The Lake Erie Shore. Ron Brown
a torrent in 1850 when the American president, Millard Fillmore, signed the notorious Fugitive Slave Act, allowing bounty hunters to capture escaped slaves and making it illegal for Americans to harbour them. Not even free Blacks were safe.
Josiah Hensen, the inspiration for Harriet Beacher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, recalls in his diaries arriving on the banks of the Niagara River at a large house with pillars. That house still stands. It is Bertie Hall. The basement, unlike most homes, is four metres high, with a secret room hidden behind a moveable bookshelf. From this room it is speculated that a tunnel led the short distance to the riverbank through which the runaway slaves could enter the house undetected. (While there is an anomaly in the masonry on the wall that suggests a tunnel entrance, its existence remains only anecdotal.) The history of Bertie Hall suggests, too, that illicit products also might have found their way through this secret corridor.
The Underground Railroad helped thousands of African-American slaves flee to Canada, using such hiding places as the specially equipped basement of Fort Erie’s Bertie Hall.
Harriet Tubman, the legendary “Black Moses,” who guided more than five hundred slaves to Canada, mostly to St. Catherines, is said to have used Bertie Hall, as well. The legacy of the Underground Railroad has left more than merely buildings. A series of meetings at a local hotel resulted in the formation of the Niagara Movement, an initiative that eventually evolved into the widely respected NAACP.2
Bertie Hall is a stunning building in its own right. Built by William Forsyth between 1826 and 1834 and named after Sir Peregrine Bertie, Duke of Ancaster, it displays the Greek Revival style with pillars stretching to the portico above the front entrance. Forsyth, who had built the Pavilion Hotel at Table Rock in Niagara Falls, one of the cataract’s first tourist accommodations, moved to Fort Erie where he acquired an eighty-two-hectare (216-acre) tract of land on the Niagara River.
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