EMPIRE brickwork

Freeborn Trails
Speculative Steps on the Underground Railroad at Wilderstein

Freeborn Trails is a meditation on the promise of freedom offered by the Hudson River, “express track” of the Underground Railroad, as well as the many riverfront estates that offered access to it, like the 160 acres purchased in 1799 by abolitionist Methodist minister Rev. Freeborn Garretson, a portion of which Wilderstein Historic Site stands on today. Using found “EMPIRE” brand bricks and pebbles harvested from the river, the design of each “station” is based on the legendary patterns quilted by enslaved women who once communicated in code the movements of the Underground Railroad. Freeborn Trails inscribes the landscape with traces of an unwritten history of the “American Picturesque.”

Freeborn Trails was exhibited in 2021 as part of Not Just One Thing, curated by Krista Caballero and Julia Rosenbaum and in partnership with the Bard Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.

Click on an image to hear the audio description

"North Star"

"Shoofly"

"Monkey Wrench"

"Flying Geese"

"Bear Claw"

"Crossroads"

"North Star" Station installed at Wilderstein Historic Site, Rhinebeck, NY

Special thanks for research help to:

Julia Rosenbaum and Krista Caballero
Myra B. Young Armstead, author of "Freedom's Gardener"
Nancy Kelly, Town of Rhinebeck Historian
Ashley Hurlbert-Biagini and Susan Stessin-Cohn, authors of "In Defiance, Runaways From Slavery in New York's Hudson River Valley, 1735-1831"