Hamilton and Rhoda Littlefield House

The Littlefield House kept its secrets in the ceiling for a century and a half. Hamilton and Rhoda Littlefield settled at 44 East Oneida in Oswego in 1836 — lumber trade, real estate, farming — and made the Federal-style house part of the city's Underground Railroad network. The documents survive: in 1853, Gerrit Smith's agent John B. Edwards wrote that he had taken a fugitive 'to Hamilton Littlefield's for housing.' On another occasion the house sheltered fifteen freedom seekers at once.

Littlefield's position was uniquely useful — he ran for office on the Liberty Party ticket, served as an officer of the county antislavery society, and his lumber ships gave him something most station keepers lacked: transportation. Freedom seekers rested at his house or farm, then boarded his lumber vessels — often crewed by Canadians — for the run across Lake Ontario to Ontario.

In 2000, renovators found a cache of abolitionist literature hidden between the kitchen ceiling and the floor above — including a printed speech of Gerrit Smith's. The county historian's line became the house's: 'In this house, the walls actually spoke volumes of abolitionist activity.' The hiding place for pamphlets was found a hundred and fifty years after the hiding place for people stopped being needed.

The Littlefield House is the archive's ceiling-cache file — the Oswego station where the fugitives were documented by name in an agent's letter and the abolitionist pamphlets were still hidden in the ceiling when the renovators opened it in 2000.