Road Trip: Was My Friend’s House a Late Stop on the Underground Railroad?

Canada’s 41 million people populate its nearly 1 billion hectares. But 7.8 million of us inhabit Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, which is just 3.3 million hectares. So, driving here often feels like our horse got sent to the knacker’s. But a quick drive across the border — not even two hours from central Toronto (on most days) — contains so much undercelebrated and shared history.

Take my friend Greg’s 1840s farmhouse. Just on the edge of ski country, his town of Holland, N.Y., was a penultimate stop on The Underground Railroad (UGRR) before destination Buffalo, 48 km north. And maybe his house too. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 sent previously enslaved people caught in “free” New York state back South.

That’s only if the freedom seekers were caught.

Strident abolitionists like Holland civil servant Abner Orr quietly flouted the law, hiding runaways in their own homes before smuggling them up to Buffalo to cross the Niagara River to freedom in Canada. (The British Empire had only banned slavery 16 years before, so don’t feel smug.)

See the old map* here whose added arrows point to Holland in the bottom right corner. The route through Erie County to Buffalo has barely deviated after 150 years. It’s a lovely drive and relatively unpopulated compared to Ontario’s coagulating Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW). Mind, that vista wasn’t enjoyed by freedom seekers; the UGRR was travelled by night to avoid the many out-of-state bounty hunters hoping to score so close to the end of the line.

That escape route in Western New York went directly past Greg’s.

Quaker country contained many active anti-slavery advocates, possibly the original inhabitants of Greg’s house. But first, who’s Greg?

He directed the first TV commercial I ever wrote. I was 27 and he’d just turned 40; we’ve been chums since. “Uncle Greg” to my kids, he’d regularly visit us in Canada or host us at his hilltop “Film Farm” above Holland.

With three storeys plus a creepy unfinished basement, the house was a hide-and-seeker’s wonderland. The kids’ favourite hiding place was a tiny extra room behind the large closet in the front hall.

A false wall hiding a tiny room could have multiple reasons for being there.

The simplest explanation suggests this was a forgotten hiding place for runaways. Consider that from Greg’s attic, you could see bounty hunters coming from 360 degrees for miles, giving people plenty of time to sneak someone from anywhere in the house into this hidden room.

Sadly, there’s no proof. Being underground, the UGRR’s actors never documented their activities or stops. Still, the area’s worth the extra half-hour drive from Buffalo. Emerging tourist towns like East Aurora offer charming country getaways for us farm-to-table culture hounds.

Today, my wife and I are stopping in Buffalo to meet Greg for lunch. About 200 km from Toronto, it’s often an easy drive, depending on the QEW’s traffic and upkeep.

Sure, complaining about a major highway sounds like a #FirstWorldProblem, but consider the QEW’s age. Opened in 1939, 13 years before Elizabeth became Queen, it’s 87 years old. Sound familiar? The number 87 is literally “four score and seven years,” the same age America was when Lincoln hailed the fallen in America’s Civil War to end slavery; a pivotal time worth remembering during its 250th anniversary.

Odd: These 87 years seem recent; at the same time, the QEW seems utterly antiquated.

According to Wiki, the QEW is “the first intercity divided highway in North America.” That was probably impressive once. These days it’s as messy as the Royal Family itself, but this day, we got “lucky.” The Horseshoe’s skies are, umm, Golden with forest fire smoke; people are staying home, so the drive is tolerably ugly.

With such an unflattering description, why would 20 per cent of Canadians want to spend a day in Buffalo with no lifelong friend to meet? History. Though the UGRR kept its activities hidden, there are endless visible stories in Buffalo’s landmark buildings.

A trained architect before directing, Greg recommends these highlights:

Credit: Getty

• The Martin House by Frank Lloyd Wright: It’s one of Wright’s earliest houses but contains what Greg calls “the best of his residential concepts.”

• The Richardson Hotel: In 1885, this Victorian masterpiece opened as the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane. It’s at once beautiful and overwhelming; probably terrifying if you weren’t in peak 1890s mental health. Another director friend who’s filmed there at night swears “it’s haunted AF.”

• The Art Deco City Hall: You cross the Peace Bridge and immediately notice you’re in the Empire State, with its distinct, stacked skyscrapers. Speaking of directors, Guillermo del Toro loves this straight-out-Gotham-City structure and its council chamber, both featured in Nightmare Alley.

• Urban planning royalty, Frederick Law Olmstead (designer of Biltmore Estate, New York’s Central Park, U.S. Capitol grounds, and Montreal’s Mount Royal Park) created Buffalo’s Parkside neighbourhood, an early and world-famous experiment in urban planning. He also designed the landscape for the aforementioned asylum.

Note: even during hot summer weekends, free parking in central Buffalo abounds.

Our luck took a left turn when the restaurant we’d driven two hours to was shuttered.

We’d arranged to meet Greg in the funky downtown neighbourhood of Allentown, a mecca for the epicurious. Not 30 seconds after Greg, we arrived at the agreed-to restaurant, a funky designer burger-meets-bistro joint. He hadn’t heard us calling but cut the guy some slack: Greg also used to be a sound engineer. He worked with Joe Walsh for a while in the 1970s (no surprise, Joe doesn’t remember). Once Greg mixed a concert in Ohio for Joe’s friends The Who, Earth’s loudest band at the time. So, he was surprised to see us when he turned around.

When we tugged at the entrance door, we found the restaurant closed, out of business. Still, our luck held!

The former owner was on site, renovating the space into a dive bar for live punk rock coming this fall. He directed us to the most American meal imaginable. Just two blocks away, past several charming, aging buildings that would’ve been flattened in Toronto’s postwar war on classical architecture. Destination? The colon-cramming southern-style BBQ venture called Fat Bob’s Smokehouse.

It’s funny. The last time we saw Greg, we toured the newly renovated Albright-Knox Museum, which is as good as any art museum you’ll find in Canada. Maybe make that your destination after viewing the list above.

This time, for us, our reward was the entertaining company of an 80-year-old birthday boy, sweeter than a plate full of grilled St. Louis ribs and collard greens.

Shuffling back home demanded coffee first.

*The Underground Railroad map was copied from BuffaloResearch.com, the original dated from approximately 1903.