Incredible footage shows the inside of Old Faithful Geyser in 1991

Yellowstone National Park covers some 3,500-square-miles of the US and is home to some of the world’s most iconic hydrothermal geysers and fumaroles. These include the iridescent colors of the Grand Prismatic Spring, the bubbling mud cauldrons that are the Artists Paint Pots and—of course—Old Faithful, the magnificent cone geyser that erupts a spray of water and steam roughly every 44–125 minutes. As millions of tourists marvel each year over the park’s many hydrothermal spectacles, so do earth scientists as they attempt to plumb the underground systems that formed and maintain them.

In their study, geophysicist Professor W. Steven Holbrook of Virginia Tech and his colleagues conducted special, airborne scientific surveys of Yellowstone using a special instrument called “SkyTEM”, which consists of a large loop of wire suspended from a helicopter.

The system — which emits repeated electromagnetic signals into the ground and measures the response of electrically conductive bodies — allowed them to identify areas underground with unusual electrical and magnetic properties.

Prof Holbrook said: “The combination of high electrical conductivity and low magnetization is like a fingerprint of hydrothermal activity that shows up very clearly in the data. The method is essentially a hydrothermal pathway detector.”

By making repeated passes over the path, the team were able to probe the subsurface along some 2,500 miles of so-called helicopter lines, from which they could create stunning maps of the subsurface “plumbing” under Yellowstone that supplies geysers such as Old Faithful.

Prof Holbrook added: “One of the unique aspects of this dataset is its extensive coverage of this huge system.

“We were not able just to look deep beneath the hydrothermal features, but also to see how adjacent features might be connected in the subsurface across great distances. That’s never been possible before.”

Old Faithful (pictured) is Yellowstone National Park’s most iconic geyser (Image: Getty Images)

Pictured: a survey line. Blue areas are conductive pathways while red are resistive lava flows (Image: Virginia Tech)

The researcher found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the nature of Yellowstone’s hot springs are profoundly influenced by the geology of the vast national park.

Hot hydrothermal fluids — comprising both water and dissolved gases and minerals — were found to ascend vertically from depths of more than 0.6 miles into the park’s major hydrothermal fields, traveling along faults and fractures within the rock.

As they complete this journey, the fluids mix with the shallower groundwaters that flow both beneath and within the park’s lava flow deposits.

According to the team, the findings help to fill a longstanding gap in our understanding of the deep hydrothermal system that fuels Yellowstone’s iconic geysers and fumaroles.

READ MORE: Yellowstone volcano warning: ‘Huge rocks’ could ‘crush’ public

Pictured: the iridescent colors of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park (Image: Getty Images)

Previous studies have examined the park’s surface hydrothermal features — such as, for example, the eruptive intervals of the geysers, the chemistry and temperature of the mud pots and springs and the unique bacteria that thrive in these extreme environments.

Others, meanwhile, have used seismic data to learn about the earthquakes and deeper heat sources far beneath Yellowstone — but little had been known about the exact nature of the connection between these deep fluid sources and the surface features.

As Prof Holbrook put it: “Our knowledge of Yellowstone has long had a subsurface gap.

“It’s like a ‘mystery sandwich’ — we know a lot about the surface features from direct observation and a fair amount about the magmatic and tectonic system several kilometers down from geophysical work, but we don’t really know what’s in the middle.

“This project has enabled us to fill in those gaps for the first time.”

One such mystery the study has addressed concerns whether or not different hydrothermal areas of the park — exhibiting different chemistries and temperatures — might be supplied by different deep fluid sources.

The team found that the deep structure beneath areas like the Norris Geyser Basin and the Lower Geyser Basin is remarkably similar, suggesting that the observed surface differences are actually the result of variable degrees for mixing with shallow groundwater.

