Exhibition Reviews

"Just over the Line: Chester County and the Underground Railroad." Chester County Historical Society, 225 N. High St., West Chester, PA 19380-2691.
     Temporary exhibition, Feb. 7, 2002–March 31, 2004. M-Tu, Th-Sa 9:30–4:30, W 9:30–8; adults $5, children 6–17 $2.50, children 5 and under free, seniors $4. 5,000 sq. ft. William C. Kashatus, project director; Ellen Endslow, curator; Christopher Densmore, Larry Gara, Lois Horton, Emma Lapsansky, James McGowan, Kym Rice, and Carl Westmorelad, interpretive development consultants; Sanderson Caesar, designer; Suzanne DeMott Gaadt, catalog design.
     Just over the Line: Chester County and the Underground Railroad. By William C. Kashatus. (West Chester: Chester County Historical Society, 2002. 119 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-929706-17-X.)
     Traveling the Eastern Line: Student Essays on Southeastern Pennsylvania's Underground Railroad. Ed. by William C. Kashatus and Anthony J. Stavenski. (West Chester: Chester County Historical Society, 2002. 63 pp. $15.00, or $10.00 for educators, ISBN 0-929706-19-6.)
     Internet: information on the project, online tour, listing of events and books <http://chestercohistorical.org/ugrr/ugrr.htm> (Feb. 10, 2003).

After more than one hundred years in obscurity, the underground railroad now commands great popular interest. In a society still troubled by the legacies of slavery and racism, stories of black and white people who worked together to resist oppressors have great power. But how should those stories be told at a county museum whose territory encompasses several important "lines" on the road? Can local stories be used to draw museumgoers into a more nuanced understanding of the world of "conductors," "station masters," and "passengers" that goes beyond simply lauding the virtuous and condemning the vicious? Is it possible to make sense of the many shades of antislavery northern opinion, as well as proslavery views? In short, how can one illustrate the complex choices and consequences that dealing with runaway slaves presented to Chester Countians? Finally, how do you make such a show visually appealing, given the sparsity of surviving objects that bespeak slaves' flights to freedom? "Just over the Line" succeeds resoundingly in dealing with all those issues through inventive uses of space, language, and interactive devices. It is an outstanding piece of work.	1
Visitors entering the exhibition first encounter paintings of Thomas Garrett, William Still, and Harriet Tubman, along with a timeline that covers the history of slavery and emancipation and contextualizes the role of the Underground Railroad. Next comes a series of displays organized metaphorically around the idea of the "line": the arrangement of the exhibition leads visitors along a figurative re-creation of a slave's flight. One learns that Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were responsible for "drawing the line" that became the symbolic boundary between slavery and freedom. Runaways from Delaware and eastern Maryland are portrayed "crossing the line" and their pursuers appear as men "holding the line."	2
As visitors move along, they, like a fugitive slave, leave the slave states and enter Chester County. Here the focus turns to citizens who opposed slavery through political organization and agitation. Free blacks, Quakers, colonizationists, and abolitionists who "pushed the line" give way to the fairly small number of underground railroad supporters who "stepped over the line" and violated fugitive slave laws to aid escapes. The exhibition then shows the role of African Americans in "breaking the line" by fighting for the Union: more than sixty men from Chester County swelled the ranks of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, the first black regiment recruited from northern free blacks. A concluding section briefly treats the eras of segregation and civil rights activism, paying homage to Bayard Rustin, who hailed from West Chester, the county seat.	. . .