ALBANY – At 194 Livingston Avenue, Albany, there is a valuable piece of history, full of mystery, perseverance, freedom, and prosperity. Now serving the community as the Underground Railroad Education Center, the tall brick house stands as a monument to the past, present and future.
Mary Liz and Paul Stewart founded the Underground Railroad History Project in 2003, after incorporating under the state education department. “Our belief was that the voices of the people we were engaging with, which had been written out of the history of the Underground Railroad, belonged to the community by right; their voices, their stories,” said Mary Liz Stewart.
As the Underground Railroad History Project travelled to various locations in the Capital Region to tell the stories of the Underground Railroad, they made a surprising discovery about their work. “This information was new to people…stories that reflected places and spaces in the local community,” Mary Liz Stewart explained. “It became a progressively expanding story.”
The history and stories they would share would reflect the towns they were visiting, with the goal of making local history as tangible as possible for everyone. It was this sense of history within the community that first motivated them.
“It was originally a project that became an entity that grew out of Mary Liz and my attempts to make sense of the Underground Railroad’s story locally,” said Paul Stewart.
Mary Liz Stewart, an educator, and Paul Stewart, a writer, were both interested in the local history of the Underground Railroad, but initial research found “almost nothing on people who were in our local community,” said Paul Stewart.
It was the absence of immediate information that sparked their interest in uncovering the past in Albany. They began at libraries, where with more intensive research they began to explore historical documents from the 1800s and put pieces into place.
“Albany’s history is such that a lot has been done to remove its older buildings instead of rehabilitating and restoring,” Mary Liz Stewart remarked. “And what are we interested in? The older buildings. This shifted our focus to the stories of people.”
At the end of 2003, a friend of theirs conducting their own research at the American Antiquarian Society in Massachusetts contacted them with a clue for a building address in Albany; it was a copy of an original document held at the American Antiquarian Society, which said at the top: VIGILANCE COMMITTEE OFFICE: 198 LUMBER STREET, ALBANY, NY.
“The first question was, where is Lumber Street?” Mary Liz Stewart recalled.
They discovered that the current address of 194 Livingston Ave was originally 198 Lumber Street after a thorough examination of the streets and maps of historic Albany.
“We were able as an organization to purchase the building and have begun restoration,” she added. “While restoring it, we are also keeping the building open for public usage so that we can continue to have a very tangible artifact through which we can share this empowering history.”
At the Myers Residence, visitors are encouraged to take part in the tour ‘experiences’ where they are allowed to interact with the historical furniture and newspapers and tangibly experience the historical home.
The building itself can be traced back to 1841 when Sloop Captain John Johnson purchased the lot along Lumber Street with the intention of building a building there. A skilled, record-breaking captain, he traveled back and forth between Albany and New York City, hauling building materials and possibly even livestock and people.
John Johnson was the brother of Harriet Johnson, who in 1827 married Steven Myers. The rest of his life still remains an unwritten mystery, but his legacy is preserved at the Myers residence.
“As we get into the 1850s, we don’t know a lot more about what happened with John Johnson. But we do know that he let his sister and his brother-in-law stay at his home… Stephen and Harriet Myers lived at 198 Lumber Street in the mid-1850s,” said Paul Stewart. “While they were there, they did what they had been doing at every other address that they had lived at since 1830 which was to help people in connection with the Underground Railroad.”
Steven Meyers was born enslaved in New York State and was given his legal freedom in 1818. Until it was legally abolished in 1827, New York State still allowed slavery; however, there was a significant amount of state-wide support for enslavement.
“The economic connections were strong for New York to not rock the boat too much,” said Mary Liz Stewart. “There were a number of laws on the books that still supported the institutions of enslavement in various ways and supported the sustaining of prejudicial notions toward people of color.”
Harriet Myers née Johnson, was born free into a family that had amassed wealth as boat captains on the Hudson. Her brother John Johnson followed in the footsteps of their father. “Nonetheless, they were impacted by the pro-slavery sentiment,” she added.
“Harriet could see these things going on. As was written in her obituary, she was a woman who was ‘well posted on state and national policy, a reader of books, and a reader of men,’” explained Paul Stewart. “She was certainly an astute observer of things that were happening in the world around her.”
“One of the things that was operative for Steven Meyers was that he probably had within