Pictured: the Artists Paint Pots, Yellowstone National Park (Image: Getty Images)

Paper author and geophysicist Dr Carol Finn of the US Geological Survey said: “While the airborne data were still being collected, we saw the first images over Old Faithful and knew instantly that our experiment had worked

“We could, for the first time, image the fluid pathways that had long been speculated.

“Our work has sparked considerable interest across a range of disciplines, including biologists looking to link areas of groundwater and gas mixing to regions of extreme microbiological diversity, geologists wanting to estimate volumes of lava flows, and hydrologists interested in modeling flow paths of groundwater and thermal fluid.

“With the paper as a guide and the release of the data and models, we will enable research in these diverse scientific communities.”

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Pictured: study author and geophysicist Professor W. Steven Holbrook of Virginia Tech (Image: Virginia Tech)

The researchers’ study may be complete — but Yellowstone still holds plenty of mysteries.

In future studies, for example, Prof Holbrook said that they would like to look for further evidence for distance connections between isolated underground hydrothermal areas.

The SkyTEM data, he explained, has already revealed evidence for subsurface linkages between hydrothermal systems in Yellowstone that are up to six miles apart.

Prof Holbrook added: “That might have implications for the co-evolution of thermophilic bacteria and Archaea.”

“The notion that airborne geophysical data could illuminate something about the life of microscopic organisms living around hot springs is a fascinating idea.”

The team have also released their geophysical scans, allowing other researchers to conduct their own analyzes delving into the remarkable dataset.

Such, Prof Holbrook said, is “so big that we’ve only scratched the surface with this first paper. I look forward to continuing to work on this data and to seeing what others come up with, too.

“It’s going to be a data set that keeps on giving.”

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Nature.

The post Yellowstone scan exposes enormous underground ‘plumbing’ community: ‘Solely scratched floor!’ | Science | Information appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

In 2000, the San Francisco Health Commission made harm reduction — a philosophy that advocates for making it safer to use drugs rather than criminalizing those who do — an official public health policy. It’s an approach with roots spanning from the Summer of Love in 1967, to the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, to the present-day fight to open sites in San Francisco for people to use drugs safely.

Vitka Eisen, president and CEO of HealthRIGHT 360, poses for a portrait at the medical clinic in San Francisco on March 9, 2022. HealthRIGHT 360 is a health care provider for lower-income and otherwise marginalized Californians. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

Inside a ‘hippie’ clinic, health care was a right

The Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic opened its doors in 1967, committed to an ethos where health care was a right, not a privilege. Tens of thousands of flower children and teenage runaways were flocking to San Francisco to “drop out” of everyday society and experiment with drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.

The clinic offered people who used drugs health care at a time when the city’s health department worried compassion would encourage the hippies to stay. It provided a safe space for people dealing with bad trips and heroin withdrawal and, later, for veterans returning from Vietnam with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Founder Dr. David Smith said it was illegal for physicians to treat people with substance use disorder with prescription drugs in the 1960s. Clinic volunteers were so worried police would shut the clinic down if people used drugs inside that the door was painted to read: “No dealing!/No holding drugs/No using drugs/No alcohol/No pets/Any of these can close the clinic/We Love You.”

When the Summer of Love ended, many people went home, but generations of people searching for meaning stayed behind in San Francisco, where the hard drugs moved in and people’s health care needs overwhelmed the clinic.

This painted door marked the entrance to the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. (Courtesy of David Smith archives)

“More than three years of life in the Haight, once the flower pot of America, now shattered into fragments of terror and despair, a ‘behavioral sink’ of pathologies feeding off the pill and the needle,” read a 1971 New York Times piece.

Still, the philosophy of the clinic — not only that health care is a right but also that addiction can be treated with medicine — persisted.

“It was harm reduction before there was such a term. It was never like, ‘When are you going to get your shit together?’ It was always, ‘Hey, can I see what’s going on?'” said Vitka Eisen, who was a patient at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, as it was called in the 1980s.

