Starr Clark Tin Shop

Starr Clark ran the Underground Railroad out of a tin shop on Main Street. The Mexico, New York tinsmith arrived in 1832, wrote the first antislavery petition Oswego County sent to Congress, founded the county Anti-Slavery Society, and made his shop the abolitionists' meeting place — locals came for news and gossip, and 'before they got done,' a neighbor remembered, 'Starr Clark would bring up the abolitionist movement.' He was the engineer of Mexico's railroad: he housed fugitives in his own home or placed them with other families, arranged their transport to Oswego and the boats to Kingston.

The documentation is unusually rich. Researcher Judy Wellman believes Clark wrote the 1837 newspaper piece declaring 'it is my practice whenever a colored man comes into our village to go and invite him to my house and make him free at the same table with my family, let him be bond or free.' Gerrit Smith himself published a letter in 1839 commending Clark for shepherding the fugitives Williams and Scott to Canada — 'they both had obtained places to work and were doing well.' In October 1851 the shop took part in the Jerry Henry relay, sheltering the fugitive the Syracuse crowd had just broken out of jail.

The Clark family maintained that a tunnel connected the shop to the house next door — the arrangement of stones in the tin shop's basement east wall suggests a filled-in passage. The building survived a century as tavern and boarding house; the Mexico Historical Society bought it, peeled off the aluminum siding, and opened it as the Underground Railroad Museum — the tinsmith's shop where freedom's passengers were routed to the lake.

The Starr Clark Tin Shop is the archive's conductor file — the Mexico tinsmith who wrote 'I make him free at the same table with my family,' whose shop ran the village's Underground Railroad and helped carry Jerry Henry to Canada.