Hundreds of students stroll across Guilford College’s campus daily, yet many remain unaware of the rich history preserved just beneath their feet. 

Beyond its status as one of the oldest coeducational institutions in the South, the college—specifically the New Garden Woods located on its campus—served as a vital hub for the Underground Railroad in the early 19th century. 

Guilford’s legacy as an Underground Railroad Stop began in 1819, when an enslaved man named John Dimery trekked through the woods toward freedom in Indiana with the assistance of Quaker Levi Coffin. 

However, the New Garden area was established as an ideal location for the Underground Railroad long before the first freedom seekers passed through.  

Gwen Erickson, Guilford’s Quaker Archivist/Special Collections Librarian, described the area as an early “crossroads” between anti-slavery Quakers and a sizable free-black community. According to her, this demographic makeup, paired with the area’s dense vegetation, “worked together to provide a place of refuge and help people get along.” 

Key figures in the efforts included Quaker cousins Levi and Addison Coffin, who covertly transported individuals north to Indiana, New York and even Canada. Addison’s memoirs recount escaping through creative means, such as false-bottom wagons, which concealed the fugitives as they traveled through hostile locations. 

But Erickson said that a large amount of the information we know today is formed from fragments of stories from individuals like the Coffins, as well as newspapers and college records. 

“Levi Coffin, who grew up here in this area … as an old man, he’s writing his memoirs, and so he tells stories in there, and then we can take what he writes in those stories and match it up to other things that make sense,” said Erickson. 

Those stories help document a largely overlooked route from North Carolina to Indiana, in addition to a quieter, paper-trail-based form of resistance centered around figures like Lavina “Vina” Curry. 

“We used a pretty small number of sources we have related to Lavina Curry,” said Guilford College History professor Sarah Thuesen, “including a memoir [from Addison Coffin] that recalls her lending her late husband’s free papers to men escaping on the Underground Railroad.”  

As a free black woman living and working at New Garden Boarding School in the 1830s, Curry’s role only comes into view when school ledgers are cross-referenced with existing memoirs. Today, Guilford is trying to make these faint traces harder to miss. 

As part of that effort, Thuesen helped lead a campus effort to create a permanent marker honoring Curry, which stands near the existing Levi Coffin marker—one of three historical markers along Friendly.

She said that in addition to tracing history through markers, students can visit Hege’s archives or the Underground Railroad trail to truly “feel” the history on campus.

Though Guilford students have access to a variety of means to access the rich local history of the Underground Railroad, it was not always such an open topic.

“A lot of people who attended Guilford 60 to 70 years ago don’t recall hearing anything about the Underground Railroad,” Erickson said. “Only in the last 40 years or so has Guilford really began to draw on that history as representative of our core values.” 

Erickson said that this complicated relationship with the past stretches back to the college’s beginnings (as New Garden Boarding School). There was never an official abolitionist policy, but Quaker anti-slavery beliefs still quietly shaped who the school hired, taught and did business with. 

While Guilford’s relation with this history has evolved over the years, one thing remains certain: The land that Guilford College sits on and the community that once lived there played a crucial role in the story of the Underground Railroad.  

According to Thuesen and Erickson, this history is still being assembled, one fragment at a time. Yet, even as the full story emerges, the campus remains a site of refuge where history lives within the landscape, continuing to define the daily experience of every student who crosses through it.