The clinic smelled of patchouli, and a counselor walked around in a leather fringe jacket, Eisen recalled. She would go to the clinic before visiting her family in New York because she didn’t want to be strung out on heroin when she went to see them. She’d pick up a “kick pack” of medicine to fight stomach cramping and nausea, and to help her sleep during withdrawal.

“After the seventh or eighth time, I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” she said.

She got treatment at Walden House, an addiction and mental health treatment program in San Francisco, and said she never used drugs again. Now she runs the treatment provider HealthRIGHT 360, the umbrella organization that includes what is known today as the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics.

‘Carrying bleach was like having aspirin’

The philosophy of harm reduction spread internationally when activists and caregivers sought ways to reduce suffering and health risks during the AIDS crisis in the ’80s. Volunteers handed out clean needles and encouraged cleaning needles with bleach.

Maia Szalavitz, the author of “Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction,” says she was addicted to cocaine and heroin at the time. She was unaware that sharing needles put her at risk of contracting HIV until 1986, when she met Maureen Gammon, a volunteer with the San Francisco-based group Mid-City Consortium to Combat AIDS.

Maia Szalavitz, author of ‘Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction,’ in the 1980s. (Courtesy of Maia Szalavitz)

“She told me I shouldn’t share, but if you have to share, clean the needle with bleach and then with water,” Szalavitz said. “Shooting up is a pretty compulsive thing, so I immediately incorporated this into my compulsive routine and she probably saved my life.”

Gammon said carrying bleach was as common as having aspirin.

“People just had [bleach], and it was not unusual to go into a corner store or taqueria or bar and ask for a bottle of beach and be able to get it,” Gammon said.

Inside the Ambassador Hotel

The AIDS crisis also forged a new generation of physicians, said Joshua Bamberger, an associate clinical professor of family and community medicine at UCSF.

He began his residency at San Francisco General Hospital in 1989, and said all his energy and focus went into caring for men who were dying of AIDS.

“Much of my work was really holding men in my arms as they died,” he said. “And as awful as that was, it also created an era of physicians and other healers who bonded over the important things in medicine, which isn’t necessarily slinging medication but providing love and care for people who are really suffering.”

Some hospices refused to take in people who had a history of drug use, or had clauses saying they’d only accept people on the condition they’d been sober for six months before being referred. But the people who needed to be referred often had two or three months left to live.

So, many people found refuge at the Ambassador Hotel, an SRO in the Tenderloin run by gay rights activist Hank Wilson beginning in 1978. It became one of the few places where AIDS patients who used drugs could live without having to die on the streets. In the 1996 documentary “Life and Death at the Ambassador Hotel,” the site is described as a model in harm-reduction housing.

“The Ambassador was sort of a de facto AIDS hospital,” said Bamberger, who did rounds there, providing care alongside community members and friends of those dying. “When treatment options were limited, and [people] didn’t have a home, the Ambassador was a place where they could land.”

Val Robb, a nurse at the Ambassador Hotel, said she had to learn the culture of the people who stayed there. Many people who used drugs were distrustful of a health care system that considered them not worth treating.

“I started speaking the language more, which is, ‘Let me work out a deal. You need me to do this. I want you to do that,'” Robb said. “I need you to go to the doctor. If you go to the doctor, if you let them examine you, then let’s get you some codeine. It wasn’t like, ‘I’m Nurse Nancy doing this thing for you.'”

There were times Robb had to go against what she knew about health, such as offering guests cigarettes if they would let her examine them. But she said she still had to draw the line.

“Another guy, he says, ‘Val, I’m trying to get high, and my partner couldn’t hit the vein. Can’t you?’ I said, ‘No, I’m a nurse with kids and a license, I can’t do that,'” she recalled.

It took years before the city approved or funded some of the harm-reduction practices happening underground. The AIDS crisis hit its peak in San Francisco in 1992, and the following year Mayor Frank Jordan declared a state of emergency and announced that San Francisco would back a program to give clean needles to people who used drugs.

