Natick on the Underground Railroad

Real and imagined stories about the Underground Railroad had already begun to permeate American understandings of the nineteenth century and the Civil War by the 1880s. Stories about benevolent white Underground Railroad “conductors” were told in the Northern States to counter narratives popularized in the Southern states that decentered enslavement as a cause of the Civil War and justified the Confederacy. Simultaneously, Reconstruction efforts in the Southern states were faltering, and discriminatory policies and practices were creeping into U.S. politics. Historian Henry Louis Gates explains, “many white Northerners sought to preserve a heroic version of their past and found a useful tool in the Underground Railroad.” Is the story of the Walcott house a myth created in this particular historical and cultural context? Let’s trace the story from where it originated and examine how it changed. 

Hints of the story appeared in Edward Walcott’s 1876 obituary published in the Boston Journal on April 7. The obituary reads: “[Walcott’s] door was always open to the dusty fleeing bondsmen.” 

The minister of Natick’s First Congregational Church, Reverend John F. Norton, was the first to call Edward Walcott’s house a stop on the Underground Railroad in a chapter about Natick’s history published in a local history book in 1890. Moving to Natick following Edward Walcott’s death, Norton likely never heard first-hand accounts of the Underground Railroad from Mr. Walcott himself. However, members of the Walcott family and other contemporaries of Edward Walcott were involved with the church and town during Norton’s tenure. 

In March 1930, the Walcott house's deconstruction uncovered a small chamber in the basement, corroborating many people's belief that the home was connected to the Underground Railroad. However, they did not find a tunnel connecting the house to the railroad, which many people expected and hoped to see. 

Edward Walcott’s granddaughter, Helen Forbush, shared her theory about the chamber with local newspapers. Forbush believed the chamber served as an emergency hiding spot for those escaping enslavement. Forbush’s husband disagreed and thought the room was likely a cold air shaft. Helen Forbush believed the house was part of the Underground Railroad because she remembered her father, John W. Walcott’s stories about seeing black people eating in the servants’ kitchen and receiving instructions not to tell anybody about who he saw. To Helen Forbush, the chamber supported her father’s memories and her interpretation of those memories.

Wilbert H. Siebert mentioned the Walcott house in a study about the Underground Railroad in Massachusetts published by the American Antiquarian Society in 1935. Siebert emphasized the Walcott house’s proximity to the physical railroad, assuredly stating that refugees traveled by train and entered the Walcott home via a tunnel connecting the house and the railroad. After staying at the Walcott house, the refugees moved into Israel Howe Brown’s house in Sudbury. Many historians today regard Siebert’s writings and studies as largely inaccurate and responsible for much of the mythmaking about the Underground Railroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

by Gail Coughlin

Works cited:

Natick Historical Society Collections

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. “Who Really Ran the Underground Railroad?” https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/who-really-ran-the-underground-railroad/

History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, with Biographical Sketches of Many of the Pioneers and Prominent Men, Volume 1, ed. Dr. Hamilton Hurd, Philadelphia: J.W. Lewis & Co., 1890.

Morse Institute Library Online Newspaper Database

Siebert Wilbur H. The Underground Railroad in Massachusetts. American Antiquarian Society, 1935.