Peterboro, N.Y. – The Hamlet of Peterboro NY will open its three day Peterboro Freedom Festival: Juneteenth Weekend on Saturday, June 17th at 2 pm at the Smithfield Community Center, 5255 Pleasant Valley Road, Peterboro NY 13134 with Authors for Freedom. Karol Kucinski, Co-Chair NAHOF Hall and Museum Committee, will introduce the four writers and their books which are at various stages of publication and which have connections to Peterboro and to the quest for freedom.

At 2 pm Saturday, June 17 Madison County Historian Matthew Urtz will present his popular book Honoring World War Casualties of Madison County, New York, published by The History Press in August 2022. Urtz tells the harrowing stories and experiences of veterans provided by local newspapers, personal accounts, and interviews. Madison County answered the call to service and has left behind a generation of those who served in World War I and II, and lost their lives in service to freedom around the globe.

Urtz was appointed the Madison County Historian in April of 2010. In October of 2014 Urtz, the Madison County Clerk’s Office and Madison/Oneida BOCES received the Excellence in the Education Use of Local Government Records by a Local Government award by the New York State Archives for their work incorporating local government documents into teachers’ lesson plans.  In October of 2013, the Madison County Historian’s Office started a project to record the stories of Veterans from Madison County.  The project is ongoing and to date over 20 veterans stories have been recorded. In the fall of 2018, the historian’s office launched “History Where you Eat.”  The event features a brief history and tour of local historic restaurants. Close to 20 events have been offered since the program started and they have drawn over 1000 people to local restaurants. During the COVID pandemic Urtz conducted nearly 100 interviews with business owners, public officials, teachers, school superintendents, not for profit organizations and how the pandemic impacted them. In April of 2022, Urtz received the Emily Marshall Champion of Tourism by Madison County Tourism.

At 2:40 Saturday, June 17, David Goodrich, Rockville MD, will relate how, in his publication On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad, he followed the stories of 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, Canada. Travelling south, he rode from New Orleans, where the enslaved were bought and sold, through Mississippi and the heart of the Delta Blues. Goodrich traveled to the Borderland along the Ohio River, a kind of no-mans-land between North and South in the years before the Civil War. There, slave hunters roamed both banks of the river, trying to catch people as they fled for freedom. He traveled 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 his spirit was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance.

David Goodrich is a retired climate scientist who worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and served as the Director of the UN Global Climate Observing System in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition to cycling across the US, he has ridden down the Appalachians and across Montana, South Dakota, France and Spain. His earlier books, also from Pegasus, were A Hole in the Wind: A Climate Scientist’s Bicycle Journeys Across the US and A Voyage Across an Ancient Ocean: A Bicycle Journey Through the Northern Dominion of Oil. While following Harriet Tubman’s route from Maryland to Ontario, of course, Peterboro was one the sites he studied.

At 3:20 pm Saturday, June 17th, Marilyn Higgins will share the stories that she writes in Dreams of Freedom, her first novel. In 1833, dark Irish, twenty-year-old Aileen O’Malley crosses the Atlantic and begins a decades-long journey to find her father and kidnapped half-siblings along the tumultuous Erie Canal corridor. She experiences religious bigotry, is stalked by a man she refused to marry in Ireland, and is unexpectedly aided in her search by a handsome American abolitionist. Their efforts to find the children are foiled by violence, prophets speaking of golden tablets, the death of her father, and utopian communities with unconventional sexual practices. When Aileen witnesses the suicide of slaves avoiding capture, and the painful displacement of the Haudenosaunee people, her faith is shaken and she embarks on an activist path to divert her new nation from the cruelty that haunted her native Ireland for centuries.

Marilyn Higgins has spent her life loving and working in the cities, small towns, and places of extraordinary natural beauty that comprise upstate New York.  Her passion for the area’s rich history and her belief in its profound impact on America’s national identity motivated her to write Dreams of Freedom. As the chief economic development officer for National Grid and later Syracuse University, she was told intriguing stories, visited mysterious mansions, and was shown the hidden artifacts of Erie Canal communities. Her fascination with these places continues. A twenty-year volunteer with the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, she is currently working with the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum and her home community of Canastota NY to promote Abolition Road, a public reenactment of the 1835 canal journey and walk of 104 abolitionists up a steep nine-mile hill to Peterboro to form the New York Anti-Slavery Society.

At 4:00 pm Saturday, June 17, Jesse Olsavsky will introduce his new book The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionist,1835-1861, which tells the dramatic story of how vigilance committees organized the Underground Railroad and revolutionized the abolitionist movement. These groups, based primarily in northeastern cities, defended Black neighborhoods from police and slave catchers. As the urban wing of the Underground Railroad, they helped as many as ten thousand refugees, building an elaborate network of like-minded sympathizers across boundaries of nation, gender, race, and class. Based on the recorded testimony of thousands of freedom seekers who came to the vigilance committees and told their life stories, the book begins with the ways fugitives escaped slavery, grasped the political economy of slavery, developed their own political imaginations, and imparted their knowledge to abolitionists. It shows how these fugitive-abolitionist dialogues not only radicalized abolitionist sensibilities and tactics, but also inspired novel forms of feminism, prison abolition, reparationism, and utopian speculation. Olsavsky reveals how the committees cultivated a movement of ideas animated by a motley assortment of agitators and intellectuals, formerly enslaved runaways—who grasped the economy of slavery, developed their own political imaginations, and communicated strategies of resistance to abolitionists—serve as the book’s central focus.

Jesse Olsavsky is an Assistant Professor of History at Duke Kunshan University, China. He is an historian who looks at slavery, abolition, and their long legacies. He is currently working on a book titled In the Tradition: The Abolitionist Tradition and Human Emancipation, which looks at how twentieth century movements, in both the US and numerous parts of the world studied, wrote about, and re-invoked the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement during their own struggles for self-determination.

The Peterboro United Methodist Church Sandwich Shop will be open Monday, June 17th from 12 – 5 pm for pick-up of sandwiches reserved at ndenison46@gmail.com or 315-849-7540 by May 31.

Registration and Hospitality is open from noon to 5 pm on Monday, June 17th at the Smithfield Community Center, 5255 Pleasant Valley Road, Peterboro NY 13134. The registration site includes information tables, parity snacks, sales, and exhibits including the Underground Railroad in New York State from the NYS Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. The exterior exhibits at the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark are open dawn to dusk for folks who respect property.

Admission on Saturday, June 17 and Sunday, June 19 is by donation. Admission to the three Monday afternoon June 19th programs is 19 dollars with paid reservations by May 31 to National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum, PO 55, Peterboro NY 13134 or at www.NationalAbolitionHallofFameandMuseum.org. Admission after May 31 and at the door is $30

For information and updates: www.NationalAbolitionHallofFameandMuseum.org, nahofm1835@gmail.com, PO Box 55, Peterboro NY 13134, 315-308-1890

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