‘Call it Lazarus in a hypodermic’

Meanwhile, naloxone, the medication used to reverse overdoses, was still only widely available in medical settings. Rachel McLean, the outreach worker, said she and others attended a conference on drug policy reform in 1999 where an Italian man gave a presentation on naloxone.

“None of us could even understand what he was saying because his accent was so strong. But we understood that he said that in Italy, community health workers give out naloxone on the street,” she said. “And all of us, our minds were just blown by that.”

At the conference, Dan Bigg with the Chicago Recovery Alliance brought a duffle bag full of naloxone.

“And people would just come and take it, and that’s how underground naloxone started in San Francisco,” McLean said.

Naloxone education material used in San Francisco from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. (Courtesy of Joshua Bamberger)

“It’s a mission that’s part Che Guevara, part Mother Teresa. The guerrillas aren’t doctors. Nonphysicians, obviously, are barred by law from handing out prescription drugs — it’s a felony that can carry up to 10 years in federal prison,” reads a 2003 article from A.C. Thompson in The San Francisco Bay Guardian on a visit to a San Francisco needle exchange site where volunteers were distributing naloxone. 

Critics said providing people who used drugs with naloxone, more commonly known by the brand name Narcan, would encourage drug use. Clinicians worried about liability if people had an adverse reaction to the naloxone, or if they died even after naloxone was used.

While studying at San Francisco State University in the same year as the conference on drug policy reform, McLean was assigned to write a paper analyzing a public health problem. She drafted some ideas based on the knowledge she had absorbed from the community, and proposed opening safe injection rooms, testing drug supplies and training people who inject drugs in administering naloxone.

Rachel McLean looks through her archive of flyers, zines, educational information, and research on harm reduction at her home on March 10, 2022. A photo of friend and colleague Pete Morse can be seen, as can a zine about Matty Luv, singer of the San Francisco punk band Hickey, who passed away from a heroin overdose in 2002. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

Soon after turning in her paper, McLean graduated from college, quit her job as an outreach worker and went to Mexico for six months, burned out by the trauma. But she would sometimes wake up at night to scribble notes about what an overdose prevention program would look like.

“The fire was still there,” she said.

Members of a so-called “heroin subcommittee” created by the city to address overdose deaths ended up calling McLean. They had read her paper, and asked McLean if she would implement some of her ideas.

With a $30,000 annual budget, the Drug Overdose Prevention and Education (DOPE) Project began in a makeshift office in McLean’s kitchen in 2002. She started making phone calls to overdose prevention workers, and put together a curriculum to teach drug and alcohol treatment providers, sheriffs and deputies, the probation department, homeless shelter staff, and others how to reverse overdoses through rescue breathing. Without naloxone widely available, rescue breathing was something anyone could do to reverse overdoses, with some training.

Heroin overdose deaths plummet

Alex Kral, then a researcher with the Urban Health Study at UCSF, conducted a pilot study with other researchers in 2001 to 2002, training 24 people to use naloxone. There were 20 overdoses during the study. Trainees reversed all of them, 15 with naloxone, and most of those with an additional rescue method. The researchers presented the findings to the county’s public health director.

“We said, ‘Look … you’ve got people dying of overdoses and you’re not able to do anything about that,'” said Kral, who is now an epidemiologist with the nonprofit health research institute RTI International. “‘Why don’t you do something about it?’ And [the director] said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.'”

One year later, the San Francisco Department of Public Health partnered with the DOPE Project to distribute naloxone at syringe-exchange programs, SROs, reentry programs and other sites in the community.

Joshua Bamberger, who oversaw the program with San Francisco’s DPH, said heroin overdose deaths dropped “unbelievably down,” plummeting from a peak of 155 in 1995 to 10 in 2010.

An altar includes a candle from a memorial for Pete Morse on the mantel of Rachel McLean’s home on March 10, 2022. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

“Nothing’s gonna reduce death to the extent that getting 10,000 doses of naloxone out there in San Francisco in the early 2000s will ever do,” Bamberger said.

