William “Billy” Marks & the Underground Railroad

A series of essays written for the Naples Historical Society in the 1980s

by Robert J. Vierhile

[Editor’s Note: These essays have been transposed from type-written papers, with exact words and descriptions as originally written, sometimes repetitive due to serialization of essays. Some words and phrases have been edited for clarity or with respect to cultural depictions.]

PART 1

William Marks, known as “Uncle Billy” to everyone in the Naples area that knew him during the 1800s, was definitely one of the most colorful citizens to ever reside in Naples. Marks was born on January 17, 1814 in Burlington, Connecticut and died in Naples on August 29, 1879. He was one Neapolitan who really left his marks on Naples. 

Marks had a severe childhood illness that left him slightly crippled all of his life. Most people would’ve become depressed after a severe illness that probably could’ve been properly diagnosed and cured today. Marks, however, went through a long treatment process which never cured the illness. Young William Marks was determined to overcome his handicap and make his life a successful experience. He did just that. The handicap never slowed him down.

As a young man, Billy decided to make his fortune as a Peddler. He left his home state of Connecticut and cut a route through New York State and Pennsylvania during the spring, summer, and fall months selling from his horse-drawn wagon such necessities as medicine, furniture, spices, clothing, and special candies, and knickknacks for the home. Billy Marks had a gift of gab that attracted his customer‘s attention and made him an extremely popular and successful peddler. He was also very honest, and sold only high-quality merchandise; two very unusual qualities for a peddler in the 1800s.

Marks’ peddling finally took him to the Naples area in the 1830s. During one of his stops at the Holcomb residence on Cook’s Point in South Bristol on Canandaigua Lake, Marks was introduced to Emily Catherine Holcomb, a young attractive girl who Marks immediately fell in love with. Her parents, Roderick and Rebecca Winthrop Holcomb, were direct descendants of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts and a member of the group that landed at Plymouth Rock on the Mayflower to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1620s.

Billy Marks and Emily Holcomb were married on April 4, 1839 in Naples. Emily told Billy he had to give up his peddling business and settle down in Naples; this he did. Marks went into partnership with Mr. Hotchkiss in the old Torrey General Merchandise store on Main Street in Naples on September 3, 1839, but, soon afterward, Marks dissolved the partnership because of several disagreements with Hotchkiss and decided to go on his own way.

Marks had several talents; he was a good salesman; he was a good carpenter and he was a good leader. He decided to use these talents to go into business for himself at the age of 25 in 1839. Billy Marks figured that the best site to build a store was on the corner of Main and Mechanic streets. He bought this corner lot for $300, built his furniture store on the corner and built his home just east of it. [The Marks home is now used as the business residence for dentistry and the home of Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Harwood.]

Billy Marks loved Naples, and Naples loved Billy. Due to his peddling days, Marks knew almost everyone in the Naples area. The Naples area people went to Billy‘s furniture store, and they also went to him for funeral arrangements. He operated the first formal funeral parlor in the Naples area. He built the coffins and caskets, provided first class funerals, and did this for the lowest prices in the area.

The Naples townspeople trusted Billy so much that, when money was scarce during the Civil War, Billy Marks issued his own script money, and it was freely accepted at any store in Naples and the surrounding area. By 1850, he was the most respected and the most aggressive merchant in Naples. He conducted all of the funerals; he provided furniture for the homes; he led Naples government; and he was a very devoted Christian Methodist.

Billy Marks had one big problem during the mid 1850s; he hated slavery. He was one of the strongest abolitionists in Ontario County. Marks put his family, his business, and his future on the line when he became one of the major links on the “Underground Railroad”, the [route for Negro fugitives from slavery] to freedom prior to the Civil War.

PART 2

William Billy Marks settled comfortably in Naples village with his wife and family and got off to a great start in business at his new store on the corner of Main and Mechanic streets. The Marks home was very comfortable and it would seem that Marks and his family would live a comfortable quiet life in Naples. It didn’t happen.

One of the problems that Marks quickly noted in Naples was that there was no one in the community to take care of the deceased. Usually, when a person died in Naples, he/she was laid out in his/her home for 24 or 48 hours and then interred in the Pioneer Cemetery on the Old Square. These very primitive arrangements didn’t suit Marks who felt that a funeral should be much more than a two-day wait for burial. 

