A Tangled Web of Frayed Threads

History was my least favorite subject in school. For me, it was a disconnected mass of random facts. I have great admiration for people who can discern a story line through the tangle.

I encountered one such person on my ride this summer in Ashtabula, Ohio. Andy Pochatko is the docent of the Hubbard House Underground Railroad Museum. He has the brain and the nose to go down rabbit holes, comb through the tangle, distinguish fact from fiction, and then tell the story of what he’s discovered.

Andy Pochatko

Ashtabula, situated on Lake Erie on the brink of freedom where you can almost smell Canada, was a hotbed of abolitionists and people willing to take personal risks to help others who had escaped from enslavement onwards toward their goal. Andy has done the digging to figure out actual pathways and people involved. He leads an annual pilgrimage from the Hubbard House, a known Underground Railroad station, situated on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie.

Walnut Beach in Ashtabula as seen from Hubbard House

Hubbard House

When we cycled through Ashtabula on August 28, we had the great fortune of a serendipitous tour of the Hubbard House given by Andy. I could tell he was the real deal. At the time, he mentioned his pilgrimage and I took note. This was my first foray away from home after finishing my ride in Maine on September 15. This time, I wasn’t in a rush. I had the whole day set aside to hear what Andy had to relate. To top that off, Tim Gary, a childhood friend of my friend, Mary Ellsworth, invited me to join him and Nancy in his pickup truck for the tour. That way, in between tour stops, Tim layered in lots of local lore, then and now.

Tim and Nancy

We stopped at Sycamore Hall, a home once owned by Mary’s great-grandfather, where she spent many enjoyable childhood hours. Its previous owner had told an escaping person to hide under the bed where his wife was sleeping to avoid being apprehended.

See this link for a fuller version of this story.

Sycamore Hall

The icing on the cake was a connection to the story of the Pearl that I learned about on a ride with Jenn Weiss in July 2019. That was a historic event I couldn’t let go of as it happened where I live. I read at least three books on it and put together a bike ride connecting places involved in the story. In a nutshell, 77 people from the DC area left their places of enslavement on April 15, 1848, to board the Pearl to sail for their freedom. Though they made it all the way down the Potomac to Cornfield Harbor, weather conditions were not favorable for them to round Lookout Point and go up the Chesapeake Bay to Frenchtown NJ where they would be free. They were pursued by enraged slaveholders and captured at Cornfield Harbor, the exact place where Jenn and I were waiting for a ferry to Smith Island. That’s where I saw the historic marker and first learned about this event.

The two captains, cook, and passengers were hauled back to Washington DC, humiliated, and tried in court. Joshua Giddings, a representative from Ohio in the US House, and an unapologetic abolitionist, defended the captains at their trial. He is buried in Ashtabula.

Tomb of Joshua Giddings

© 2023 Lynnea C Salvo