McLean, who now works for the state health department, still keeps a picture on her mantel of Pete Morse, who was at the forefront of bringing naloxone to the streets of San Francisco. He died of a drug overdose in 2007.

“I think about him all the time. I want to make sure that his contributions are remembered,” McLean said. “I don’t want to say that it broke my heart the most because I don’t want to compare it to all of the other deaths, but it’s still with me.”

The fentanyl overdose crisis

Naloxone has become a key tool in reducing overdose deaths nationwide. For years, it helped stave off the worst of the opioid crisis in San Francisco. But geography also helped for a time. On the West Coast, black tar heroin was the most common type of heroin, and that black color made it more difficult to hide white-powdered fentanyl inside.

Still, the number of people who injected drugs in San Francisco — mostly heroin — more than doubled early in this century, from 10,158 in 2005 to 22,000 in 2012.

By 2017, fentanyl had crept in to begin its rampage. That year, the city reported 36 deaths linked to fentanyl. That jumped to 90 in 2018. In 2020, the number of fentanyl-related deaths skyrocketed to 518.

An estimated 650 people overdosed and died in San Francisco last year, a spike driven by fentanyl, according to data from the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office.

Data on fentanyl-related and non-fentanyl-related overdose deaths from the San Francisco Department of Public Health and San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office. (Chart by Matthew Green/KQED)

“I lost so many people to just fentanyl,” said Joel Webber, who goes by Turtle. He sat on a curb recently near Hotel Whitcomb, a city-run hotel on Market Street. People regularly gather nearby to use or sell drugs.

Webber said he received methadone treatment for 22 years, then started using fentanyl when he stopped his methadone treatment.

“If I could, I would blow up every f—ing fentanyl lab up with a button and end it. I’d get sick, but I’ll take it,” Webber said. “I just want it gone.”

Drugs like fentanyl are unlikely to disappear, and that means the city will need to try new strategies to prevent overdoses. A river of naloxone is not enough to confront the crisis, said Keith Humphreys, an addiction researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine.

One dose of naloxone often is not enough to reverse a fentanyl overdose.

“Maybe we can’t make fentanyl use safe,” he said. “Let’s say you make it twice as safe. It’s still just so deadly it just overwhelms the capacity of what we know how to do.”

Community and trauma in harm-reduction work

In 2021, President Joe Biden became the first president to make expanding harm reduction one of his drug-policy priorities. But people still argue that harm reduction encourages drug use. Several city leaders in San Francisco have criticized an overreliance on harm-reduction services and a lack of abstinence-based treatment options.

Kristen Marshall and the Dope Project team pose for a portrait during Overdose Awareness Day in 2020. The event gathers providers and community members to hold space for those lost and celebrate people still with them. (Courtesy of Kristen Marshall)

Kristen Marshall was the program manager for the DOPE Project until last winter.

“When you do this work, it’s your life, even if you try to fight it. It’s a lot of grief, it’s a lot of pain, it’s a lot of trauma. And that breaks a person down,” she said. “It feels really hard for me as someone who is in this position when suddenly people are like, ‘Well, this is your job. If overdose prevention is your job, what do you do? Harm reduction must not work.'”

Still, because of the vast supply of naloxone in the community, people are reversing more drug overdoses, many fentanyl-related, in San Francisco than ever before. The DOPE Project reported 81 overdose reversals in 2006. In the year 2021 alone, the group reported 8,985 reversals. Many of those overdoses were reversed by people who use drugs. In comparison, San Francisco police, who by then were carrying naloxone, reversed 144 overdoses in 2021.

Reporting data from the Drug Overdose Prevention and Education Project, as documented in a San Francisco Department of Public Health report. (Chart by Matthew Green/KQED)

Marshall said the larger question she keeps asking herself is what happens after overdoses are reversed.

