Mapping the Underground Railroad: Landscapes of Defiance and Ingenuity

The Drawing Holds the Research

The exhibition began with two historic maps: Colton's Guide through Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin & Iowa, which documented the physical infrastructure of the 1840s—railroads, canals, stagecoach routes—and Wilbur Siebert's map of the Underground Railroad, drawn in the late 1890s from decades of interviews with Black men and women who had fled slavery through Ohio, and with the white landowners who had sheltered them. The conceptual premise of Crossings was to hold both maps simultaneously: to ask what it meant to lay the infrastructure of commerce and mobility against the clandestine geography of liberation.

Left: Guide through Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin & Iowa, John Calvin Smith and J. H. Colton, 1846. Right: "Underground" routes to Canada, Wilbur Henry Siebert, 1898. David Rumsey Map Center.

My first task was to translate these historic maps into spatial data using GIS—tracing the canals, railroad lines, and state boundaries from the Colton map, and then doing the same for the routes, nodes, and counties of the Siebert map. This process is slow and immersive. To digitize a map is to inhabit the mind of the cartographer who made it—to understand not only what was recorded, but what was omitted, generalized, or assumed. In the case of Siebert's map, what emerged from that inhabiting became the central problem of the work.

Siebert's 1898 Underground Railroad map translated into GIS—routes, nodes, and counties redrawn as spatial data.

Siebert's map is compelling and meticulously documented—the product of a career spent in painstaking research. But its routes privilege white abolitionist homes and stations, the structures that still stand today, as the primary nodes of the Underground Railroad. Siebert's network is organized around property and testimony filtered through his own position as a white academic in the 1890s. Reading it carefully, one begins to notice the gaps: the routes between stations, the places where people found shelter outside of documented abolitionist networks, the stories that left no record at all. The map tells us a great deal. It also tells us what it cannot tell us.

Transportation infrastructure and Underground Railroad routes overlaid. The conceptual premise of Crossings: to hold both maps simultaneously.

I begin every journey by transcribing the source material myself. This may seem like a strange act—the text is already in digital form, so why trace the words again in a document? In my designer's mind, I need to retrace the words slowly to allow for discovery. The act of deliberate retyping produces a different quality of attention—a slowing down that allows other aspects of the text to become visible. After transcription, I draw the journey as a series of spaces and stops—not stations necessarily, but the places and moments where the story needs to follow. The text becomes territory. The words become a map.

Siebert's 1898 Underground Railroad map translated into GIS—routes, nodes, and counties redrawn as spatial data.

From this spatial sketch, the architectural and landscape research begins: the structures at Ripley, the topography of the river crossings, the organization of agricultural land in Kentucky. Each site was modeled from historic maps, photographs, land records, and National Parks Service documentation. Where the record ran out—and it runs out often—the imagination was enlisted, carefully, with its limits acknowledged. History asks us to use our imagination to fill certain gaps. The obligation is to be honest about where the gap is, and where the filling begins.