Boston has been known as a stop along the Underground Railroad, a place for enslaved people from the South to find safety in free states.
A local author's new bestselling book tells the story of one couple's incredible escape from Georgia to Beacon Hill. But even she had not been inside the home where they stayed or seen the actual tunnel — that is, until a surprising moment while doing an interview with NBC10 Boston.
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Ilyon Woo took us on an unusual tour of Beacon Hill, showing us the maze of little-known spots that in the late 1840s helped to keep newly-freed enslaved people safe.
"Here's the African Meeting House. And then these are the alleyways. They're all over the place," she said.
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In several unmarked passageways, bounty hunters unfamiliar with the city could easily have become lost.
"If you need to run, this is a good place to run into," Woo said in one of the alleys.
The Cambridge native wrote the New York Times bestseller "Master Slave Husband Wife."
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It details the story of the escape of Ellen and William Craft from slavery in Georgia to find freedom in Boston. Ellen disguised herself as a sickly, wealthy white gentleman, and William as her servant.
In her decade's worth of research, Woo combed through thousands of documents, visiting numerous historic sites, but a central part of the Crafts' time in Boston eluded her.
The Hayden House on Beacon Hill is where Ellen and William lived for two years and were married. Lewis and Harriet Hayden were themselves newly freed from slavery in Kentucky. They had set up a prominent safe house along the Underground Railroad on what's now Phillips Street.
"They were hiding right here," said Woo. "It's really incredible. I've never been inside. It's privately owned, but I hear that there are underground tunnels there."
Then, on an early spring day, in the middle of our interview, the door opened at the Hayden House, and the current owners — the Giers — invited us in.
"I'll start with the house being about 1835, and everything's original," says Mary Gier.
Mary and John Gier have owned the home since the 1970s and were eager to show Woo all of its well-preserved corners, including a hidden tunnel.
"It's about four feet wide and eight feet — we have eight feet of it or so," Mary Grier said. "We know it went as far as West Cedar Street, the next street down."
And it was just as Woo described in her book.
"A second door led out from the basement while a secret tunnel, a dark crawl through space accessible only from the sub-basement, allowed other visitors to enter and exit the house unseen," the passage reads.
Seeing inside the time capsule, into the home where the Crafts lived during their time in Boston, left Woo flooded with emotions.
"Boston was just swarmed at this time. There are all these people waiting to capture the Crafts. And they were here, and they were fortified here, and they were sheltered by these incredible heroes," she said. "It's overwhelming to be in the space, really. Wow."
The visit had finally and fully brought the Crafts to life.
"You know, there have been times along this journey when the history, the presence of the people in the story, feels so real," Woo said. "It's a feeling I've really tried to keep alive by keeping pictures, images of people close, but sometimes, you enter a space, and the presence of those people becomes just palpable. And that's what I felt there. I felt that they had been there."
