Midnight: Detroit’s Underground Railroad
Detroit’s code name on the Underground Railroad was “Midnight,” the last stop before freedom across the river. Seven stops: two churches, a riverfront memorial, a cemetery full of conductors, and one famous tunnel the record doesn’t back up.
- Stops 7
- Time Half a day
- Cost Free guide
- Best by Car (the first three stops are walkable downtown)
The guide is free. Admission, food, drinks and parking along the way are on you.
The memorial and the cemetery are outdoors and free. Both churches are active congregations, and their basements are seen by tour only: Second Baptist by appointment, First Congregational by reservation. Tommy’s is a working bar. Elmwood is an active cemetery with gate hours. We haven’t been to any of these seven stops yet. They’re all marked, and we’d love your help with them.
The route in Google Maps, in parts
Stop 1
Second Baptist Church
The connectionCroghan Street Station, founded 1836VisitingOpen to visitOur visitNot yet
Start in Greektown, at 441 Monroe. Monroe used to be Croghan Street, and the basement of Second Baptist Church was known as the Croghan Street Station. The church puts the number of freedom seekers who passed through on their way to Canada at up to 5,000, and it is the only documented Detroit Underground Railroad site still standing in its original location.
Thirteen formerly enslaved people founded the congregation in 1836. Two of them, Caroline French and Tabitha Lightfoot, had already shown what they would risk: in 1833 they visited Lucie Blackburn in the Detroit jail, where she was being held for return to Kentucky, and French swapped clothes and places with her so she could walk out. The riot that freed her husband, Thornton, the next day sent both Blackburns across the river for good.
In 1839 the church opened Detroit’s first school for Black children in that same basement. The building has been rebuilt and added on to since, but the site is the site. Tours are by appointment; call the church office.
Stop 2
Gateway to Freedom International Memorial
The connectionEd Dwight, dedicated October 20, 2001VisitingOpen to visitOur visitNot yet
Walk south to the river, the way freedom seekers had to. At the edge of Hart Plaza, Ed Dwight’s Gateway to Freedom International Memorial shows a group of freedom seekers on the Detroit bank, looking across the water. The figure at the center, pointing toward Canada, is George DeBaptiste, one of the conductors you’ll meet again at Elmwood.
Dwight won the commission through Detroit 300, the city’s tricentennial, and the memorial was dedicated on October 20, 2001. The marker gives the code name: Detroit was “Midnight,” the last stop before freedom. “Dawn” is often given as the code for the Canadian side, and it was also the name of Josiah Henson’s settlement in Ontario.
Look across the river. In Windsor stands the other half of the piece, Dwight’s Tower of Freedom, a 22-foot granite monolith with figures who have just arrived. A few blocks north of here, a historical marker at State and Griswold remembers Seymour Finney, whose barn hid freedom seekers. The barn is long gone.
Full listing: Gateway to Freedom International MemorialGet directions
Stop 3
Tommy’s Detroit Bar & Grill
The connectionTunnel lore, not recordVisitingRestaurant or barOur visitNot yet
This stop is here so you can hear the story and know what the record says. Tommy’s Detroit Bar & Grill, at 624 Third, has a bricked-up tunnel in its basement, and for years it has been described as an Underground Railroad escape route. Magazine stories still repeat it.
The building doesn’t support it. Wayne State University archaeologists, who dug here in 2013, date the first brick building on the lot to 1869, four years after slavery ended in the United States. Oral histories place a bar on the site back to the 1840s, but the researchers note the records don’t confirm that. The tunnel itself runs about ten feet, to a small basement room with traces of wood paneling, and what the dig found pointed to a Prohibition speakeasy called Little Harry’s.
Tunnels are the most common Underground Railroad myth there is. The real network ran on people, houses, barns, boats and nerve. Tommy’s is a good bar with a real Prohibition story, and it’s on our Prohibition route for that.
Stop 4
First Congregational Church of Detroit
The connectionLiving museum; current building 1891VisitingTicketedOur visitNot yet
Drive up Woodward to Forest, in Midtown. First Congregational Church runs the Underground Railroad Living Museum in its lower level, where the Flight to Freedom tour puts visitors in the role of freedom seekers, led by a costumed conductor through scenes of the escape north and the signs people used to know whether it was safe to keep going.
Know what you’re standing in. This Romanesque building, designed by Boston architect John Faxon, went up in 1891, after the Civil War. The congregation’s Underground Railroad work, which the church dates from about 1840 to 1863, happened at an earlier building near the river, on Jefferson near Beaubien, where freedom seekers waited in the basement until it was safe to cross. The tour is a reenactment, and a well-loved one, not the original hiding place.
Tours run about 90 minutes and have been offered by reservation Tuesday through Saturday at 11 a.m. Call ahead; groups book it out, especially in February.
Full listing: First Congregational Church of DetroitGet directions
Stop 5
Elmwood Cemetery
The connectionIntegrated burial ground since 1846VisitingCemetery groundsOur visitNot yet
Head east to Elmwood Cemetery, at 1200 Elmwood. Founded in 1846, it was integrated from the start, and for generations it was where Black Detroit buried its leaders, including many of the people who ran the city’s Underground Railroad.
William Lambert is here. Born free in New Jersey, he settled in Detroit around 1840, became a prosperous tailor, helped found the Colored Vigilant Committee in 1842, and spent the 1840s and ’50s moving people across the river with his friend George DeBaptiste. William Webb is here too: it was at Webb’s house in 1859 that John Brown and Frederick Douglass met with Detroit’s Black abolitionists.
The cemetery has a free African-American heritage audio tour with a downloadable map, 53 stops in all, and it’s the best way to find these graves. Download it before you go. It’s an active cemetery: keep to the drives and paths, keep it quiet, and check the gate hours.
Stop 6
George DeBaptiste’s Grave
The connectionConductor and steamboat owner, died 1875VisitingCemetery groundsOur visitNot yet
George DeBaptiste, the man pointing at Canada in the Hart Plaza memorial, is stop 42 on Elmwood’s audio tour.
He was born around 1815 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and was already an Underground Railroad conductor in Madison, Indiana, where his barbershop was the local network’s nerve center. In between, he worked as William Henry Harrison’s valet on the 1840 campaign and was briefly White House steward before Harrison died in office.
He came to Detroit in 1846, worked as a barber and clothier, and was regarded as the head of the city’s Underground Railroad. In 1859 he and William Whipper bought a steamboat, the T. Whitney. Because a Black man couldn’t hold a captain’s license, they hired a white captain, and the boat ran between Ohio and Detroit with a stop at Amherstburg, Ontario, carrying more than ordinary cargo.
He died in Detroit on February 22, 1875. His home stood at East Larned and Beaubien, a short walk from the river.
Stop 7
Elizabeth Denison Forth’s Grave
The connectionFreedom suit, 1807VisitingCemetery groundsOur visitNot yet
Finish with the story that came before the Underground Railroad. Elizabeth “Lisette” Denison Forth, stop 5 on the audio tour, was born enslaved near Detroit around 1786. Slavery lingered here for decades after the Northwest Ordinance was supposed to have ended it.
In 1807 her family sued for their freedom. The territorial court ruled that only the youngest Denison child, born after the ordinance, could go free. So Lisette and her brother did what thousands would do after them: they crossed the river into Canada, establishing residence there, and came back around 1815 as free people.
She worked for decades as a domestic, much of it for the Biddle family, invested her wages in land, and in 1825 became the first Black property owner in Pontiac. She died on August 7, 1866, and left about $3,000 to build a church. St. James Episcopal on Grosse Ile was consecrated in 1868, and its red doors are dedicated to her.