Marks decided to become the first undertaker in Naples. Becoming an undertaker in the early 1800s didn’t require much more than hanging out a shingle and advertising one’s services. Marks was a master of advertising and promotion. The first thing that Billy did to get into the swing of the undertaking business was to buy one of the finest teams of horses in the Naples Valley. He quickly added another superb team to give him a four-horse stable for his undertaking business. Marks’s two teams of fine horses were the undertaking Cadillacs of the present time. Marks also bought one of the finest hearses in Ontario County; it was built from the finest wood, polished to a brilliant shine with varnishes and waxes. Billy Marks‘s hearses are now in the possession of the Baird Moore funeral home in Naples and have been shown during major events in the community.

Marks advertised his undertaking business every week in the Naples weekly newspapers. One of his ads read as follows: “WILLIAM MARKS - UNDERTAKING. I keep constantly on hand coffins, caskets, burial robes, and shrouds of the best quality in all sizes and prices for both sexes. I give personal attention to every order received. My horses and teams are first class, and for the same quality of goods, I will not be under sold by anybody. There are no extra charges for the hearse! Rose Ridge cemetery has already been fenced and will soon be in first class condition; it contains about 500 lots of which 1/2 are already taken. Any person’s desiring to purchase lots will please call at my residence where information will be given. William Marks, Undertaker.”

Sometimes, Marks’s two businesses confused people, especially newcomers to Naples. Many strangers to the community wondered which Marks was the undertaker, and which Marks ran the furniture store. Few people could figure out that Billy ran both businesses. One Naples newcomer visited Marks’s store and saw an unfinished wood coffin in the corner of the store. He opened the lid and found a dead body inside. The startled man left the store very rapidly; he didn’t realize that Marks had not completely finished the coffin. Billy, of course, with a late night effort, had the coffin ready for burial the next day.

One of Billy Marks’s biggest assets was his love of people, especially Naples people. Prior to the Civil War, when he was a young, independent, and aggressive man, Marks became very disturbed over the conditions of the Negro in America. He wanted to do something to help them, so he joined a rising group of young abolitionists in the Rochester area, whose principal purpose was to abolish slavery and help fugitives from slavery. He also decided to become a part of the “Underground Railroad”, a chain of people from the states bordering the southern provinces of Canada, who offered safe stations on their route from slavery in the south to the freedom of non-slavery in Canada.

Despite the risks to himself and his family (there was a $1,000 fine and imprisonment if caught transporting formerly enslaved people to Canada), Marks was willing to take the risk. Prior to the start of the Civil War, Marks personally helped transport over 600 fugitives from slavery to freedom in Canada.

Unfortunately, at that time, Marks got very little support for his abolitionist ideas from other Naples residents.

PART 3

By 1850, Billy Marks was the best known and most respected businessman on Main Street in Naples. His undertaking and furniture businesses located at the corner of Main and Mechanic streets were flourishing. He was a pillar in the Naples Methodist Church, having built a new Methodist church at the corner of Main and Vine Street after moving the old 1826 vintage wood-frame church across the street. William “Billy” Marks was the success story of the Village of Naples at the age of 36.

As Billy Marks entered the second half of the 19th century in 1850, there was something really troubling him. A devout Christian, Billy could not tolerate Negro slavery, which was so important to the economics of the Southern tobacco-cotton economy.

Marks took an interest in the lectures and writings of Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved person who had gained his freedom and lived in Rochester, New York. Marks and Douglass soon became good friends, and Marks became heavily involved in the abolitionist movement in upstate New York. Few Naples people knew of Marks‘s involvement, especially in his establishing a station on the “Underground Railroad.”

Frederick Douglass was once enslaved in the South. His early years were not happy ones; he was sent to work at an early age for an Enslaver. During this experience of being enslaved by a wealthy Maryland landowner, Douglass learned about injustice, brutality, and the inhumanity that was all a part of Negro slavery, all condoned by the U.S. Supreme Court, as perfectly legal, perfectly right to buy and sell and hold in bondage a Black American.

Douglass wanted to be free. He saved a few dollars from his pay, which financed his runaway to the North and finally a new life in Rochester, New York. It wasn’t long before Douglass bought a house on Alexander Street, near East Avenue in Rochester. He later bought a home near the Lily Pond in Highland Park. Douglass was outspoken in lectures that he gave against slavery and in his abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, where he wrote article after article about the inhumanity and non-Christian attitude towards slavery in the United States.

