Passengers on this "railroad" never forgot their life-or-death journey from bondage.

Arnold Gragston struggled against the current of the Ohio River and his own terror the first night he helped a slave escape to freedom. With a frightened young girl as his passenger, he rowed his boat toward a lighted house on the north side of the river. Gragston, a slave himself in Kentucky, understood all too well the risks he was running. "I didn't have no idea of ever gettin' mixed up in any sort of business like that until one special night," he remembered years later. "I hadn't even thought about rowing across the river myself."

Slaves had been making their way north to freedom since the late 18th century. But as the division between slave and free states hardened in the first half of the 19th century, abolitionists and their sympathizers developed a more methodical approach to assisting runaways. By the early 1840s, this network of safe houses, escape routes and "conductors" became known as the "Underground Railroad." Consequently, a cottage industry of bounty hunters chasing escaped slaves sprang to life as lines of the railroad operated across the North—from the big cities of the East to the little farming towns of the Midwest. Above all else, the system depended on the courage and resourcefulness of African Americans who knew better than anyone the pain of slavery and the dangers involved in trying to escape.

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In a 1937 interview with the Federal Writers' Project, Gragston recalled that his introduction to the Underground Railroad had occurred only a day before his hazardous trek, when he was visiting a nearby house. The elderly woman who lived there approached him with an extraordinary request: "She had a real pretty girl there who wanted to go across the river, and would I take her?"

The dangers, as Gragston well knew, were great. His master, a local Know-Nothing politician named Jack Tabb, alternated between benevolence and brutality in the treatment of his slaves. Gragston remembered that Tabb designated one slave to teach others how to read, write and do basic math. "But sometimes when he would send for us and [if] we would be a long time comin', he would ask us where we had been. If we told him we had been learnin' to read, he would near beat the daylights out of us—after getting somebody to teach us."

Gragston suspected such arbitrary displays of cruelty were meant to impress his master's white neighbors and considered Tabb "a pretty good man. He used to beat us, sure; but not nearly so much as others did, some of his own kin people, even."

Tabb seemed especially fond of Gragston and "let me go all about," but Gragston realized what would happen if he were caught helping a slave escape to freedom—Tabb would probably shoot him or whip him with a rawhide strap. "But then I saw the girl, and she was such a pretty little thing, brown-skinned and kinda rosy, and lookin' as scared as I was feelin'," he said. Her plaintive countenance won out, and "it wasn't long before I was listenin' to the old woman tell me when to take her and where to leave her on the other side."

While agreeing to make the perilous journey, Gragston insisted on delaying until the next night. The following day, images of what Tabb might do wrestled in Gragston's mind with the memory of the sad-looking fugitive. But when the time came, Gragston resolved to proceed. "Me and Mr. Tabb lost, and as soon as [dusk] settled that night, I was at the old lady's house.

"I don't know how I ever rowed the boat across the river," Gragston remembered. "The current was strong and I was trembling. I couldn't see a thing there in the dark, but I felt that girl's eyes."

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