Freedom Road Cemetery

Along the Susquehanna River in the years before the Civil War, a lumber raftsman named Daniel Hughes was doing something far more dangerous than floating timber downstream. Between roughly the eighteen fifties and the outbreak of war, Hughes brought fugitive enslaved people north from Maryland, sheltering them at his home here before they continued on toward freedom.

Hughes later donated a portion of his land for a cemetery. Among those buried here are nine known African American veterans of the Civil War, men who had won their freedom and then fought to end slavery for others. The cemetery has carried its current name, Freedom Road Cemetery, since nineteen thirty-six, a name that honors both the Underground Railroad that ran through this property and the men who rest in the ground beside it.