Tour highlights Mercer’s history

By Jeanne Starmack

The old stories are coming to life this weekend.

MERCER, Pa. — On quiet, shady South Pitt Street, two old colonial houses stand beside each other.

On the porch of one of them last week, Patricia Dixon stooped to retrieve her newspaper, then stood patiently to answer questions about what it was like to live in one of the town’s most historic monuments.

Yes, she said, she knew that her house, which she and her husband Woodrow have lived in since 1989, was quite old.

The former Small House, it is the oldest house in the borough — and she agreed it feels pretty special to live there.

“It’s nice,” she said. “My husband and I like history.”

What she didn’t know, though, was that her house is considered part of the Underground Railroad, a clandestine route of sites that Southern slaves used when they made their break for freedom in Canada.

“No,” she said. “That’s the house next door,” and she gestured toward the Hanna House.

Yes, the Hanna House has the flagstone around back that used to open and hide three to four people at a time underneath the Hannas’ kitchen.

The Smalls and the Hannas, though, both helped runaway slaves. The Rev. Edward Small was married to Robert Hanna’s daughter Mary, and the families were dedicated to the abolitionist cause.

Their former homes are two of a half-dozen railroad sites on a tour that’s going to take place today and Sunday, beginning at 3 p.m. at the Mercer County Historical Society on Pitt Street. The tour is a part of the larger, weekend celebration called Victorian Days, during which the county celebrates its heritage.

If you go, you’ll walk where people long swallowed up by history walked, and you’ll hear their stories.

Wear comfortable shoes. Allow yourself at least two hours. David Livenspire, who’s got a summer job with the historical society between college semesters, will lead you along those tree-lined streets. He’ll bring those old stories to life.

He’ll point out a small building behind the society, which had been a barber shop.

Fountain Reed, a freed black man, settled in Mercer after being drawn into a church by the singing on his way through town. When his sons wanted to join the Union army during the Civil War, they walked to Pittsburgh to do it.

They were turned away.

Pennsylvania didn’t allow blacks to join up, but Massachusetts did. So the brothers eventually made their way there, and they did join the army.

Livenspire knows another interesting one. It’s about the time Mary Hanna helped a runaway slave make it to Erie, where he could gain his passage to Canada.

Mary dressed the slave, a young, slightly built man, as a woman. She bought two stagecoach tickets to Erie and accompanied him there. In Meadville, Pa., the slave’s master, who was searching for his runaway, got on the stagecoach. He rode with them to Erie, never guessing that the young black woman whom Mary had passed off as her maidservant was his slave.

The slave got off in Erie, where his trail is lost.

In another version of the story, the slave was a young woman, Livenspire acknowledges.

Bill Philson, the historical society’s executive director, shakes his head when asked for clarification.

The way he always tells it, he assures, the slave was a man.

But that’s the devil in the details of these old stories.

What’s come down through time is bits and pieces of what they couldn’t talk openly about when they were living through it.

The Underground Railroad was a seriously kept secret. If abolitionists were caught helping runaway slaves, they could be imprisoned. They paid a hefty fine that would amount to $112,000 today, Philson said.

Not all the railroad sites are known. It’s likely that most names of those involved didn’t end up in recorded history, he said. So their stories can’t be told.

Philson can tell only part of the story about Auntie Strange, who lived in a black community at what is now Stoneboro.

Made up of some free blacks and some runaway slaves, the community had become a respite for the slaves on their way to Canada, he said.

Then in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act made it against the law to help a runaway. Many from the community fled to Canada then, but Auntie Strange, who was by that time an old woman, stayed. It had been her home since her second run to freedom, and she was not sent back to the South.

What good would it do to send an old woman back to slavery, Philson surmises.

He doesn’t know where Auntie Strange came from. Virginia, likely. He doesn’t know what year she died, or where she was caught the first time she ran away.

Parts of her story are lost, like the fingers they chopped from her hand to teach her a lesson that first time. The only lesson she learned was that she wasn’t going to stay around for more of the same.

So she came to Mercer County, and she’s now part of its heritage. This weekend, the county is honoring her and all the others whose stories are plucked out of time, piece by piece, and tacked together, whole or in part, so they won’t be forgotten.

starmack@vindy.com