Haines House

The Haines House kept its fugitives above the kitchen. John and Nancy Grant — Quakers out of New Jersey — built the brick house in stages between 1827 and 1842 on the Stark County frontier, on land that had been Iroquois and Delaware country. Their daughter Sarah and son-in-law Ridgeway Haines took over the house and the conviction: from about 1853 they ran an Underground Railroad station in what historian Wilbur Siebert called 'a hotbed of abolition.'

The routine is documented — freedom seekers spent the daylight hours in a tiny room above the kitchen, then were hurried through the dark to the next station at Marlboro or Limaville, and on to Randolph in Portage County and north toward the lake. The attic hideaway is still in the house; the museum shows the room where people waited out the sun. Their son John Columbus Haines fought for the Union — the family's abolitionism carried into the war it helped precipitate.

The house became the Haines House Underground Railroad Museum — one of only two Network to Freedom sites in Stark County, on Ohio's official Historic Underground Railroad Trail. The parlor, the early kitchen, the attic room — the house preserved as the station it was, in the town that grew around the farm where the Grants first settled.

The Haines House is the archive's attic-station file — the Quaker farmhouse where the room above the kitchen hid the passengers of the hotbed of abolition, in a county on Ohio's main line north.