Did the underground railroad run through North Carolina?

Answer 1

Yes it did. Manumission of individual slaves and abolition of slavery in general were popular sentiments among the Quakers of Piedmont North Carolina. Many of the leaders of the anti-slavery movement were those Friends who had moved to North Carolina from the island of Nantucket in the 1770s, of whom Levi Coffin of New Garden (now the site of Guilford College) in Guilford County was the so-called "President" of the Underground Railroad, and his first cousin Elisha Coffin of Franklinville was the founder of the 1838 Franklinville factory, an early alternative to investing money in slavery. Levi Coffin's autobiographical memoir 'Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad: Being a Brief History of the Labors of a Lifetime in Behalf of the Slave, with the Stories of Numerous Fugitives, Who Gained Their Freedom through His Instrumentality, and Many Other Incidents'(Cincinnati, 1880) contains an entire chapter (Chapter II- The Story of Jack Barnes) recounting Levi's efforts to assist Elisha Coffin in 1821 to smuggle an escaped slave to Ohio. Elisha Coffin at that time owned the site of Franklinville, where he operated a grist mill. Elisha Coffin's house on that property (built circa-1835) is one of the pivotal structures of the Franklinville Historic District.

In his book Levi Coffin notes several actual routes from central North Carolina, into the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia, into Ohio and Indiana. Although Levi Coffin moved to Indiana in 1830 to direct efforts on that end of the "freedom trail," other North Carolina Quakers continued to help slaves escape to the North up until the Civil War.