Site of Catherine Harris Home (Underground Railroad Station)

Born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1809, Catherine Dickes Harris was the child of a free African American man and a white woman. After the death of her first husband, Catherine and her daughter moved to Jamestown, New York, in 1831, where they were the only African American people in the town. As more African Americans moved to the area, they tended to settle around the home of Harris and her second husband, John Harris, and the community became known as Africa. At some point, Harris began using her home as a station on the Underground Railroad. The Harris home was demolished in the late twentieth century, but a historical marker identifies the now-empty lot as the former site of their home.

Catherine Harris was born in 1809. Her grandfather, originally from Africa, was brought to England on a slave ship and later married the daughter of that ship’s captain. Their son—Catherine Harris’s father—eventually came to the United States, where he married a white woman of Dutch descent. Apparently little is known of Harris’s family background beyond her unusual (for the time) lineage.

Harris married her first husband, a man by the name of Butler, when she was 19, in 1828. The couple moved from Meadville, Pennsylvania, to Buffalo, where their daughter, Maria, was born. Shortly after their arrival in Buffalo, Harris’s husband died, leaving her to raise her young daughter alone. For reasons that are no longer known, Harris and her young daughter moved to Jamestown, New York, in 1831.

At the time, they were reportedly the only African Americans living in the town at a time when slave-hunters were rampant in the area. As a result, few African Americans were willing to stay for very long in Jamestown and it is not known what made Harris want to move there with a young child. She married John Harris in about 1835, and although it is not known how long he had been living in Jamestown, he ran a barber shop that was advertised as early as 1834. Catherine was well-known in the community as a washerwoman, nurse, and cook for many of the local families.

Eventually, other African American families began moving to Jamestown, and many of them settled in proximity to the Harrises. John Harris purchased the property at the corner of West Seventh and North Main Street in 1838, and by the 1840s, white people in Jamestown began to refer to that area of town as Africa, apparently because of the number of African American families there. By 1849, it was reported that almost 100 African Americans were living in the Africa area.

At least some of those people made their way to Jamestown to escape slavery. The Underground Railroad was reportedly active in the area, and the Harris’s home was a station. It is believed that Harris could hide as many as 17 runaway slaves at one time in her attic. Catherine Harris became a beloved fixture in the community—not only Africa, but Jamestown as a whole—and lived until 1907, when she died at the age of 97. Her home, enlarged over the years, was still standing as recently as 1984 but was demolished at some point. A historic marker identifies the site of the home.

Catherine Harris, Africa, and Some History of Jamestown, NY, African American History of Western New York. Accessed March 16th 2022. http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/0history/harris.and.jamestown.html.

Livsey, Karen. Another Look at the Remarkable Life of Catherine Harris , The Post Journal . February 7th 2020. Accessed March 16th 2022. https://www.post-journal.com/news/local-news/2020/02/another-look-at-the-remarkable-life-of-catherine-harris/.