Lancaster Historian Randy Harris has been recognized by the National Park Service with two prestigious awards for submitting 20 Pennsylvania resources to the Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Listings. He is the first person in the Network to Freedom’s 25-year history to win both the Robert G. Stanton and Wilbur H. Siebert Awards.

These awards may not be familiar to those outside historian circles but they are the Oscars of verifying Underground Railroad sites.

Southeast Pennsylvania was a strategic location for many enslaved people seeking freedom due to its proximity to the slave state of Maryland and free Blacks and Whites working to help the enslaved escape bondage.

Randy Harris explains, "At the end of the revolution when Pennsylvania was forming as a state, creating its own governance structure, the folks at the time had the foresight to create the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, which was the first unit of government in the Western Hemisphere to begin the dismantling of this horrible institution of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, in the Americas. In doing that as currently, of course, it was gradual. It wasn't a free get out of slavery writ by anybody. If you were born before 1780, unfortunately, you were enslaved for life. If your "owner" wanted you to remain in that capacity or that status. If you were a child born after that, you had to wait till age 28. And they were all made in sorts of ways that people could barter their time, sell their time, or these even hate to say the word these owners could could claim a monetary effect and sell years of time of someone who was in their indentured servitude. It was, in essence, slavery by another name, but it was at least a glimmer of hope to freedom".

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