Underground Railroad marker to be dedicated in Ohio
Case Western CLEVELAND — Reserve University has acknowledged its historical connection to the Underground Railroad and abolitionist Frederick Douglass by installing a historic site marker.
The marker is on the southeast corner of Adelbert Road and Euclid Avenue, outside the Allen Memorial Medical Library, and will be dedicated on Sunday.
The program, free and open to the public, will be held at 3 p.m. in Amasa Stone Chapel, 10940 Euclid Avenue. A reception will follow.
One side of the plaque recognizes the role that Western Reserve College, then located in Hudson, played in the anti-slavery movement.
The other side honors Horatio Cyrus and Martha Cozad Ford, whose homes served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The land on which the home stood became part of the university campus when the college moved to Cleveland.
The marker is sponsored by the Friends of Freedom Society Inc., Case Western Reserve and Emeritus Trustee Allen H. Ford, whose great-grandparents owned the Underground Railroad site where the marker is being dedicated.
“This dedication represents CWRU’s recognition of its connection to a significant moment in American history and the freedom struggle of African-American people,” Marilyn Sanders Mobley, vice president of the Office for Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunity, said in a statement. “Ironically, when many campuses are dealing with names of buildings and legacies of the enslavement of black people in the United States, this marker stands on a site of Underground Railroad activity that enslaved people understood supported their struggle for freedom.”
Abolitionist sentiment was strong among Western Reserve College students and faculty from the early 1830s, according to research by Richard Baznik, university historian and vice president emeritus for public affairs.
In 1854, Douglass, a former slave and an outspoken proponent of abolitionism, addressed the Western Reserve College Philozetian Society during Commencement Week, urging the audience to take an active role in the slavery debate, the university said.
The Ford family home, which was on the site of the new historic marker, was used as a refuge for fugitive slaves, as was the Cozad family home across Euclid Avenue, then known as the “Buffalo Road.”
The program will include comments from CWRU alumna Joan Southgate, who retraced the path of escaping slaves from Ohio to Canada in a monthlong, 250-mile journey in 2009.
Southgate founded Restore Cleveland Hope, located in University Circle at the Cozad Bates House.