Williamsburg Cemetery

Williamsburg Cemetery buries the conductors. Three Underground Railroad operatives lie in the township cemetery on Gay Street: Charles B. Huber, Dr. Leavitt Thaxter Pease, and Samuel Peterson — the men who ran Williamsburg's role as the northern terminal of the Clermont County spur, the last stop on the line that ran up from the Ohio River through Felicity and Bethel.

Huber was the operation's heart — a large man, by the county's account, who feared no one, whose fiery antislavery speeches ended in fisticuffs and who quietly picked off the community's bright young men to recruit them. His engineer was Marcus Sims, a Kentucky-born biracial man who drove the wagons along the back roads between Brown County, Martinsville, and Williamsburg. One night heavy rain stranded the work — seventeen fugitives in the conductor's hands, each hour multiplying the risk of a federal crime carrying six months in jail and a thousand-dollar fine. All seventeen made it through.

Peterson the stonemason carried food to the fugitives hidden at Huber's place and drove them by wagon to the next stop; Dr. Pease's practice gave the network cover. The county's Freedom Trail marks the cemetery on the same route that holds the Felicity and Moscow stations — the graveyard where the men who ran the traffic now lie together.

Williamsburg Cemetery is the archive's conductors' file — the graveyard holding Huber, Pease, and Peterson, the operatives of the last station on the Clermont spur, where seventeen fugitives once waited out a storm in a wagon on the back roads.