He followed the most famous of conductors, Harriet Tubman, from where she was enslaved in Maryland, on the Eastern Shore, all the way to her family sanctuary at a tiny chapel in Ontario. Traveling south, he rode from New Orleans, where the enslaved were bought and sold, through Mississippi and the heart of the Delta. As we pedal along with him, Goodrich brings us to the Borderland along the Ohio River, a kind of no-mans-land between North and South in the years before the Civil War. Here, slave hunters roamed both banks of the river, trying to catch people as they fled to freedom. We travel to Oberlin, Ohio, a town that staunchly defended freedom-seekers, embodied in the life of Lewis Leary, who was lost in the fires of Harpers Ferry, but whose spirit was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance.

On Freedom Road enables us to see familiar places — New York and Philadelphia, New Orleans and Buffalo — in a very different light: from the vantage point of desperate people seeking to outrun the reach of slavery. Join in this journey to find the heroes and stories, both known and hidden, of the Underground Railroad.