This column was published Nov. 16, 1997, in the Herald American.
By Dick Case
Syracuse's reputation as a keeper of history balances on a few squares of packed clay in the basement wall of an old church in the center of downtown.
The squares hold five sculpted faces experts believe were left by fugitive slaves who hid under the sanctuary of Wesleyan Methodist Church, at 304 E. Onondaga St., across from the county courthouse.
Those experts, many from outside the community, call them unique as works of art and artifacts of the abolition movement in the United States.
Few of us know they're there. They were ignored for years.
We're about to be asked to decide if we care enough about the clay faces to keep them in Syracuse.
Right now, they're promised to a National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to be built in Cincinnati. The $70 million center is scheduled to open in 2002.
Lawyer Vaughn Lang, who bought the church after the congregation left nine years ago, donated the sculptures to the Cincinnati project. He says the deal's done.
MEANWHILE, A GROUP OF LOCAL PEOPLE is organizing to keep the sculptures here. Their first public meeting is Thursday.
The owner of the church, which is a listed national landmark, said he made the arrangement with Cincinnati because the sculptures had deteriorated to a point that they would be lost if something wasn't done.
No one he contacted, from city officials to the National Park Service, had the interest, or the money to help, according to Vaughn.
"Everybody was talking, nobody was doing anything," he explained, pointing out his interest in the faces was the same as his interest in saving the church from demolition in 1988: preservation.
Vaughn feels he made the right decision in signing the agreement to transfer title to the sculptures to the new museum, after a five-year preservation program.
He said the donated $5,000 toward conservation. Restoration of the church into an office and restaurant cost him half a million dollars, Vaughn said.
"This is a marvelous opportunity," the lawyer said of the Cincinnati project, which is described as one of the first major museums to focus on African-American history. Replicas of the faces could be made available for display in Syracuse.
"This is part of our history," according to the Rev. Ronald Dewberry, pastor of Bethany Baptist Church. "We don't want to see them go to Cincinnati."
THE MINISTER, county Legislator Sam Roberts and Doug Armstrong, president of the Preservation Association of Central New York, are working up a campaign to raise public interest, and money, to preserve the sculptures in the town where they were made.
Doug Armstrong is chairman of the anthropology department at Syracuse University. In 1994, he and colleague LouAnn Wurst, and their students, ran an archaeological dig in the church basement.
As a result of that research, Doug convinced the owner to change his construction plans to avoid damage to the faces, which were cut into the church's clay foundation along a 50-foot earthen passageway that ends under the front door.
The sculptures were part of the history of the church, which opened in 1846, but no one had studied them before the SU team.
Doug believes the passageway was cut before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and so were the faces. One sculpture was darkened by a fire in 1898. The archaeologists also uncovered a clay bench probably used by fugitive slaves as they waited for transportation out of town, to Canada.
"The creation of these faces was a silent act," Doug explained last week. "We don't know who did them, but they line up as being mid-19th century at a time when Syracuse was a center of the anti-slavery movement."
Doug's findings were circulated among colleagues and historians and prompted visits by experts, including scientists from the Smithsonian and National Park Service.
EACH TIME THE SYRACUSAN talked with people beyond Onondaga County -- "there always was more interest outside than here," Doug admitted -- he said he stressed how delicate the artifacts were, how they needed conservation that a private owner such as Vaughn Lang couldn't afford.
Eventually, according to Doug, a group of conservators in New York City contacted him and the owner and volunteered to come to Syracuse and donate some of their time to stabilize the sculptures. Vaughn agreed and the work began this summer when a protective sheath was put over the faces.
In time, Doug said, they will have to be removed from the wall and preserved in display cases.
"They can't be left in the wall; they're ready to fall off. It's gone too far," he said.
A HISTORIAN who works as a consultant for the Cincinnati center agreed with that. Dan Hurley of Applied History Associates spent three days in Syracuse checking out the sculptures in August, prior to the agreement with Vaughn Lang.
"We felt like somebody had to step in," the historian explained from Cincinnati Friday. "If we hadn't, they wouldn't be there next spring."
Doug Armstrong said he decided to get involved with Syracusans who want to keep the faces here "because I think this community, and New York state, deserve a chance to decide if these are important enough to save. At this point, we can't take some responsibility; it's all or nothing."
He pointed out the state recently approved funding for the beginnings of a New York "Freedom Trail" tied to antislavery history, but only in the Buffalo area.
Armstrong said his group, the preservation association, is willing to act as the nonprofit agency to receive grants for a Syracuse preservation project which he guessed could cost $1.3 million "if we do this right."
Doing it right would include buying the church, maintaining it as a museum with an endowment and covering costs of conservation, exhibit and interpretation.
Doug's prepared a preservation "plan of action" he'll discuss at the meeting Thursday, at noon in Bethany Church, 149 Beattie St.
IN CINCINNATI, Dan Hurley said he's not sure what the Freedom Center will do, at this point. He did mention that, "if we invest a lot of money into conservation, we'll want the originals in Cincinnati but right now there are a lot of questions that need to be answered."
Among those are the authenticity of the sculptures, the safety of removing them from the wall and their importance in the overall scheme of the exhibitions in the new center.
"In order to display them properly, we would have to recreate the crawl space" of the church basement, Dan said.
He added, "It's not part of the agreement to take them from Syracuse. We're a long way from a final decision."
The old brick building, a downtown landmark for 150 years, was the city's oldest operating church when the First Gospel Baptist congregation, successor the Methodists, moved to the suburbs in 1988.
The original Wesleyan congregation came together in 1843 because a group of Syracusans split with the Methodist church over the Fugitive Slave Law. That was five years before Syracuse became a city.
THE FOUNDERS wanted to take a stand against the law. Later, the building would be a literal sanctuary for slaves on their way to freedom.
The founding pastor, Luther Lee, wrote in his autobiography that he did the largest work of his life on the "under-ground railroad" in Syracuse between 1852 and 1855:
"I passed as many as 30 slaves through my hand in a month."
Historians feel the congregation hid them in the church basement.
Since renovation, Vaughn Lang rents the former sanctuary as Windows on Columbus Circle restaurant and office.
Cincinnati has been planning its National Underground Railroad Freedom Center for the past three years. A fund-raising campaign for the $70 million project was announced earlier this year, with a $3 million grant from Procter & Gamble Co. It's to rise on the city's riverfront.
Historians say Cincinnati, like Syracuse, was a hotbed for the abolition movement.
County Legislator Sam Roberts said he got involved in the Syracuse campaign at the request of Arthur Eve of Buffalo, a state legislature leader, who phoned and asked, "why isn't Syracuse in an uproar?" over the sculptures' new owner.
"This would be a very significant loss for out community," Sam remarked Friday. "It's not too late."
Dick Case is a columnist for the Syracuse Herald-Journal and Herald American.