Buckout-Jones Building

The Buckhout-Jones Building on West Bridge Street in Oswego is where the Underground Railroad had a storefront. Built in the 1850s — rebuilt in 1876 after a fire, which accounts for the Gothic and Queen Anne details — the commercial block was owned by abolitionists Abram Buckhout and Erastus Jones. In the basement, two men who had escaped slavery ran barbershops: Charles Smith, who worked there from 1854 until his death in 1882, and Tudor Grant, who opened his shop in 1857.

Both men were born enslaved in Maryland. Both made it to Oswego — the Lake Ontario port city that was a last stop before Canada — and both became businessmen in the building's basement rooms. Grant was a noted abolitionist believed to have helped other fugitives reach Canada, possibly using his shop near the harbor. His son went on to invent the golf tee. The building's white owners assisted fugitives at Buckhout's farm on the city's southern edge — the Underground Railroad in Oswego was, as the historians who documented it note, a collaboration between Black and white, and this building is the collaboration in brick.

The building stayed in commercial use — clothing stores, brewers, offices — and is on both the National Register and the Network to Freedom. The basement rooms where two fugitives from slavery built businesses are part of the documented record of the harbor town that was the end of the line before the lake crossing.

The Buckhout-Jones Building is the archive's barbershop file — the commercial block where fugitive slaves ran shops in the basement while the abolitionist owners ran assistance upstairs, the Underground Railroad as Main Street business.