When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1850, Marks decided to join the abolitionist movement with Frederick Douglass. It was dangerous business. In Rochester, many of Douglass‘s friends feared for his safety and urged him to flee New York State, as many fugitives from slavery had done. Douglass, however, refused to leave Rochester, but he did move to a new house on South Avenue near Highland Park. It was here that Douglass set up one of the busiest stations on the Underground Railroad for self-emanicipated individuals. It was here that Billy Marks met with Douglass and agreed to set up a Naples “station” on the Underground Railroad. Nobody in Naples knew of this meeting or was concerned other than Marks.

Marks became so intensely involved in the abolitionist movement that he decided to bring Frederick Douglass of Rochester to Naples to give a lecture on the abolishment of slavery. The only places large enough in Naples in 1850 to house a lecture were the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches. Marks asked each church group for permission to use the church auditorium for a Frederick Douglass lecture. The Presbyterians said no. The Baptists said no. And even the Methodists, for whom Marks had built a new church, said no.

Billy Marks, a person not to be deterred, decided to do it his own way. He built a huge platform in front of his home on One Mechanic Street [the present Harwood residence], put chairs in his yard, provided free refreshments, and over 300 Naples people came to listen to Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved and now self-liberated man, talk about the evils and un-Christian aspects of slavery. The people listened, and Billy Marks became heavily involved secretly in the Underground Railroad.

PART 4

Although William “Billy” Marks established his secret Naples “station” on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, the Underground Railroad had operated from about 1830, going out of existence in the 1860s after the Civil War.

Estimates of the effectiveness of the Underground Railroad in helping fugitives from slavery escape to freedom in the North and in Canada vary widely, ranging between forty- and one-hundred-thousand persons. The Underground Railroad did, however, stir the emotions of many Americans prior to the Civil War. Among the enslaved in the South, the Railroad was their only hope of freedom. Among Southern enslavers, the Underground Railroad was organized thievery, and totally illegal as the enslaved were considered private property.

Slavery was a brutal business. Negroes were captured by privateers and taken from their villages in Africa by boat to southern ports and then sold at slave auctions at prices ranging from $300 for a young Negro to $1,800 for a strong adult male. In Southern cities, a slave auction was a big event. It attracted curiosity seekers as well as slave owners who were looking for a bargain.

Josiah Henson, enslaved in Maryland, described how his family was auctioned off when he was a small boy:

“My brothers and sisters were bid off first and one by one, while my mother, paralyzed by grief, held me by the hand. Her turn came, and she was bought by Isaac Riley of Montgomery County. Then I was offered to the assembled purchasers. My mother pushed through the crowd, while the bidding for me was going on, to the spot where Riley was standing. She fell at his feet and clung to his knees, entreating him in tones that a mother only can command, to buy her baby as well as herself and spare to her one, at least, of her little ones. Will it, can it be believed that this man, thus appealed to merely turned a deaf ear to her appeal? Riley disengaged himself with such violent blows and kicks that she was forced to creep out of his reach and mingle, groans of pain with the sobs of a breaking heart.”

In the 1830s, the first railroads were built across the United States, and this new method of transportation stirred everyone’s imagination. As fugitives from slavery ran away from their enslavers, they soon called their escape route the “Underground Railroad.” The word “underground” added mystery to the secret operation. Fugitives from slavery were helped by both black and white friends to travel hundreds of miles to gain freedom in the North or in Canada. Guides on the Underground Railroad called themselves “conductors”; homes and barns and abandoned buildings where the fugitives were cared for and hidden became “stations” or “depots” on the “lines.” Fugitives themselves were called “passengers.”

One of the major Underground Railroad lines went from Maryland into Philadelphia, through New York City, and then via either the Erie or New York Central Railroad to Buffalo or Rochester and into Canada. Billy Marks’s Underground Railroad station was located on the Rochester line at One Mechanic Street in Naples.

PART 5

The Underground Railroad was a secret network of places and routes leading to freedom. Few people knew the organizers and the stations on the routes because it had to be kept very secret to provide safety for those involved in the traffic of fugitives from slavery. The chain of people that made up the Underground Railroad were white and black men and women, many of whom had formerly been enslaved and were willing to risk anything to help free others. This group of people became known as Abolitionists. Their numbers continued to grow as the non-slave states became more and more aroused to the tyranny of slavery. By 1840, there were 2,000 anti-slavery societies in the US with over 200,000 members.

In addition to the underground “line” that went up the East Coast through New York State to Rochester and Buffalo, there was another very successful line that went through Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan to Detroit and freedom in Amherstburg in Canada, just across the river from Detroit. 10, 15, or more fugitives entered Canada at this point almost every day.

