D. L. McIntyre

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So many stories to tell. Thank God for William Still who didn’t allow these people to be forgotten.

William Still hid 800 names in the loft of a Black cemetery in South Philadelphia. He did it after the federal government seized John Brown's papers in 1859, because he knew his were next.

The records of the Underground Railroad spent more than a year above the graves. He went back after the war and got them.

There was a desk in a Philadelphia office at the corner of Fifth and Arch, and on that desk sat a book of handwritten names. By federal law, those names were not allowed to be written down at all.

It was August 1850, and the Fugitive Slave Act had been signed weeks earlier. The man at the desk was William Still.

He was twenty-eight years old, the son of two formerly enslaved people, and he had taken a clerk's job at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society three years before. By that summer he was running its Vigilance Committee, the small operational body that received freedom seekers as they arrived in the city.

The committee hid them in safe houses, fed them, found them clothes, and pushed them on toward New England and Canada. Every other abolitionist in the country was burning their notes.

The Fugitive Slave Act made it a federal crime to assist a freedom seeker, with steep fines and imprisonment for anyone caught with evidence of having done so. William Still kept writing names down anyway.

That is the choice the rest of this story is built on, and you cannot understand the man without sitting with it for a moment. He had every reason in the world to stop, and he kept going.

He did it because of his mother. Charity Still had been born Sidney, enslaved in Caroline County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and she had run north with two of her daughters because she could not carry everyone.

She had to leave her two sons behind. Peter was about six years old, and Levin Jr. was eight.

She carried the weight of that decision for the next forty-three years. William grew up hearing her speak the names of those two boys at the table, in the kitchen, in the half-dark of evenings when the work was done.

He grew up understanding, in a way that only a child raised on the absence of his own brothers can understand, what happens when a family is torn apart and nothing is written down. The world quietly arranges itself to pretend the family never existed.

So when he sat down at the desk in Philadelphia, he wrote everything. Name, age, where they came from, what name they were using now and what name they had been called before, who they had left behind, who they were trying to reach.

He wrote down the small details, too. A scar on the left hand, a child carried under a coat, a letter folded inside a shoe, a man who walked from North Carolina with one good leg.

The names piled up across the early 1850s. Hundreds of them.

Henry "Box" Brown, who had himself shipped north in a wooden crate with three biscuits and a bladder of water. William and Ellen Craft, who had crossed half the South with Ellen disguised as a sickly white planter and her husband posing as her servant.

Harriet Tubman, coming through again and again, leading parties of six and eight and thirteen. Most of the names were not famous.

They were the people who do not get a paragraph in the textbook, who walked through swamps for nights at a time and trusted their lives to a stranger at the corner of Fifth and Arch. William Still wrote each one down.

Then on a Friday afternoon in August 1850, the man who walked through the door was his own brother. The man called himself Peter Freedman.

He had purchased his liberty in Alabama for five hundred dollars, scraped together over years of hired-out labor. He had come north looking for parents he had not seen since he was a small boy.

He sat across the desk and began to talk. He gave his father's name as Levin and his mother's name as Sidney.

He said his older brother had been called Levin Jr. and had died in Alabama after being treated more cruelly than any man should be treated. He said he had been sold from Maryland to Kentucky and then deeper south.

William Still sat very still as the words came across the desk. The room was a working office, papers and pamphlets stacked on shelves, light coming in through the front windows from Arch Street.

He had grown up hearing his mother say those names. Levin and Sidney, Peter and Levin Jr., the two sons left behind.

He looked at the man across from him and he could see his mother's face inside that face. He wrote later, in his own words, "I could see in the face of my new found brother the likeness of my mother."

Three more words from him close that scene. "My feelings were unutterable."

What William Still said next is recorded in the documents he himself kept. His voice was beginning to tremble.

"Suppose I should tell you that I am your brother?" He told Peter their father's name, and their mother's name, and how long she had mourned her two lost boys, and that she was still alive.

The next day the two of them crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey. They went to the small farming community where most of the Still family had settled.

William brought his older brother into a room where their mother, by then nearly eighty years old, was waiting. Charity Still reached up and put her hands on Peter's face, a face she had not seen since he was six years old.

"O, Lord," she said, with the tears running down her cheeks. "How long have I prayed to see my two sons."

She did not get both. Levin Jr. was already gone, killed years before in Alabama for the simple act of visiting his wife without permission.

But she got one. Forty-three years on, she got one of them back.

That reunion is documented in detail in William Still's own book because William Still wrote it down. Of course he wrote it down, because by that point the writing was the whole point.

He understood that day, in a way he had not fully understood before, what the names were actually for. They were for his mother, and for every mother and every father and every brother and every sister whose family had been blown apart and whose only chance of finding each other again lay in someone, somewhere, having had the discipline to keep a list.

After Peter found them, William Still helped his brother do the next impossible thing. Peter still had a wife and three children enslaved in Alabama.

Over the next two and a half years Peter traveled the abolitionist circuit, telling his story in churches and lecture halls, until he had raised the five thousand dollars demanded for their freedom. In 1853 Peter brought his wife Vina and their three children out of Alabama and onto a ten-acre farm in Burlington County, New Jersey.

Peter lived on that farm for the rest of his life. He died in 1868, free, with his family beside him.

The work in the Philadelphia office did not slow down through the 1850s. It grew.

The Fugitive Slave Act sent slave catchers into Northern cities with new federal authority, and William Still moved freedom seekers through Philadelphia faster, with more care, with more elaborate networks of safe houses and forged documents and changed routes. He met with John Brown in 1858 when Brown came north looking for funding for the raid that would end at Harper's Ferry.

