the untold story of the heroes of the Underground Railroad
Hagedorn, Ann
2002
Tells the story of the abolitionists of the Ohio River town of Ripley, focusing on the work of Presbyterian minister John Rankin whose hilltop house stood as a beacon to slaves trying to reach the Underground Railroad.
A sophomore at Princeton in 1955, southerner Fletcher Randall meets a group of Quaker Friends and eventually becomes involved in the Underground Railroad.
Thirteen-year-old Dana investigates a mystery involving the old Kansas house that her parents have turned into a bed and breakfast business; in a parallel story, a Quaker boy living in the house in 1857 sets out to help some fugitive slaves to freedom.
In 1861, thirteen-year-old Phoebe runs away from her master's Alabama plantation and joins four other slaves as they journey to Canada on the Underground Railroad.
In two parallel stories, a Quaker family in Kansas in the late 1850s 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.
Describes what it was like to be involved in the Underground Railroad, discussing life on the run, the lives of the trackers, conductors, and stationmasters, and the building of new lives in Canada.
Ziggy, Rico, Rashawn, and Jerome, four curious African-American kids, find themselves trapped in an Underground Railroad passageway under their school, with no way out but to travel its tunnels as escaped slaves did over one hundred years before.