First Congregational Church of Detroit

Detroit was the terminus — the city where the Underground Railroad ended at the water. The First Congregational Church, organized in 1844, stood at Fort and Wayne Streets, blocks from the Detroit River — and its basement hid the people making the last crossing. Refugees were concealed below the sanctuary, then moved down Wayne Street to the boats that ferried them to Windsor — the ferry ride that put them in Canada and out of American law's reach.

The church worked inside a network — Seymour Finney's hotel barn at State and Griswold was the companion station, and Frances Eddy's account records the audacity: while slaveholders pursuing their 'property' lodged at Finney's hotel, the people they were hunting were hidden in his barn. Grateful men arriving in Canada sometimes took Finney's name. Mrs. Utley, the church member who recorded the activity, noted 'lots of activities in the Underground Railroad' — the congregation's own record-keeper of illegal mercy.

The present church is the 1891 building at Woodward and Forest — John Lyman Faxon's ornate Venetian-Ravenna design, as far from a New England meetinghouse as Detroit was from Boston. The congregation built its Underground Railroad Living Museum in the Albert Kahn-designed wing — the 'Flight to Freedom' tour that walks visitors through the journey the church's basement once served.

First Congregational is the archive's terminus file — the church whose basement hid the passengers for the ferry to Windsor, in the city where the Railroad's tracks ran out at the river that meant Canada.