William Still and the Underground Railroad

Although it was William who ran station two, the hub of the American Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, beginning in the 1840s, his siblings accomplished a staggering list of professional, entrepreneurial, social welfare, and legal activities while the mass of American slaves lay in chains in the South. After the Civil War, when emancipation came to the slaves, William Still, a successful coal merchant, used his own money to finance a host of civil rights and other social reforms to elevate the freed men arriving in the city.