May 17, 2012Underground Railroad 1831
Located at 12 West Seventh Street
Catherine Dickes Harris, born June 10, 1809 on a farm near Meadville, Pennsylvania, came to Jamestown with her husband in 1831. Perhaps the community’s first Black citizens, they built a small house at what became 12 West Seventh Street. Although only sixteen feet in length, it is maintained that as many as seventeen runaway salves could be harbored at one time. One of the few Blacks in the United States to operate a station in the underground railroad, Mrs. Harris, a free-born Black, risked a heavy fine, imprisonment, and her life to help an enslaved people.
In 1881, seventeen years after the close of the Civil War, the small house served as the first site of the AME Zion Church, which she founded. Mrs. Harris died February 12, 1907 and is buried in Lakeview Cemetery.
HERE STOOD A STATION OF
UNDERGROUND R.R.
IN WHICH CATHERINE HARRIS DID HEROIC SERVICE FOR FUGITIVE SLAVES.