Richard Moore: Underground Railroad Safe House
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
Richard Moore was a Quaker potter and abolitionist who turned his eastern Pennsylvania home into a refuge for people escaping slavery. Over three decades, Moore assisted roughly six hundred freedom seekers traveling the eastern Pennsylvania routes of the Underground Railroad.
One of those he sheltered was William Parker, later a participant in the Christiana Riot of eighteen fifty-one, a dramatic confrontation in Lancaster County when a group of free and freedom-seeking Black Americans successfully resisted a slave-catching posse, mortally wounding a Maryland slaveholder in the process. Parker fled afterward and is believed to have passed through the Underground Railroad network. Moore's sustained, quiet courage, six hundred people guided to freedom over thirty years, represents the sustained commitment that made the Underground Railroad work, not a single dramatic act but a lifetime of deliberate risk.
