Orson Ames House

The Orson Ames House sheltered the most famous fugitive in America for one night. On October 1, 1851, federal marshals seized William 'Jerry' Henry in Syracuse — a barrel maker who had escaped Missouri slavery, arrested under the new Fugitive Slave Act while a Liberty Party convention filled the city with abolitionists. That evening the convention broke into the jail and carried him out — the Jerry Rescue, the act of open defiance that proved the federal government could not reliably enforce the law in the North. His shackles came off at a blacksmith's; after four days hidden, he was moved to Mexico, New York, in a meat wagon.

Orson Ames — Mexico's wealthiest abolitionist, a tanner and manufacturer who had signed the county's first antislavery petition and joined its Vigilance Committee in 1838 — took Henry in for the night of October 5. Just one night: the house stood on Main Street, too close to the business district to be safe. The committee moved Jerry next to Asa and Mary Beebe's barn in secluded Toad Hollow, where he hid for two weeks, then to Oswego and a boat to Kingston, Ontario — Canada, and freedom.

Ames wrote to his brother in Oswego to arrange the boat — the paper trail that documents the route. The house at 3339 Main is the only surviving property marking where Jerry hid on his escape — the one-night shelter in the chain that carried the rescued man to Canada.

The Orson Ames House is the archive's Jerry file — the Mexico farmhouse where the fugitive rescued from a Syracuse jail spent his first documented night on the route to Canada, the only building left from the escape that embarrassed the Fugitive Slave Act.