JOHN WALTER JONES

"[in] Elmira [New York] was ...a black gravedigger named John Walter Jones... In 1844, Jones and four other slaves escaped together from a plantation in Leesburg, Virginia. They stuffed their pockets with all the food they could, and one of them carried a pistol and a knife. They walked nearly three hundred miles, with Jones and his four companions fighting off slave hunters in Maryland. In Elmira, Jones first worked as a gardener and laborer and later became sexton of the First Baptist Church. He moved into the yellow house near the church, a house that would shelter hundreds of fugitive slaves in the decade before the Civil War. As the Underground Railroad agent at the Elmira station , he helped more than eight hundred other slaves escape. His allies included a bank president, a college founder, several lumber dealers, and a hardware merchant . In 1864-1865, John Jones became a legend for burying and recording personal information about nearly three thousand Confederate soldiers who died in the Elmira Prison Camp, known as the death camp of the North. It is ironic that those dead who had enlisted in the Confederate army to preserve slavery, had been buried by a man who had escaped slavery and become a symbol of what a free black man could do." P.38-39, "The Special Delivery Package," FORBIDDEN FRUIT: LOVE STORIES FROM THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Betty DeRamus (2005)