There’s a statue of Joshua Chamberlain, hero of the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War and former Maine governor, standing watch over the Brewer side of the bridge that connects State Street with Oak Street in Bangor.
But Chamberlain Freedom Park, the tiny park near the Penobscot River in which the statue stands, has a history that stretches beyond the Civil War and connects the city to one of the most important parts of 19th-century American history: the Underground Railroad.
A historic home once stood on that site that historians believe was a stop on the Underground Railroad, the vast network of anti-slavery safe houses that between the 1790s and 1860s helped slaves escape bondage in southern states for the freedom of Canada. A stone tunnel built to allow slaves to get into the house undetected was reputed to exist, and clothing believed to have been worn by former slaves was found inside the house.
The house was built in the 1820s by the Holyoke family, shipbuilders who also owned one of the first brickyards in Brewer. John Holyoke, born in 1804, was not just a successful businessman, but was also an ardent abolitionist who publicly donated to anti-slavery causes before the war, and helped recently freed men and women access education afterward.
There were upwards of 75 Underground Railroad sites in Maine, most prominently the Abyssinian Meeting House in Portland, the nation’s third-oldest Black church, built in 1831 and where former slaves would arrive after escaping on ships arriving from points south. Others can be found in towns including Brunswick, Topsham, Auburn and Fort Kent.
Since Underground Railroad sites were meant to be kept secret, written documentation of the Brewer site was nonexistent — but stories about Holyoke’s safe house remained a part of the local oral history. Stories hold that slaves would enter the house by the tunnel, rest for a night, and then carry on down the Airline, now known as Route 9, which at the time was little more than a dirt path that ran east to Calais. From there, it was just a quick hop over the Canadian border to freedom.
Holyoke died in 1885, more than 20 years after the Emancipation Proclamation that set most of the country’s slaves free. Over the next century, the Holyoke house had a number of different owners, including the Christmas family, who bought it in 1954, and Town and Country Realtors, which bought it in 1987. The Christmas family often told the story of how a boy mowing their lawn during the summer of 1956 fell through a hole in the ground into a stone-lined chamber. Though the hole was filled in, the story lived on.
In 1990, however, the Maine Department of Transportation announced it was preparing to replace the 90-year-old iron bridge that spanned the Penobscot River and terminated a few hundred feet from where the Holyoke house stood. It took more than five years for the project to actually happen, and involved extensive reshaping of the landscape and traffic flow around the area.
The biggest controversy in the bridge project was the plan by the Maine DOT and some members of the Brewer City Council to demolish the Holyoke house, which stood directly in the path of the proposed widened entryway to the new bridge. For several years, the Brewer Historical Society and a number of other Brewer residents fought to save the Holyoke house, while pro-bridge advocates played down the house’s connection to the Underground Railroad.
In the end, the MDOT’s bridge project won out, and the house was demolished in late 1995. The following spring, however, construction workers prepping the site found a 37-foot deep shaft almost exactly where the Christmas family said it would be. And just before the demolition, workers cleaning out the house found a “slave-style” shirt tucked into the eaves of the building. According to Maine historian Harriet Price, the discovery of the shirt wasn’t made public until after demolition.
Preservation advocates turned their attention at that point to creating a park on the site of the former house to commemorate not just the city’s connection to the Underground Railroad, but also Brewer’s most famous son: Joshua Chamberlain, the great hero of Gettysburg, whose brave actions on that day helped turn the tide for the Union. On Veteran’s Day in 1997, the statue of Chamberlain was unveiled at the new Chamberlain Freedom Park — just a few hundred feet down the street from the house where Chamberlain himself grew up.
Five years later, another bronze statue was unveiled at the park: “North to Freedom,” which depicts a man recently escaped from slavery, hoisting himself out of an underground tunnel and looking north to freedom.
Though the tunnel and home that helped human beings escape bondage was destroyed to make way for a road, each year, Juneteenth celebrations are held at the park to commemorate the end of slavery. And every day, motorists pass by the two statues, which serve as reminders of the brutality of slavery, and the moral issue at the core of what the Civil War was fought for.
