A Victorian-era family portrait purchased for $15 at a Baltimore estate sale has been identified as a rare historical document showing Underground Railroad activity that continued 20 years after the abolition of slavery. The photograph was discovered in autumn 2019 in a cardboard box during the clearing of a three-story Victorian row house in the Fells Point neighborhood. The home’s last occupant, elderly Helen Morrison, had lived there alone for nearly 40 years. Her distant relatives hired an estate sale company to liquidate generations of accumulated belongings.
Dr. Raymond Chen, a professor of American history at Johns Hopkins University who collects 19th-century photographs of Black families, bought the portrait. The image showed a prosperous Black family posed formally in an elegant parlor, with a large ornate mirror mounted on the wall behind them. The photographer’s mark identified the studio as Bradford and Sons, Baltimore, 1885.
Chen created a high-resolution digital scan for preservation and detailed examination. When he zoomed in on the mirror’s reflection, Chen spotted something that did not belong: two human figures in what appeared to be a dark basement or cellar. One figure appeared restrained, with what looked like metal shackles catching the light. The photograph dated to 1885, two decades after slavery was legally abolished.
Chen immediately called Dr. Adrienne Baptiste, a historian specializing in African-American history and the Underground Railroad. Baptiste and Chen agreed on two possible explanations. The family might have been hiding people who had escaped illegal bondage, with restraints not yet removed.
Alternatively, the situation could have been darker, involving coercion or exploitation. They traced the photograph through the studio’s 1885 commission book, finding an entry dated October 14th: “Freeman family, five persons, parlor setting with prominent mirror background, $18. Special commission family requested privacy and evening appointment. Full payment received in advance.
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A small cross in the margin was Bradford’s notation for clients considered trustworthy or sympathetic to progressive causes, including known abolitionist families. Property and census records identified the family as Thomas Freeman, a Black merchant aged 38; his wife Clara, 35; and their three children. The family lived at 47 Lancaster Street in Fells Point, the same neighborhood where the photograph was found. Records from Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, one of Baltimore’s oldest Black congregations and a center of abolitionist activity, showed Thomas Freeman had been active since the early 1870s.
A letter dated July 1883 from Reverend Morris Williams referred to “Brother Freeman” continuing “the blessed work of our cause” and described his house as “a sanctuary for the lost and the pursued. ”
The decisive evidence came from the journal of Samuel Carter, an Underground Railroad conductor in Maryland and Pennsylvania. An entry dated October 10th, 1885 read: “Received word from TF in Baltimore that two souls arrived at his house two nights ago, having escaped from a farm in southern Maryland where they’d been held in illegal bondage nearly 2 years. A brother and sister, ages 16 and 14, bearing marks of their captivity.
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An entry from October 13th noted that slave catchers had searched the neighborhood, but the Freemans concealed the siblings and the search failed. On October 15th, Carter recorded that Thomas Freeman commissioned the family portrait “as both precaution and symbolic declaration” that his house was “a place of freedom. ”
The siblings, identified as Daniel, 16, and Ruth, 14, were safely transported to Philadelphia within weeks. Tracing the family forward revealed both courage and cost.
In June 1888, unknown assailants vandalized the Freeman home, shattering windows, destroying furniture, and leaving threatening messages. A letter from Reverend Williams described it as punishment and warning connected to slave-catching interests, including explicit threats against Clara and the children. The Freemans sold the Lancaster Street house in February 1889 at a financial loss and moved to West Baltimore. Thomas Freeman died in 1902.
His obituary described him as a man who “dedicated his life to the welfare of his people,” a phrase that suggested some understood what he had done. Clara lived until 1921, known for charitable work with newly arrived Black migrants. The siblings’ identities were confirmed through a 1936 oral history recorded by the WPA. Ruth, then elderly, described being held with her brother on a Maryland farm after the war, working from dawn to dark and being beaten.
She recounted walking three days to Baltimore, being taken in by Thomas and Clara Freeman, and hidden in their basement for almost two weeks before transport north. Descendants of both families were located. Marcus Freeman, a retired engineer in Silver Spring, Maryland, is Thomas and Clara’s great-great-grandson. Diane Jackson, a social worker in Philadelphia, is Ruth’s great-granddaughter.
Neither had known the full story. A virtual ceremony was held on October 14th, 2020, exactly 135 years after the photograph was taken, with more than 60 descendants and historians participating. An in-person reunion followed in October 2021, where a historical marker was unveiled near the former site of the Freeman home. The photograph was featured in a major exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in fall 2022, with the mirror reflection displayed at high resolution.
The story was covered by national media and produced as a PBS special. Chen and Baptiste co-authored “The Mirror’s Witness: Thomas and Clara Freeman, and the Hidden History of Freedom,” published in 2023. Proceeds established the Freeman Morrison Scholarship Fund for descendants of Underground Railroad activists and post-emancipation bondage survivors.