He lived with us until he died

Harrison Gray Otis Blake, known as H.G. Blake, was born in Newfane, Vermont, in 1818, moved to Medina as a young lawyer, and on his first day in the Ohio House of Representatives in 1846 introduced a bill to repeal Ohio's Black Laws. A partial repeal passed in 1849. He later served in the U.S. Congress. His Greek Revival house on the corner of East Washington and Jefferson Streets in Medina was, from the 1840s until Emancipation, an Underground Railroad station.¹

His daughter Elizabeth, interviewed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1932, remembered being kept home from school when fugitives were hidden in the barn or the house. Her sister Helen once noticed "unusual quantities of bread and meat disappearing" from the kitchen. In 1858 Blake wrote a letter to two professors at Oberlin College, James Monroe and Henry E. Peck, that served, in effect, as an Underground Railroad travel document. That letter is still held at Oberlin.²

During the Civil War, Blake's son-in-law Robert McDowell served as a Union officer. In 1865, while stationed in Maryland, McDowell met a formerly enslaved man named Thomas King and, at the war's end, invited him to come home to Medina.³

King came. He lived in the Blake household, the same house that had sheltered fugitives ten years earlier, until his death in 1875. One year later, Blake himself died. The people who had built the station were gone within a generation. Thomas King had no obvious way to be remembered outside the family.

He was remembered anyway. Someone in the household kept his photograph. On the back, in ink, someone wrote: "He lived with us until he died."⁴

Between 2019 and 2021, the Medina County Historical Society restored the McDowell family's later home, the McDowell-Phillips House at the corner of North Prospect and Blake Streets, and opened it as a public museum. During the restoration, the photograph of Thomas King was found in the attic.⁵

In 2022, Spring Grove Cemetery on West Union Street was accepted into the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, in part on the strength of the Blake papers. H.G. Blake is buried there. So is Elizabeth Bell Blake, his wife. So is Lieutenant Colonel Herman Canfield, another Medina abolitionist and Ohio senator killed on the first day of Shiloh in 1862.⁶

The Blake house on East Washington and Jefferson is gone. The Old Phoenix Bank building Blake helped run stands rebuilt on the Square after the 1870 fire. The McDowell-Phillips House opens the second Sunday of every month. The photograph of Thomas King is inside.