After the raid failed, Brown's wife Mary stayed in the Still family home in the days surrounding her husband's ex*****on. William helped two of Brown's surviving men find their way to Canada.

Then in late 1859 the federal government seized John Brown's papers, and William Still understood what that meant for him. If the government had Brown's records, the government would come looking for the records of the network that had aided Brown's surviving raiders.

Every name in his book was now a name the government could try to track. He did not burn the records.

He could not bring himself to do it. What he did instead was carry them across the city to Lebanon Cemetery in South Philadelphia.

He hid them in the loft of the cemetery building, above the graves. He left them there, and he kept working.

The cemetery held the dead. The loft held the names of the living.

For more than a year the most detailed written record of the Underground Railroad in America sat in a cemetery building in South Philadelphia, kept alive by a Black man's stubborn refusal to let his people be erased. After the war ended, William Still went back and got the records.

He spent years organizing them, expanding them, writing the surrounding context. In 1872 he published the book that those records had become.

The Underground Railroad ran nearly eight hundred pages. It carried the testimonies of roughly eight hundred freedom seekers in their own words, gathered from a man who had sat across from them at a desk and listened.

It is the only book of its kind written by a Black man at the center of the work. Historians and genealogists still use it today to trace ancestors whose names would otherwise have been lost.

William Still's other life ran alongside the writing. He built a coal delivery business in Philadelphia that became one of the most successful Black-owned enterprises in the city, and he used the money to fund Black churches, schools, and orphanages.

He fought a long campaign through the 1860s to desegregate Philadelphia's streetcars, where Black passengers were forced to ride on the open front platforms in all weather. That fight ended in 1867 when Pennsylvania passed a law banning segregation on public transit, and he published a pamphlet documenting the campaign so that the next generation would know what the fight had cost.

He died on July 14, 1902, at his home in Philadelphia. He was eighty years old.

The New York Times called him the Father of the Underground Railroad. The country mostly forgot anyway.

You can still walk the streets of Philadelphia where his Vigilance Committee office stood. You can still read his book, freely, online.

You can still find the names he wrote down at that desk, written in the careful hand of a man who understood what a name on a page is worth when the law is trying to make sure no one writes it. His mother prayed for those two lost boys her whole life.

She got one back because someone, somewhere, had kept a record. Now we keep the record of the man who kept the records.

I’m building Daily Black History with love, patience, and real research, because our people deserve accurate stories told the right way.
If you’d like to help me continue:
https://ko-fi.com/dailyblackhistory
Every coffee makes a difference.

I want to apologize for my lack of posting on my page for the past several months. It’s been a crazy season. My husband was in the hospital three times last year (surgery in October), then my 97-year-old sweet mother passed away January 1st. She was the great granddaughter of the ancestors who inspired me to write my book. Then in early March we moved to a new home and are still settling in.
I haven’t forgotten about the Cowper family or Lily and Manny and the other characters I left in February of 1850 and will be writing their next chapters soon. Photo is Mom 16 months ago with her Christmas present from me. Miss her so much!

Finally found a photo of Sarah “Sally” Adams, my g. g. grandmother and my inspiration for Jane Cowper in my book. She lived well into the 20th century and my grandfather remembered her fondly.
How I wish I could sit down and talk to her about her adventures helping fugitives on the Underground Railroad!

My 97-year old mother left us to be with Jesus and all her family who were waiting for her on January 1st.

She was the great granddaughter of Daniel and Sarah Adams, my inspiration for Seth and Jane Cowper, protagonists in “A Wishful Eye”.

What a legacy of love and faith they passed down through generations of my family. I can almost hear their voices calling for me to do the same.

Need a last minute gift that can be delivered anywhere instantly? A digital copy of my book can be purchased for just $7 via Venmo or PayPal and downloaded to a reader’s device within moments. Message me for details.

Next Saturday, December 6th, I will be selling and signing “A Wishful Eye” at this large event funding the band program at my husband’s alma mater. Come to shop and stop by and see me!

What better Christmas gift for the reader or history buff on your list than an inspiring story about Christians who rebelled against the government and popular opinion to help others gain freedom?
Available wherever books are sold in paperback or digital copies. PM me if you’d like one of these directly from me.

Thrilled to meet a couple dozen new readers last Saturday and looking forward to meeting more Thursday night at this awesome holiday event! Christmas is coming. Books make great gifts and are easyto wrap!🥰

Candlelight - Downtown Frankfort, Inc. Candlelight Holiday Weekend Tradition November 13-15, 2025 Candlelight Weekend – November 13th – 15th Times:5:00 – 8:00 pm Thursday 5:00 – 9:00 pm Friday3:00 – 8:00 pm Saturday: Glow Party is 3-5PM and St. Clair St. & Horse Carriage Setup 5PM-8PM. Candlelight Weekend Presented by Commonwea...

Selling and signing books in my home town of Versailles, Indiana this Saturday. Location is South Ripley Elementary School on Benham Road. Click me see me and enjoy a fantastic day of shopping.

September is Underground Railroad Month. Today I will be selling my book at the Midway Fall Festival. It has been a crazy summer. Hoping to get back to writing the next chapters in the lives of my characters soon.
If you haven’t told anyone about A Wishful Eye lately or written a review it would be much appreciated!
Photos are antebellum homes still in use in the Hunter’s Bottom area between Carrollton and Milton, Kentucky where many clandestine crossings of the Ohio River took place.

Friends in Kentucky: I will be giving a presentation at the Scott County Library in Georgetown this Thursday, August 22st, at 6:30 PM on slavery, abolitionists, and the Underground Railroad in Kentucky and Southern Indiana.

This is based on research I did for “A Wishful Eye.” I’d love to have the moral support of my friends! My presentation is called “God’ Outlaws”. Hope some of you can make it! 🥰