“So they go to treatment, then what? Where’s their housing? So they go right back outside,” she said.

She believes overdose prevention efforts will inevitably fall short until root causes such as poverty, racism and isolation are addressed.

“We’re giving people Narcan and saying, ‘Live, live, live, live — you have to live,’” she said. “The question that I want to ask everyone is, ‘What are we living for? What is there for people to grasp?’”

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Considering that the massive network of hidden paths and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad stretched from the Deep South all the way to Canada, it makes sense that hundreds of people were involved in its operation. Some, like Harriet Tubman, were “conductors,” who led the rescue missions, while others—John Brown, for example—were “station masters,” hosting fugitives in their homes and arranging safe passage to freedom. Here are nine other valorous heroes who risked life and limb to help people on their way to liberty.

1. William Still

Born to formerly enslaved parents in New Jersey in 1821, William Still moved to Philadelphia at age 23 and took up the abolitionist mantle in more ways than one. He taught himself to read and write, got a job as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and advanced through the organization until he was named chairman of its new Vigilance Committee in the early 1850s. In that position, Still oversaw the region’s network of safe houses—his own house among them—and raised money to finance key rescue missions, including a few of Harriet Tubman’s.

It’s estimated that Still ferried about 800 people to freedom during his tenure; one of them was his brother Peter. But there’s another reason he’s often referred to as “the Father of the Underground Railroad.” Still documented the stories of more than 600 escapees and published them all in a groundbreaking volume called The Underground Railroad in 1872, making him the only Black person ever to write and self-publish a firsthand account of activity on the Underground Railroad. He hoped that the “extraordinary determination and endeavor” exhibited in the harrowing narratives would inspire Black Americans to continue the struggle for civil rights.

“The race must not forget the rock from whence they were hewn, nor the pit from whence they were digged,” he wrote in the introduction. “Like other races, this newly emancipated people will need all the knowledge of their past condition which they can get.”

2. John P. Parker

When John P. Parker was 8 years old, a merchant separated him from his enslaved mother in Norfolk, Virginia, and sold him to a doctor in Mobile, Alabama. There, Parker apprenticed at an iron foundry—and learned to read and write, with the help of the doctor’s children. At age 18, he persuaded one of the doctor’s patients to purchase him and let him gradually buy back his freedom with his foundry earnings. The plan worked, and Parker left for Ripley, Ohio, where he built a house, started a family, and patented a few popular mechanical parts for tobacco machines during a successful career as a foundryman.

Through it all, Parker made regular excursions across the Ohio River to spirit fugitives from Kentucky back to Ripley’s safe houses (one belonged to John Rankin, a prominent white abolitionist who lived less than a mile from Parker). Parker’s rescue missions were especially dangerous, partially because bounty hunters looking for fugitives knew who he was, and partially because Parker himself was dauntless. Once, an enslaver suspected a married couple would attempt to escape, so he took their baby and put him to sleep in his room. Parker snuck into the room, carefully plucked the child from the bed—where the enslaver also lay sleeping—and dashed back through the house. The enslaver awoke and tore after him, firing his pistol, but Parker and the family managed to escape across the river.

Parker recounted these rescues to journalist Frank M. Gregg during a series of interviews in the 1880s, but the manuscript sat forgotten in Duke University’s archives until historian Stuart Seeley Sprague unearthed it and published it in 1996.

3. and 4. Harriet Bell Hayden and Lewis Hayden

Born enslaved in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1812, Lewis Hayden watched enslavers tear apart his family not once, but twice. First, his siblings were sold to a different enslaver; and later, his wife and son were bought by Kentucky senator Henry Clay [PDF] and sold somewhere in the Deep South. Hayden never saw them again. In the early 1840s, he married an enslaved woman named Harriet Bell, adopted her son, and soon began plotting their escape.

