Lewis and Harriet Hayden House

The Hayden House was the Temple of Refuge — the Beacon Hill boardinghouse at 66 Phillips Street where two people who had escaped Kentucky slavery ran the most documented safe house in Boston. Lewis Hayden had watched his siblings sold away as a child and lost his first wife and two sons to the auction block; he and Harriet escaped in 1844 with flour rubbed on their faces to pass as white, helped by Calvin Fairbank and Delia Webster — who were caught and imprisoned for the rescue. The Haydens reached Canada, then deliberately returned to run the station.

The Vigilance Committee's account book is the documentation — entries record Hayden boarding fugitives by name: 'John Simmons, W. Miller, Ja. Jackson, Solomon Bander, Geo. Reason, Issac Mason & Wife'; fares to Canada for 'Taylor and Cooper'; clothes for Henry Demby. The 1850 census listed thirteen in the household — including William and Ellen Craft, the famous fugitive couple. Harriet ran the boardinghouse and the danger; Lewis ran the rescue operations — the courthouse rescue of Shadrach Minkins in 1851, the attempted rescue of Anthony Burns in 1854, and John Brown himself slept there in 1859 while planning Harpers Ferry.

Lewis recruited for the 54th Massachusetts during the war and sat in the Massachusetts legislature after it — the escaped slave who had been hunted under federal law ended up making law in the statehouse on the other side of Beacon Hill. The house is still a private residence on the Black Heritage Trail — the building where the most documented Underground Railroad household in Boston operated under the fugitive slave law it was defying.

The Hayden House is the archive's temple-of-refuge file — the boardinghouse where the Vigilance Committee's ledger records the fugitives by name, where the Crafts and John Brown slept, run by two people who had escaped slavery and come back to run the station.