Site of an Underground Railroad Station - Jamestown, New York
Posted by: 
Szuchie
N 42° 05.993 W 079° 14.547
17T E 645330 N 4662360
An underground railroad station in downtown Jamestown, New York!
Waymark Code: WM368Z
Location: New York, United States
Date Posted: 02/17/2008
Views: 51
Located at this site visitors will find a historic marker that states:
Here stood a station of Underground R.R. in which Catherine Harris did heroic service for fugitive slaves. State Education Department 1936
According to the City of Jamestown, New York:
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.