Quakers' refusal to participate in slavery dated back generations. Their theology held that every person carried an inner light that no owner could extinguish, and that conviction translated into direct action. Hiding people in farmhouses, moving them at night, connecting them to the next safe house along the route: these were ordinary acts in this community. The meeting house standing near this marker is a tangible link to that network. It is a plain building, as Quaker buildings always are, but what happened here was anything but plain: ordinary families repeatedly broke the law of the land because they believed a higher law required it.