II. The "Shadow South" Trail
Description
A self-guided regional driving tour of Quaker meetings, Abolitionist, anti-Confederacy and African-American heritage sites combined with a driving tour out of the region through Virginia and Kentucky to underground railroad sites in Ohio and Indiana.

Significance
The region’s heritage of dissent is its most defining religious, political and cultural characteristic, yet it is also the least understood and most undervalued part of its identity. The isolated pockets of anti-slavery, anti-Confederate, pro-industrial activism have been called "the Other South" by historians, but almost nothing has been done to educate modern residents of the region about the attitudes and actions of their ancestors. After the recent media flap over Randolph Community College’s ‘happy slave’ Confederate history class, UNC history professor George Tindall noted in an editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer that the irony lost on most Randolph County residents is that their counterparts of 1861 were overwhelmingly opposed to slavery and secession, and that the county was a hotbed of insurrection throughout the Civil War. Members of the Society of Friends were at the forefront of the intellectual and political opposition to the slave economy. Residents of the region ran escaped slaves up the ‘underground road’ to Indiana and Ohio, agitated for manumission and abolition, founded factories as an alternative to the slave economy, and were persecuted by the Confederate government for refusing to serve in the war. Though all of these things are known in the region, all of them have been minimized and undervalued, even though much of the region’s political isolation from mainstream North Carolina can be traced to those factors.

Assets
The region has more Friends meetings than the rest of North Carolina put together. Randolph County has the most; Guilford runs second; Alamance third; Chatham has one in High Falls. The Cane Creek Meeting at Snow Camp was the first Quaker meeting in the Piedmont. It is the mother of all the other meetings in Guilford and Randolph, and is the site of the Sword of Peace summer outdoor drama. New Garden Meeting at Guilford College is the next oldest institution. Guilford College, formerly New Garden Boarding School, is one of the finest institutions of Quaker higher-education in the nation.

Sites connected with the abolitionist Wesleyan missionaries of the 1840s and 1850s should be documented, as should sites connected with the Colonization and Manumission society of the 1820s. The over-mountain trail used to smuggle escaped slaves to Quaker settlements in Ohio and Indiana is documented in the autobiography of Levi Coffin, even though it is overlooked by the National Park Service Underground Railroad project. The Quaker impetus behind industrial development should be emphasized.

Current information on African-American heritage sites is minimal here, as all across North Carolina.

Documentation
The Friends Historical Collection at the Guilford College Library is the depository for all southern Quaker records. It is understaffed and underfunded, and much of the collection is poorly catalogued. The Autobiography of Levi Coffin is the best source for early anti-slavery activism in the region. The records of the Wesleyan missionaries and the Manumission society have been published. The supporting material for this theme is scattered and has infrequently been collected; the assembly of this narrative would be one of the primary historical contributions of the entire corridor.

Partners

• UNC history graduate schools
• Quaker schools and historians
• Quaker meetings
• African-American historians and researchers
• The National Park Service UGRR project
• Indiana and Ohio Friends and UGRR institutions

Funding
NPS?