Tanner's Alley and the Underground Railroad

A few blocks from the river, near the corner of Walnut and Commonwealth streets, there was once a short stretch of road called Tanner's Alley. It was about five hundred feet long, lined with small houses and workshops. By eighteen fifty, this neighborhood was home to roughly nine hundred free Black residents, about twelve percent of the entire city's population. That concentration of free Black families made Tanner's Alley one of the most important nodes on the Underground Railroad in the entire mid-Atlantic region.

Harrisburg's position mattered enormously. The city sat only a short distance above the Mason-Dixon Line, the boundary between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North. Freedom seekers escaping enslavement moved north through multiple routes, by road, by canal, by railroad, and Harrisburg was a critical junction where those routes converged.

The network of support here was organized and serious. Joseph Cassey Bustill, a schoolteacher who had joined the movement as a teenager, sheltered freedom seekers in his home. Doctor William Jones, a Black physician, ran one of the primary safe houses, providing rest, food, and medical care for people who had traveled enormous distances in secret. The Wesley Union African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, founded in eighteen twenty-nine, was a known station on the Underground Railroad. Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison both spoke from its pulpit.

In eighteen thirty-six, community members formalized their efforts into the Harrisburg Fugitive Slavery Society, coordinating passage north to Philadelphia and beyond. All of this was done at personal risk. Slave catchers operated openly in Harrisburg, and even free Black residents could be seized under federal law.

The alley itself was eventually demolished in the early nineteen hundreds, taken by Capitol complex expansion. Its legacy survives in the historical record, and in the courage of the people who lived there.