The East End's Underground Railroad Ties

Professor Kathleen Gaffney Velsor is no stranger to serendipitous events and happy accidents. She’s lived with them since she can remember.

They’ve led Ms. Velsor straight to her passion and life’s work: digging up the truth about the Underground Railroad, a vast network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th century black slaves to escape to the free states and Canada, which she will discuss during a visit to Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday, March 9. She recently published “The Underground Railroad on Long Island: Friends in Freedom,” her fifth book on the topic but the first with a connection to this region.

Born in Rochester, New York, she was raised by her parents, Matthew and Doris Gaffney, in Le Roy, a small upstate town halfway between Buffalo and her birthplace. All three were stops along the Underground Railroad.

Her childhood was filled with stories about the abolitionists who helped lead the slaves to their freedom, tales about the allies who put their lives on the line for the cause, legends who wove themselves into Ms. Velsor’s childhood.

“They were about people passing through, not Le Roy as a destination point. And it fascinated me,” the Bayville, New York resident said last week during a telephone interview. “Being only a small child, to imagine this. There was not a black community in Le Roy. It was a white community. So it just caught my attention.”

It would be decades, though, before Ms. Velsor visited the subject again. But it was always lurking beneath the surface, she said, patiently waiting to break free.

The type of student who would take the window seat in history class, Ms. Velsor first majored in fine arts and education at Lindenwood University in Missouri and then went on to earn her master’s degree in educational administration from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and her doctorate in educational research from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio—another stop on the Underground Railroad, she said, as were a number of places she lived, including Tarrytown, New York and Norristown, Pennsylvania.

“As I look back, all these little hints were coming around me and tapping me on the shoulder,” Ms. Velsor said. “And I wasn’t even listening.”

The final hint came in the 1990s while teaching a unit on Lois Lowry’s, “Number the Stars,” a story about the German occupation of Denmark during World War II, to her undergraduate students at the State University of New York at Old Westbury—also an Underground Railroad stop.

“I wasn’t really listening to all the students’ presentations,” she laughed, “and I began to think about how the people in Denmark helped the Jewish people escape to safety by way of boats. I thought to myself, ‘Gee, Long Island is similar, geographically, to Denmark. I wonder what happened here on Long Island with the Underground Railroad.’”

Inspired, she visited the Oyster Bay Library after class and asked the reference librarian for books about the local Underground Railroad movement.

She looked Ms. Velsor straight in the eye and replied, “Dear, there was no slavery on Long Island. Therefore, there was no Underground Railroad.”

“When someone says ‘no,’ that usually means, ‘go,’” Ms. Velsor said. “That really fired me up. That was the hook. If there was a story, it was well worth tracing.”

With that, she began to dig by piecing together historical documents and working backward. The payoff was incredible. She unearthed a whole network and history of safe houses nestled into the western communities of Long Island run by the Quakers, who became known as the Society of Friends and are, coincidently, the direct ancestors of her husband, Curtis F. Velsor Jr., she said.

“The thing I’ve learned writing this book, that I didn’t know before, is that many people think blacks were just running from one house to the next, from one day to the next,” Ms. Velsor said. “What my research really brought out this time that I think really needs to be said is that there was a real organized effort by the Quakers, the Society of Friends, to bring larger groups of families in and keep them safe and healthy.”

The Quakers, who fled Europe in search of their own religious freedom, believed all men and women were equal in the eye of God, and that within their lifetime, they were required to better their generation for the next generation. And that started by taking in the scared, black runaways on their front stoops, Ms. Velsor said.

Quaker Valentine Hicks, who is believed to have run the Jericho section of the Underground Railroad, said it was much more dangerous for the slaves than it ever was for him, Ms. Velsor said.

“The slave catchers didn’t have to necessarily take the body back,” she reported. “You could take a hand or take a head and say, ‘I’ve got your slave.’ That’s been lost. Nobody wrote that. And that’s dirty history. That gets edited out, that kind of brutality that was going on.”

Ms. Velsor stumbled across another piece of missing history linked to the East End while working on a project at the Patchogue Library for the Queens Historical Society. She happened to pull a newspaper clipping from 1955 and curiously read the “100 Years Ago Today” column. Its subject was village resident Appleton Smith and the topic, of course, was the Underground Railroad.

The year was 1855, and Mr. Smith needed to earn some extra money. Despite that all slaves were granted freedom in 1827, he decided to kidnap a group of pregnant black women, transport them by boat from Shelter Island to the South and sell them as a two-for-one deal: mother and child.

“The only reason we know about this is because the Coast Guard was out there wondering what the boat was doing waiting,” Ms. Velsor said. “When he came and arrived with, shall we say, his cargo, he was arrested and put in jail. He was later set free and lived in the Carolinas and had an incredibly tragic life, which is good.”

Spellbound by this story, Ms. Velsor returned to the Patchogue Library to give the clipping another read. Mysteriously, the librarians couldn’t find it.

“Isn’t that strange?” the author chuckled. “I guess somebody read that and said, ‘We have to hide that story.’ Isn’t that powerful? It’s just those kinds of things that happen to me that just blow my mind.”