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From the Archives:
Biographies:
Cynthia Catlin Miller
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Warren County
Historical Society |
Cynthia Catlin
Miller was a strong and defiant woman. Like the row of
rare hardwoods that bordered her land, she stood her ground,
unwavering in her fight against slavery. Cynthia established
the Female Assisting Society and the Ladies Fugitive Aid Society
in Sugar Grove, Pennsylvania where she lived with 30 other
abolitionist families from
Oneida,
New York.
She organized sewing circles to make clothes for escaping slaves
and hosted prominent abolitionists, including Frederick
Douglass, in her home. One winter, a fugitive slave came to
Cynthia’s back steps after camping out for an entire month.
Cynthia immediately took him in and called upon her
sister-in-law, Dr. Martha Van Renssalaer Catlin, a physician, to
attend to his wounds. He had frozen his feet and burned himself
while asleep by his fire.
In mourning for a great deal of her life having lost her husband,
Richard Bishop Miller, in 1832, Cynthia was rarely seen in any color
besides black.
Cynthia and Richard’s son, Franklin Richard Miller, established the
Miller Foundation Tree farm, the first tree farm in the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania.
The Miller Mansion on Big Tree Road in Sugar Grove, looks much the way
it did in the 1850s during the height of Underground Railroad
activities. Cynthia’s diaries are preserved at the
Warren County Historical Society.
Read more about Cynthia Catlin Miller and her family on the
Sugar Grove Underground Railroad web site published by Underground
Railroad historian and Miller descendant Greg Wilson. |
