While digging up dirt to repair a leak in the root cellar just outside the Goodnoe Farmhouse estate in Newtown Township, a mystery was uncovered.
The cellar’s roof wasn’t made of modest materials normally used for such underground cooling rooms. Instead, a type of shale more often seen on church tops covered the cooling room.
Why? That’s the mystery.
The president of the Doylestown-based Heritage Conservancy wonders if the root cellar was a hiding place for fugitive slaves escaping the South in the 19th century.
“There are no recordings of structures that could have been used as Underground Railroads since it was an illegal activity,” said the conservancy’s Jeff Marshall, “but any underground structure could have been used to sneak people out.”
The Underground Railroad wasn’t a rail system but a network of people who believed slavery should have been abolished. Abolitionists offered their homes as a safe hideout or provided runaway slaves with a ride to the next stop on the freedom trail. Many Quakers and Presbyterians in Bucks County were active in the network, according to historians. An estimated 100,000 fugitive slaves escaped to the North between 1810 and 1850 via the Underground Railroad, they said.
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