Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen

An engraved frontispiece portrait of Abolitionist Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen (1813 -- 1872) from his autobiography, "The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a slave and as a freeman" (1859), written in the third-person.

In 1813, Jermain Wesley Loguen was born into slavery in Davidson County, Tennessee; the son of David Logue, his white enslaver, and his enslaved mother, Cherry. Known then as "Jarm Logue," he escaped to Canada in 1834. and then went to Rochester, New York, where he attended Beriah Green's abolitionist school. Loguen and his family moved to Syracuse in 1841, where he taught school, served as a licensed preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and became one of the nation's most active agents of the Underground Railroad. The Loguen house in Syracuse was a principal station on the Underground Railroad and he was popularly known as the "Underground Railroad King" for helping over 1,500 fugitives escape from slavery. After the Civil War, Loguen continued his church work and became a bishop of the AMEZ denomination in 1868. In 1872, tuberculosis forced him to resign and seek treatment. Loguen died on September 20, 1872 and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, Syracuse.