The organizer of the Midwestern Underground Railroad line was Levi Coffin. He was called the “president of the Underground Railroad.” Levi prized this title. Levi, a Quaker, operated a store for many years in Newport, Indiana, and later in Cincinnati, Ohio. Once a fugitive got into Levi’s hands, he was as good as free. In Levi Coffin’s store, there were no goods made by enslaved people. His store adjoined his house and under the store was a cellar which only the Coffin family and the fugitives from slavery knew about. At Coffin’s table, he often fed a dozen fugitives at one time, guiding more than 100 of them to freedom each year.

In 1850, the U.S. Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Law that southern enslavers were clamoring for. The law really had teeth in it, providing $1,000 fine or six months in jail for helping or aiding a fugitive from slavery. The law also provided a bounty and bevy for “slave catchers” and appointed commissioners who caught and prosecuted a runaway. Suddenly catching any fugitive from slavery became profitable.

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law hit the northern states like a bombshell. It made the northern cities like Boston, Rochester, and Syracuse furious with the U.S. government that was condoning slavery more rigidly than any time in U.S. history. Anti-slavery groups sprang up in almost every community in the free states. The state of Pennsylvania completely ignored the law as completely unjust. As a result of the law, traffic on the Underground Railroad tripled to nearly 10,000 runways per year.

Billy Marks of Naples was not complacent. He had traveled throughout the east; he was aware of the problems of slavery. He decided to join the abolitionist movement and make his home and his equipment available to fugitives from slavery. From the time he opened the Naples “station” on the Underground Railroad, he was handling over 100 fugitives a year, comparable to the exploits of Levi Coffin in Indiana, Ohio.

PART 6

William “Billy” Marks got involved in the Underground Railroad in 1852. He was irate when the new Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made helping a fugitive from slavery in any way a crime punishable by a fine of $1000 or six months in jail. Billy, a devout Christian Methodist, couldn’t understand why anybody could condone selling a black human being as property to an enslaver. He couldn’t understand why his fellow Methodists in Naples and the other churches in Naples would not condemn the U.S. government for allowing slavery.

In 1847, Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved and now self-emanicapted man, started publishing a newspaper in Rochester, New York called The North Star. The title of the paper was significant because fugitives from slavery were told to focus on the North Star in the heavens in their flight to freedom because that star would keep them moving north, especially at night when most of their traveling was done.

Frederick Douglass had spent his youth enslaved, and once he escaped to freedom, he devoted his life and talent to provide freedom for his race in America. Douglass feared nothing; he felt his cause was right, and that he would be heard. He was, especially in the North.

As Billy Marks of Naples read Douglass’s stories about the abuse and inhumanity of slavery, as he read about the evils of the U.S. – Mexican War that gave the U.S. a chance to steal that part of Mexico that is now Texas, as he read about the attempts of the U.S. government to extend slavery into these new territories, William Marks of Naples decided to do something about it. Marks was not a complacent man; he decided to join the abolitionist movement to eliminate slavery in the United States.

In 1851, Billy Marks attended one of Frederick Douglass‘s lectures in Rochester. Douglass, a great orator, so moved Marks that Marks joined the abolitionist movement. Marks was particularly moved when Douglass in his lecture repeated his chant “Am I a man or a thing? I am a man, not a thing.” Marks found that Douglass had the nerve and courage to buck the U.S. government, and the nerve to lecture against slavery. As a result of Douglass‘s influence, William Billy Marks opened the Naples “station” on the Underground Railroad in 1852.

Marks was so involved with the anti-slavery in Naples issue that he decided to bring Frederick Douglass of Rochester to speak in Naples in July of 1852 on the abolishment of slavery. Marks asked all of the Christian ministers in Naples if they would allow Douglass to speak in their church auditoriums. The ministers all said no; they wanted nothing to do with the anti-slave controversy.

This attitude of the Naples ministers so infuriated Marks that he decided to build a temporary auditorium outside of his home on Mechanic Street. He provided free refreshments, chairs, and over 300 Naples residents came to hear Frederick Douglass speak.

Marks, meanwhile, was preparing his secret route to freedom for almost 600 fugitives from slavery in the basement and woodshed of his home.

The fugitives that were aided by Billy Marks usually came into the area from New York City and Philadelphia. Many of these slaves came via the Erie Railroad, which stopped at the very rural station in Bloods [now called Atlanta]. When the runways got off the box cars at Atlanta, they were only a few days from freedom in Canada, providing that Billy Marks didn’t get caught in his “line” on the Underground Railroad.