While cataloging a 1904 family portrait at the Detroit Historical Museum in November 2018, archivist Dr. Rebecca Foster noticed something unusual. The youngest daughter in the photograph, a girl of about six, was clutching a small object against her chest that seemed to matter a great deal to her. The child’s face showed fierce concentration, and her fingers were pressed tightly around what appeared to be a piece of paper.
The photograph had come from the estate of Clara Jenkins, who had died at 103 and left behind a collection of family materials. A note indicated the belongings had once belonged to her great-aunt, a Detroit woman named Ruth. Nothing was identified by name or explained in detail, but the image was flagged for high-resolution scanning. At maximum magnification, the object in the child’s hands proved to be a ticket.
It was issued by the Detroit and Cleveland Navigation Company and marked for special passage, good for the bearer and family. Handwritten instructions along the bottom read, “Safe passage arranged, present to conductor Wilson. Destroy after use. ”
Foster recognized the ticket as evidence of something significant.
In 1904, Detroit was a destination for Black families fleeing violence and oppressive labor systems in the South. Informal networks, often described as a new underground railroad, helped families relocate in secret, using coded documents and trusted contacts on the railroads. The fact that this family had documented their escape in a photograph seemed extraordinary. Foster traced the family through church records at Detroit’s Second Baptist Church.
In October 1904, Thomas and Katherine Price were registered as newly arrived members, along with their children William, James, and Ruth. The records noted they had recently come from Birmingham, Alabama. Ruth Price was the same woman named in the donation note, and she had lived in Detroit until 1982. In Birmingham, researcher Dr.
Marcus Williams helped Foster reconstruct what had happened before the family left. In September 1904, Thomas Price, a skilled carpenter, was arrested for breach of contract after demanding the wages he had been owed. The charge was commonly used to force Black workers into convict labor camps, where the death rate was devastating. His case was suddenly dismissed after three days in jail, with no explanation recorded.
He disappeared from official records soon after. A preserved letter from a Birmingham reverend revealed the answer. The reverend wrote to a Detroit colleague that the family had been assisted to safety, and that the means could not be put in writing. Oral histories collected later described how networks operated: sympathetic jailers, false paperwork, and coordinated departures that moved families out of the city before authorities could respond.
Thomas Price was given little time to leave, and the family abandoned nearly everything they owned. Historical records at Wayne State University identified Abraham Wilson as a conductor on the Detroit route in 1904. He was known in the community as someone who could be trusted to help families. His grandson, Marcus Wilson, confirmed that Abraham had spoken of carrying messages and arranging passages, keeping a hidden notebook of the people he helped between 1902 and 1920.
An entry from October 1904 recorded the Price family’s safe arrival in Detroit and noted that the ticket had been destroyed as instructed. Ruth Price’s diary, preserved by her family, described the journey. She wrote that her father took the family to a photographer after reaching Detroit because he wanted proof that they had made it. She was told to hold the ticket so that someday someone would know how they had arrived and what it had cost.
In another entry, she recalled her father’s explanation that asking for his earned wages in Alabama could have gotten him killed or sent to a place where he would have worked until he died. Ruth Price died in 1982, but the photograph had been kept safe through her lifetime and beyond. Her niece, Eleanor Price Hamilton, remembered Ruth as a teacher who spent her entire career educating Black children in Detroit schools. Ruth never married, and she treated her students as family.
She often said education was the one thing no one could take from you. The discovery led Foster to collaborate with historians in both Detroit and Birmingham to map the larger network that had operated in the early 20th century. Their research documented church congregations that communicated quietly across regions, railroad workers who passed information and moved people safely, and families who had escaped and later sent money back to help others. Records showed at least 30 other families who arrived in Detroit between 1900 and 1910 under similar circumstances.
The network operated until at least 1920, according to the evidence gathered. It included Black church members, domestic workers, and delivery men who used their mobility to carry messages. Some white allies, including Quakers and other religious groups, participated as a moral obligation. Railroad workers like Abraham Wilson used their access to transportation to move families out of danger.
In early 2019, the Detroit Historical Museum opened an exhibition titled “Hidden Passages: The New Underground Railroad in the Industrial Age. ” The Price family photograph was displayed at its center, accompanied by the documentation gathered from multiple archives. The exhibition drew descendants of families who had made similar journeys, many of whom shared their own artifacts and stories. Ruth Price’s diary was later published in an annotated edition, and the photograph was featured in a PBS documentary about the Great Migration and its precursors.
The exhibition traveled to Birmingham, Chicago, and Washington, DC, with each venue adding local context about the networks that had operated in their regions. In June 2020, a permanent gallery was dedicated at the Detroit Historical Society to families who came to the city seeking safety between 1900 and 1930. The Price family photograph held the central position. Eleanor Price Hamilton, then 91, spoke at the ceremony.
She said her aunt Ruth had promised her father she would tell the truth about what they escaped and who helped them if she ever had the chance. She kept that promise through her teaching and through preserving the photograph. The ticket itself was destroyed in 1904, as the conductor’s instructions required. But its image, held tightly by a six-year-old girl in a family portrait, remained for over a century.
Ruth Price lived another 76 years after that photograph was taken, teaching hundreds of students and ensuring the story was not forgotten. Her father had insisted that the truth must be remembered, and through a single image, it finally was.