Program at Sandoz Center Friday Night
The Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center at Chadron State College will host a speaker on the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program at 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 11. The session will be open to the public without charge.
The presenter will be James R. Hill, regional coordinator for the program, which is a federal listing of historical sites, facilities and programs that were associated with the so-called Underground Railroad that helped runaway slaves avoid bounty hunters and obtain freedom prior to and during the Civil War.
The National Park Service lists 60 Underground Railroad historic sites in 21 states. Of the approximately four million slaves in the pre-Civil War South, about 100,000 are believed to have escaped along the Underground Railroad.
More than 500 routes are believed to have gone through Ohio, where abolitionists, Quakers, free blacks and others hid the fleeing slaves, sometimes in cellars and caves to help establish the name.
Prior to assuming his present duties, Hill was an architectural historian with the National Park Service and a historian for firms in Florida and South Carolina.
The program Friday night is in honor of Black History Month, and is being co-sponsored by the Sandoz Center and the Chadron State Diversity Committee.
Category: Campus News