Works in Progress
Lewis Hayden was among ten Americans honored on March 9, 2024 when the United States Postal Service issued a block of stamps featuring heroes of the Underground Railroad. A criminal activity during the time that slavery was a legal endeavor, Underground Railroad activity endangered the lives, the freedom, and the financial resources of its conductors and station masters in addition to the safety and freedom of the human beings who were its passengers. Those honored included three Americans of European heritage and seven Americans of African heritage.
Hayden, who escaped enslavement in Lexington, Kentucky in 1844 with his wife Harriet, and their son Joseph, participated in the Underground Railroad effort in Michigan and was a leader in Boston. Joel Strangis, author of Lewis Hayden and the War Against Slavery (1999) (Hayden’s only full-length biography) commented, “I am delighted that with this honor; his significant inclusion in recent books about the anti-slavery struggle; and the current effort to erect a monument in Lexington featuring Hayden and his family; Lewis Hayden is finally getting the recognition he deserves.”
Lewis Hayden, 2nd row, 2nd from left is among those Americans honored for their part in the Underground Railroad. Image courtesy of the USPS.
Searching for Pasquale
Family portrait of Pasquale Bilotta c. 1913
After six years of research, I am now writing my fourth book, Searching for Pasquale. A true-crime tale told in memoir style, this is the story of my investigation into the life and death of Pasquale Bilotta, a talented Italian woodcarver. Late on a Friday night in February 1931, Pasquale was shot while he did battle with a married woman in a small café in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The shooter, the woman’s husband, fired the shot while hidden outside the café and then immediately fled home.
I discovered this mystery after a 2016 visit to my grandfather’s home town of Sambiase in the southern Italian region of Calabria. While doing my research, I found that Pasquale grew up in a house less than 100 feet from my grandfather’s boyhood home. My quest includes seeking answers to questions about the whys and hows of Italian immigration that I had failed to ask my grandfather before he died at the close of my teenage years. If you would like to see a television news report, from early in my search (2018), please click here: www.wdtv.com/content/news/A-search-for-closure-thousands-of-miles-away-478699223.html
Underground Railroad Monument
Lewis Hayden and the War Against Slavery by Joel Strangis
I am also working with a group of volunteers in Lexington, Kentucky organized as “Kentucky’s Freedom Train, the Underground Railroad Fund.”
This group proposes to erect a monument in Lexington honoring those enslaved persons from the Lexington area who hoped to find freedom traveling north on what is now the Maysville Road. The escape of Lewis and Harriet Hayden and their son, Joseph, from their enslavement in Lexington, as recorded in my book Lewis Hayden and the War Against Slavery, is a part of the inspiration for this monument.
“I belonged to the Rev. Adam Rankin, a Presbyterian minister in Lexington, Kentucky. My mother was of mixed blood–white and Indian … She was a very handsome woman … She tried to kill herself several times, once with a knife and once by hanging. She had long, straight black hair, but after this it all turned white, like an old person’s.” Hayden to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1853
See Published Works for more information about Lewis Hayden.
For more information about the Lexington Freedom Train monument, visit http://www.