With the help of Calvin Fairbank, a minister, and Delia Webster, a teacher, the Haydens fled their enslaver’s estate and eventually arrived safely in Canada. By 1846, they had returned to the U.S. and settled in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, where they opened a clothing store. Before long, Lewis and Harriet had joined the Boston Vigilance Committee and turned their home into a boarding house, which became a highly trafficked stop on the Underground Railroad.

Though slavery had been illegal in Massachusetts since 1783, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 stated that enslaved people who had escaped to free states could still be found and returned to their enslavers in the South. The Haydens fearlessly protected hundreds of people from bounty hunters who tried to do just that. Ellen and William Craft, for example, had garnered widespread attention for their risky escape from slavery in Georgia, which involved Ellen impersonating a white man and William posing as her Black servant. When bounty hunters pursued them to the Haydens’ house, Lewis announced that he’d readily blow up the whole property with the two kegs of gunpowder he kept inside if they tried to kidnap the Crafts. The bounty hunters didn’t chance it, and left empty-handed.

Lewis also helped recruit Black soldiers for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry—one of the Union’s first all-Black military units—and was even elected to the Massachusetts General Assembly in 1873. When he died in 1889, Boston’s city council praised him as “one of the pioneers in the freeing of this country from the curse of slavery.” Harriet, who died in 1893, donated her entire estate to Harvard Medical School for the purpose of establishing a scholarship for Black students, which still exists today.

5. Henrietta Bowers Duterte

In 1852, Henrietta Bowers, a 35-year-old tailor, married a Haitian-American undertaker named Francis A. Duterte. They both came from well-respected Philadelphia families, and Francis’s mortuary was successful; in other words, it should have been a long, happy union. But by the end of that decade, Henrietta was alone: Her children had all died young, and Francis had also passed away suddenly. Instead of handing the mortuary business over to a man—which would have been expected at the time—Henrietta took it over and, in addition to running the mortuary, turned it into an especially clandestine stop on the Underground Railroad.

Not only did Henrietta use funeral processions as opportunities to help disguised fugitives slip unnoticed through the city, but she also sometimes smuggled them out of Philadelphia in actual coffins. The mortuary continued to be lucrative, and Henrietta funneled the profits into organizations that served Philadelphia’s Black community, like the First Colored Church and Stephen Smith’s Philadelphia Home for Aged and Infirm Colored Persons. In 1866, she helped arrange the Freedman’s Aid Society Fair to support formerly enslaved people in Tennessee.

6. David Ruggles

David Ruggles, born free in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1810, moved to New York City at age 17 and opened a grocery shop, which he staffed with emancipated Black Americans. Before long, Ruggles pivoted to lending and selling abolitionist books, pamphlets, and newspapers, too, making him the nation’s first Black bookstore owner. In 1835, Ruggles and other local abolitionists founded the New York Vigilance Committee, an interracial organization which, like the one in Philadelphia, helped people escape from slavery. Not only did he provide legal aid to Black Americans targeted by bounty hunters, but he also housed many fugitives in his own home on Lispenard Street.

One of these temporary guests was Frederick Douglass, who escaped from slavery and arrived in New York penniless and famished in 1838. He was rescued, he explained in his 1845 autobiography, “by the humane hand of Mr. David Ruggles, whose vigilance, kindness, and perseverance, I shall never forget.” Douglass wrote to his fiancée, Anna, who joined him within a few days, and Ruggles even arranged a marriage ceremony in the house. Soon after the wedding, Ruggles gave the couple $5 and booked their passage on a steamship to New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Throughout his years as an Underground Railroad station master, Ruggles distributed countless anti-slavery publications and advocated for “practical abolitionism,” or the idea that each person should actively take part in emancipating Black Americans. He wasn’t without enemies: twice his shop was burned down, and he was physically attacked on several occasions. By his late twenties, Ruggles’s health was failing, and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child encouraged him to come live with the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a self-sufficient community in Florence, Massachusetts, that championed equal rights for all. There, Ruggles regained some of his strength through hydrotherapy, and he eventually opened his own hydrotherapy hospital, where Douglass often visited him. When he died at age 39, it was Douglass who wrote his obituary.

