Underground Railroad gives up its secrets

Monroe and Warwick were important stops on the way to freedom, By Ginny Privitar “Have we an Under-Ground Railroad in Orange County?” An Independent Republican editorial posed this question on June 16, 1859, after a fugitive slave arrived in Chester. “After examining him and secreting him until dark,” the editorial went, some local people “raised some money, bought him a ticket to Elmira, and giving him a letter to Rev. Mr. Beecher, of that city, they put him aboard of the New York and Erie [railroad] cars bound westward.”