Chester County’s Voices Underground is creating a national memorial to the Underground Railroad

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A Chester County-based organization promoting racial healing through storytelling is working with Longwood Gardens, Lincoln University and other partners to create a National Memorial to the Underground Railroad.

The memorial will be built on three distinct sites in the county to “tell a comprehensive story,” said LaNisha Cassell, executive director of Voices Underground, the nonprofit leading the project.

One site, Longwood Gardens, will focus on telling the story of Quaker abolitionist efforts. At Lincoln University, the nation’s first Historically Black degree-granting institution, the memorial will commemorate the work of Black abolitionists and freedom seekers — stories, Cassell said, that are too often sidelined in narratives about the Underground Railroad.

The third site will be a landscape memorial, somewhere on the border between Chester County and the state of Delaware. That site will afford visitors a unique perspective.

“You’ll have that experience of going from enslavement to freedom,” she said.

Gregory Thompson, who co-founded Voices Underground in 2017  and now serves as its creative director, said that in commemorating the local history, the memorial will tell a story of national significance.

“Chester County is really to the Underground Railroad what, say, Selma or Montgomery are to the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. “Apart from some very faithful local, small organizations trying to maintain that history, that history is not broadly known. There are no memorials of scale.”

He said the memorials will help address a larger “narrative inequity.” According to a 2021 audit of national monuments by Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, the vast majority represented white men.

“[The memorial will] recover a story about cross-boundary collaborations for freedom that was at the heart of Chester County, and to tell those stories again at a time when we desperately need it,” Thompson said.

The three-site format reflects the way in which the Underground Railroad was geographically distributed, and required movement between different places, he said. The memorial as a whole, particularly the landscape site, will invite visitors into the physical realities of the approximately 100,000 people who sought to escape slavery via the Underground Railroad.

“The experience of freedom seekers was not one of buildings, but one of trees and one of fields and one of streams,” Thompson said. “And so we’re really trying to center their experience and allow guests to have the experience of crossing the border. And so in aggregate, it allows us to tell the story of the Underground Railroad much more truly and broadly, and it also allows the guests to have the experience of movement in and out of these communities, which is exactly what the freedom seeker would have had.”

‘Where we are, where we’ve been’

Cassell said she believes memorials can be somber or celebratory, and have the power to “bring people together.”

“I don’t think we can ever really forget that slavery happened, but I think there are certain aspects that we just don’t know about,” she said. “So I think it’ll serve to educate and also, again, to highlight those stories that have never been shared or that people just don’t know about … I think all three sites will be an opportunity for people to really reflect, to just really consider where we are, where we’ve been.”

In line with Voices Underground’s mission, those stories will center on the Black Americans who played an important role in local and national history, including figures like William Still, Cassell said.

“He was a freedom seeker who documented a lot of things,” she said. “And so a lot of historians are able to get a lot of information about the Underground Railroad in this area because of his documentation. And even though his story is one that is known relatively well, depending on who’s looking or researching, those are the kind of stories that I really want to be able to highlight as we do that research. There’s so much local history in terms of freedom seekers and abolitionists.”

Research by scholars and community members involved with Lincoln University’s Center for Public History, established by the university and Voices Underground in 2021, will also inform the memorial and the stories it tells.

For Thompson, memorials are about what a society decides it wants to remember and what it wants to forget. The artist and activist has been working on another memorial in Memphis, Tennessee, commemorating the sanitation worker strike that was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last march before his assassination in 1968.

Remembering the past can also shed light on present-day political and social challenges, he said.

“We’re working to try to say one of the things we want to remember is this cross-racial, cross-gender, cross-jurisdictional struggle that Americans joined in for the sake of freedom and emancipation,” he said of the Underground Railroad memorial. “And this struggle was really led by the freedom seekers themselves, but supported by these other actors. And we feel like on the one hand, at the broadest level, this is about seeking to ensure that this particular story is enshrined in American memory and not just an American myth. And secondly, that this story can tell of a moment when citizens actually made principal decisions against the law to collaborate in the interest of the well-being of their neighbors, and we think that’s not just a timely message, but a message that has enduring relevance.”

A collective effort

Cassell said the organization is “honing in” on a location for the third landscape site and hopes to have that finalized by the end of the year.

The project is still in the pre-design phase, but a design team will deliver landscape analysis and early conceptual designs by the end of this year. Strategic partners include Square Roots Collective, Lincoln University, and Longwood Gardens; the initiative has also received support from the Mellon Foundation, the Longwood Foundation, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office and county and state officials.

Thompson said they hope to send out a request for proposals for artists to partner in creating the final designs at some point in 2026.

Cassell said some ideas include a visitor’s center and trails, as well as utilizing other features unique to each site and its respective assets.

She also hopes to connect with more organizations doing important historic remembrance and tourism promotion in the area, including the Kennett Underground Railroad Center, the Kennett Heritage Center, and Kennett Collaborative.

“There’s so many organizations that are doing so many things in an effort to bring people together, bring our community together, and make sure that our communities thrive,” she said. “And so we really want to be a part of that, and we know that that cannot be done individually.”

This weekend, Voices Underground and its partners are presenting a number of events for Juneteenth. Its theme this year is “Black Joy.” Celebrations and events include a comedy performance at Longwood Gardens on Friday, a festival at The Creamery in Kennett Square on Saturday, and a memorial walk, wreath-laying, and multi-faith church service followed by a festival at Lincoln University on Sunday.