Lyons Regional Library

"When George and Martha Washington moved from their beloved Mount Vernon in Virginia to Philadelphia, then the seat of the nation's capital, they took nine enslaved people with them. They would serve as cooks and horsemen, as house servants and personal attendants. The North was different for the entire household, free and enslaved, white and black. There was a new climate to adjust to, and new mores as well. Slavery, in Philadelphia at least, was...

A nineteenth-century boy, floating down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave, becomes involved with a feuding family, two scoundrels pretending to be royalty, and Tom Sawyer's aunt, who mistakes him for Tom

Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body-flayed and stripped of all identifying marks-drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victims identity, shape Finns story as they will shape his life and his death. Along the way Clinch introduces a cast of unforgettable characters: Finns terrifying father, known only as the Judge; his sickly,...

Tobin met Ozella Williams in the Old Market Building in Charleston, South Carolina, and learned of the oral tradition and coded quilts used to navigate escapes on the Underground Railroad.

In two parallel stories, a Quaker famly in Kansas in the late 1850's operates a station on the Underground Railroad, while almost 150 years later, twelve-year-old Dana moves into the same house and finds the skeleton of a black woman who helped the Quakers.

After the Civil War ends in 1865, Addy desperately hopes that her family will be reunited in freedom in Philadelphia, but the future may hold both happiness and heartache.

"In 1845, Sammy, a Chinese American girl, and Annamae, an African American slave girl, disguise themselves as boys and travel on the Oregon Trail to California from Missouri"--

Describes the history of the Underground Railroad, discussing the history of slavery in the United States, the people who aided runaway slaves to freedom, and the outbreak of the Civil War.

The year is 1815, and North Carolina widower and farmer August King sets off on his yearly trip to sell his produce and buy the stock and goods he will need to survive the winter. On his journey, he comes upon a young, female, run-away slave. Now King must decide if he will break the law and help her to freedom, or if he should leave her to be hunted down and, ultimately, returned to her slave owner.

Ellen and William Craft were two of the few slaves to ever escape from the Deep South. Their first escape took them to Philadelphia, then on to Boston pursued by slave hunters, and finally 5000 miles across the ocean to England, where they were able to settle peacefully.