7. and 8. Harriet Forten Purvis and Robert Purvis

Robert Purvis, the son of a white man and a free Black woman, was active in practically all facets of Philadelphia’s anti-slavery movement from the 1830s through the Civil War. He helped found and lead the Vigilant Association of Philadelphia and its Vigilance Committee, which offered boarding, clothing, medical attention, legal counsel, and northern passage to fugitives; and he also worked alongside prominent abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison to establish the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society a few years later.

Since women weren’t originally allowed to be members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Robert’s wife, Harriet Forten Purvis, joined Lucretia Mott and other activists in forming the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in December 1833. Harriet, like Mott, would go on to become a leader in the suffrage movement, too.

Robert and Harriet had both come from extremely successful and respected Philadelphia families, and they used their influence—and financial resources—to assist escapees in any way they could. Their house on Lombard Street became a well-traversed thoroughfare for fugitives heading north.

“He was President of the ‘Underground Railroad,’ and throughout that long period of peril his house was a well-known station where his horses and carriages and his personal attendance were ever at the service of the travelers upon that road,” read Robert’s 1898 obituary in The New York Times.

The couple’s high-profile work sometimes made them a target for those who opposed the upward mobility of Black Americans. In August 1842, a parade celebrating the eighth anniversary of the end of slavery in the British West Indies devolved into violence when an Irish mob—resenting their own low position in society—attacked the revelers and began looting and setting fire to Black-owned buildings along the street. The rioters planned to progress to the Purvises’ house, where Robert stood armed and waiting, but a Catholic priest reportedly diverted them.

After that, Robert and Harriet moved their family to a farmhouse in Byberry, a northeastern neighborhood of Philadelphia, and promptly turned their new estate into another station on the Underground Railroad. Robert approximated that between 1831 and 1861, he had helped emancipate about one person per day (though it’s possible that this calculation included his broader work with various anti-slavery organizations).

9. Samuel D. Burris

Samuel D. Burris worked tirelessly during the 1840s to lead fugitives through his home state of Delaware and into Philadelphia, where he lived with his wife and children. Though Burris was a free man, he could be imprisoned and sold into slavery if caught helping fugitives in Delaware—and in 1847, he was.

Officials apprehended Burris when he was trying to smuggle a woman named Maria Matthews onto a steamship. Since they set his bail at $5000 (more than $157,000 today), he was forced to spend months in jail while awaiting trial. “They uphold and applaud those slave traffickers, and those inhuman and unmerciful leeches, in their soul-damning conduct, by making the colored people legal subjects for their bloody principles to feast on,” he wrote from his cell, in a letter that was later published in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.

On November 2, 1847, Burris was convicted, fined $500, and sentenced to 10 more months in prison. After that, he’d be sold into slavery for 14 years. While Burris was serving his 10-month sentence, a group of Philadelphia abolitionists amassed $500 and sent a Quaker named Isaac Flint to pose as a trader and purchase Burris at the auction. Luckily, Flint ended up being the highest bidder (though according to William Still’s account in The Underground Railroad, luck had little to do with it: Flint savvily bought off a Baltimore trader who had tried to top his bid).

“[Burris] was not by any means aware of the fact that he had fallen into the hands of friends, but, on the contrary, evidently labored under the impression that his freedom was gone,” Still wrote. “The joyful news was whispered in the ear of Burris that all was right; that he had been bought with abolition gold to save him from going south.”

As Delaware State University historian Robin Krawitz told CNN, Burris continued helping fugitives after his release, and angry Delawarians actually petitioned the government to discipline him more severely. After officials enacted legislation that recommended public whipping as punishment for anyone caught a second time, Burris halted his operations in Delaware. Instead, he moved to San Francisco, where he raised funds to help newly freed people establish themselves.

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