For a freedom seeker walking north, Ashtabula County was the end of the road. Beyond it was Lake Erie, and beyond the lake was Canada and the end of any legal claim on them. That geography made this corner of Ohio one of the last and busiest links in the Underground Railroad, and it is why a county of farms and small towns produced one of the most aggressive antislavery politicians in Congress.

Most of it still stands. You can visit the house where people waited for a boat and the office where their case was argued in Washington, and they are about twenty minutes apart.

The Hubbard House

The Hubbard House sits at Lake Avenue and Walnut Boulevard in Ashtabula, a few hundred yards from the water. Colonel William Hubbard built it around 1840. He had come from New York about 1834 to join relatives running a lumber yard and warehouse on the harbor, had served as a captain in the War of 1812, and joined the local antislavery society.

The location was the whole point. People arriving here had finished the overland journey; what remained was the crossing. The Underground Railroad historian Wilbur Siebert recorded that “night after night conductors landed passengers in his cellar or hayloft.” It is one of the few documented terminus sites in the country that is open to the public, which is a rarer thing than it sounds — most Underground Railroad history survives as oral tradition and inference rather than as a building you can walk into.

Open Friday through Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m., Memorial Day through Labor Day, with tours by arrangement in the colder months.

Joshua Giddings and Jefferson

Twenty minutes inland, the county seat sent Joshua Reed Giddings to Congress in 1838 and kept him there until 1859. The House had adopted a gag rule to keep slavery off the floor entirely. Giddings spent two decades violating it. Congress formally censured him for it in 1842; he resigned his seat, went home to Jefferson, won it back in a special election five weeks later, and returned to do the same thing again.

His law office, built in 1823, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1974 — not for its architecture, which is a plain one-room building, but for what was argued inside it. He is generally credited with shaping Abraham Lincoln’s thinking on slavery. The building was moved to 102 East Jefferson Street in 2013 from its original site on North Chestnut beside his house. The Ashtabula County Historical Society operates it, by appointment.

Jefferson was not a one-man town on this. It was also home to Benjamin Wade, who went to the US Senate and became one of the chamber’s most forceful Radical Republicans. Two men from a village of a few thousand, both at the center of the national argument, for decades.

Betsey Mix Cowles and Austinburg

The county’s best-known abolitionist is not the one most visitors have heard of. Betsey Mix Cowles (1810–1876) grew up in Austinburg, and the Ohio Historical Society marker that stands for her on Center Road — State Route 45, a tenth of a mile north of Lampson Road — records a life that reached well beyond Ashtabula County.

She helped organise the Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1835, when she was twenty-five, and served as its secretary. She studied at Oberlin, completing two years there in 1840. She argued for immediate abolition rather than gradual emancipation, lectured publicly against slavery at a time when women speaking in public drew hostility of its own, and sheltered people escaping slavery at her home on the site the marker now occupies. She opposed the extension of slavery westward and protested the Mexican War.

In 1850 she presided over Ohio’s first women’s rights convention, at Salem — a landmark gathering in the American women’s movement, held two years after Seneca Falls. The following year she wrote a treatise arguing for equal pay for women working in the cities. She was the first dean of women at the Grand River Institute in Austinburg, and went on to become one of the first women to serve as a public school superintendent in Ohio.

She was also, by the record of the National Register, one of the two architects of the Congregational Church of Austinburg, the 1877 Gothic Revival church that still stands on Route 307. She died in 1876, the year before it was finished.

The marker was erected in 2003 by the Ohio Bicentennial Commission, the International Paper Company Foundation and the Ohio Historical Society. Her name appears as both Betsey and Betsy in the sources; the marker uses Betsey.

Why Here

Three things converged. The Western Reserve was settled largely from Connecticut, and the New England Congregationalist churches that came with those settlers were early and organized in their opposition to slavery. The county had a working port with boats leaving for Canada constantly and crews who could be trusted not to ask questions. And it was the last county before the water, so routes from across Ohio funneled into it.

That combination made Ashtabula County less a waypoint than a destination — the place the whole network was pointed at.

Making a Day of It

The Hubbard House and the Giddings Law Office are the two essential stops, and both are small, so the history goes down easier with the rest of the harbor around it. The Ashtabula Maritime and Surface Transportation Museum is five minutes from the Hubbard House in the old lighthouse keepers’ residence, and it explains the port that made the crossings possible. The Finnish American Heritage Museum covers the immigrant community that later filled the same neighborhoods.

In Jefferson, the Jefferson Historical Society and Jefferson Depot Village are both within a few blocks of the Giddings office.

Browse everything in museums and historic sites, or find somewhere to eat in Ashtabula and Jefferson.