The Madison Courier
6/3/2006 9:00:00 AM 

Eleutherian College on conference agenda


Eleutherian College will be one of the topics discussed next week at an Underground Railroad conference for the public, scholars and researchers.

The fourth annual Borderlands Underground Railroad Conference will be June 9-11 at Northern Kentucky University. The conference sponsors are the university’s Institute for Freedom Studies and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center across the river in Cincinnati.

The registration fee is $35 and includes a reception and keynote address Friday; conference sessions, lunch and a keynote address Saturday; and a ticket to tour the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center on Sunday.

To register, go to www.nku.edu/~freedom or call (859) 572-5600.

One of the Saturday sessions will be a half-hour presentation by Mark A. Furnish, a doctoral student at Purdue University, who will speak on “Indiana’s Eleutherian College: Biracial Coeducation of Slavery’s Borderland.”

Eleutherian College, whose main classroom building still stands on State Road 250 in Lancaster, was open to blacks and women as well as white men before the Civil War. The college was part of the Underground Railroad, the secret network that helped escaped slaves reach freedom. Many now label the Underground Railroad “the first campaign for social change in American history,” the Freedom Center says.

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