PROFILE: Bringing the Underground Railroad to life

By Denise Jewell
Niagara Gazette

February 02, 2007 08:43 pm

— When Kevin Cottrell started running heritage tours to highlight the region’s Underground Railroad history more than a decade ago, he thought interest in the subject would eventually run its course.
Instead, Cottrell and others say it has only grown stronger.
Tours by Cottrell’s company, Motherland Connextions, were featured on a recent episode of the Travel Channels’ “Not Your Average Travel Guide” that focused on Niagara Falls attractions on both sides of the border. The television show has spurred requests from tourists around the country who want to experience the Underground Railroad re-enactments.
“I would have thought that the window would have closed by now, and that the trend and the awareness had peaked,” said Cottrell, 45, who is also an adjunct professor at the University at Buffalo. “Not at all; if anything, it’s only gotten bigger. We’re pretty low key around here.”
Cottrell’s work to promote Underground Railroad history began in the early ’90s with a 15-day, 18-city tour of east coast cities that included Atlanta and Philadelphia. He and a handful of other people drove a church van to visit sites along the Underground Railroad — the network used to guide slaves north to freedom.
Cottrell started Motherland Connextions in 1993 and 1994 shortly after that as a way to continue the work.
Through the years, the business has grown to provide corporate tours and packages for Girl Scouts and other groups. The hallmark of the organization are theatrical re-enactments that bring to life the history of escaping slaves, bounty hunters and those that helped along the way.
Cottrell says the history reaches across all demographic lines.
“People have this taste for the history, and the thing about this history that’s so fascinating is that it’s black, brown, white, rich, powerful, poor. ... It literally hits every demographic that you can think about,” Cottrell said.
Carol Murphy, owner of Murphy Orchards in Newfane, which has an Underground Railroad site, agrees that interest in its history has grown in the last decade. When she first bought the farm 30 years ago, few people responded when she talked about the family farm’s involvement in the freedom trail.
Since then, Murphy said, she has seen a “steady and wonderful growth” in people’s appetite for the history. She attributes the growth to two events — a mandate by Congress that the National Parks Service begin to commemorate and preserve sites connected to the Underground Railroad and a state law that dictated that schools teach its history.
Murphy sees another reason for the history’s popularity with children.
“Children today are crying out for heroes, and when you’re talking about the Underground Railroad, you’re talking about ordinary people doing heroic things,” Murphy said.
Murphy, whose farm operates agricultural and historical tours, said people want to see and feel the history to understand it. Murphy’s farm has hosted Cottrell’s tours and was also featured on the Travel Channel.
“It’s a story about people having to make choices, and it gets them thinking about how difficult it was to make these choices. These were just devastating choices people had to make,” Murphy said. “What’s frequently left out of the story is what it was like for the people escaping slavery.”

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