Join us at The Writer’s Center to celebrate the release of David Goodrich’s new book, On Freedom Road. David is in conversation with Lynn Salvo. Refreshments provided. Book signing to follow. Book sale proceeds go to The Writer’s Center.
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David Goodrich worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and served as the Director of the UN Global Climate Observing System in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition to cycling across the US, he has ridden down the Appalachians and across Montana, South Dakota, France and Spain. He lives in Maryland.
Lynn Salvo’s career was as an educator and owner of an education business. Upon selling the business, she retired and dove deeply into long distance bicycling. Her theme has been peace and her biggest cycling achievement was a peace sign the size of North America completed over six years and 14,500 miles, during which she set three Guinness World Records. She lives in Virginia.
About the Book
A thoughtful and illuminating bicycle journey along the Underground Railroad by a climate scientist seeking to engage with American history.
The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in plain sight: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio. Over the course of four years, David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles east of the Mississippi to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad and delve into the history and stories in the places where they happened.
He followed the most famous of conductors, Harriet Tubman, from where she was enslaved in Maryland, on the eastern shore, all the way to her family sanctuary at a tiny chapel in Ontario, Canada. Travelling South, he rode from New Orleans, where the enslaved were bought and sold, through Mississippi and the heart of the Delta Blues. As we pedal along with him, Goodrich brings us to the Borderland along the Ohio River, a kind of no-mans-land between North and South in the years before the Civil War. Here, slave hunters roamed both banks of the river, trying to catch people as they fled for freedom. We travel to Oberlin, Ohio, a town that staunchly defended freedom seekers, embodied in the life of Lewis Leary, who was lost in the fires of Harpers Ferry, but his spirit was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance.
On Freedom Road enables us to see familiar places—New York and Philadelphia, New Orleans and Buffalo—in a very different light: from the vantage point of desperate people seeking to outrun the reach of slavery. Join in this journey to find the heroes and stories, both known and hidden, of the Underground Railroad.