Valerie Myers: It’s an Erie County history mystery
One of the first families in Erie County might have evolved from slaveholders to conductors on the Underground Railroad and founders of a black school and church.
That’s according to a Minnesota historian who reached out to share research on the Rees family.
Thomas Rees was one of the first settlers of Erie County. When he came here in the mid-1790s, he brought with him an enslaved 4-year-old named Robert McConnell.
Rees freed McConnell at age 28. A state law gradually abolishing slavery required it. Rees gave McConnell 50 acres of land to farm in the Gospel Hill area of Harborcreek Township.
Women thought to have been related to Rees later helped conduct runaway slaves to freedom, according to Laura Deering’s research.
Harriet Rees Stevens, of Rushford, Minnesota, also served as a nurse during the Civil War and founded a school and church for former slaves near her winter home in Jacksonville, Florida.
Steven’s mother had also helped conduct slaves to freedom, Deering said.
“Harriet’s mother was Mary Hubbard Rees, of the Hubbard Underground Railroad houses in Ashtabula, Ohio,” Deering said in an email.
Deering lives in Harriet and George Stevens’ onetime home in Rushford. Her research on the Stevens family was featured in a 2018 story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Deering believes that Harriet Rees Stevens was the granddaughter of Erie County’s onetime slave owner. She read about Thomas Rees and Robert McConnell in a 2015 Erie Times-News story.
But Harriet Rees Stevens seems to have been descended from a different Thomas Rees, according to research by Brenda Weaver of the Harborcreek Historical Society.
Period records from the region refer to two different men by that name. One might have been a nephew of the early Erie County settler and the grandfather of Harriet Rees Stevens.
It’s a history mystery, local historians said.
But the odds are that the two men named Thomas Rees were related, part of an extended family that in one generation owned a slave and in the next two generations helped slaves to freedom.
Erie Times-News staff writers share their views from behind the scenes, stories and bylines. Valerie Myers can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.