The National Park Service on Monday announced that new research has uncovered that enslaved African Americans sought freedom at Mission San José in the 1800s — the first of several sites connected to the U.S. slave trade to be identified in San Antonio.
The ongoing research is part of the National Park Service’s National Underground Network to Freedom program, which lists locations of the Underground Railroad — a network of sites that were significant in the journeys of enslaved people, or freedom seekers — in an effort to preserve the history.
New listings are added twice per calendar year to the NPS map. The latest update included 19 new sites, which are not yet added to the interactive map online which includes more than 740 sites identified across 39 states.
Of the 19 locations added, two were identified to have been in Texas. One is at Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, founded in 1720 on what is now the city’s South Side, and the second is at Jackson Ranch Church in Hidalgo County.
Listings don’t only include safe houses, but kidnapping sites, churches, Maroon communities (the name for groups that escaped slavery together), and any location related to a freedom seeker’s journey.
Allison Young, integrated resources program manager at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, said that in 1830, five freedom seekers fled from Louisiana and 400 miles southwest to Mission San José. When slave catchers arrived to take them three years later, an “armed conflict” arose when the Mexican Army upheld its anti-slavery laws.
Mission San José was also identified in a “run-away advertisement” as a potential stopping site of freedom seekers escaping a plantation that was nearby, Young said.
“These documented stories may indicate a deeper history of Underground Railroad activity at the Mission among the mission community and associated religious orders during the antebellum era,” she said.
The announcement came at a naturalization ceremony at Mission San José in honor of the new designation, Earth Day and National Park Week, where 15 people from the Philippines, China and Mexico received their citizenship.
With small U.S. flags in hand and proud families documenting them, each person proudly swore their allegiance.
“The United States is still seen as the beacon of freedom around the world,” U.S. National Park Service Director Chuck Sams said at the ceremony. ”Inviting in and bringing in new citizens, … it rings true for the folks who came here seeking freedom and it still does today.”
The National Park Service’s documentation of significant sites related to escaping slavery started after the agency took a deeper dive into listening to the Black history being brought forward, Sams said. It’s known that former slaves traveled north, but freedom seekers also began to travel West and into Texas territory, he said, where Mexico had outlawed slavery. Texas later joined the U.S. as a slave state.
“The Mission itself and the people that lived here, both the indigenous and Mexican people, helped slaves become free,” Sams said.
Now, the NPS is focused on identifying the locations along the Underground Railroad that had been lost to history or forgotten.
“Slaves came from Louisiana, out to Mexico, and received sanctuary from the Mexican government,” Sams said. “We’re always learning new stories that we’re either not told, or maybe under-told stories.”
The San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, or SAAACAM, partnered with the National Parks Service to do local research and found evidence that places slaves at Mission San José. It is still working on compiling that research that will be presented publicly in a few years, according to Cristal Mendez, historian at SAAACAM.
And tourists visiting the Missions are starting to learn San Antonio’s connection to the Underground Railroad, she said.
“Not a lot of people know this history in San Antonio,” Mendez said. “I don’t think people realize slavery existed in San Antonio, and to think about this other layer that exists at the Missions is something new to folks.”
More sites are being nominated to be listed in the Network to Freedom, including two sites in San Antonio, where freedom seekers were imprisoned for escaping slavery and sold as property, Mendez said. Researchers have also obtained Spanish archived records in Bexar County of enslaved people showing up in sales, she added, information the museum is working to confirm.
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Young also noted that some American and Anglo-American immigrants still attempted to re-enslave freedom seekers who sought refuge in San Antonio between 1829 and 1835.
Mendez said there’s still “so much research that needs to be done,” and that all the new information about the Underground Railroad in San Antonio will be included in new exhibits when SAAACAM relocates to the Kress Building downtown.
“We’re working on that research to share in our museum and to have on the National Park Service listing. It’s stories like that we’re still trying to understand,” Mendez said. “There’s just a lot of history in the larger story of slavery in San Antonio.”
