Lear Green: Freedom in a Wooden Crate

The crate was small, just big enough for one young woman to curl inside. For fifteen hours it rocked in the dark belly of a ship leaving Baltimore, carrying not cargo but a life—and a gamble for freedom. Inside was Lear Green.

In 1857, Green lived at 153 South Broadway in Baltimore. She was enslaved but determined to escape. With the help of friends, she planned her daring flight north: sealed into a wooden box, carried through the streets to the docks at Light and Pratt, and loaded onto a vessel bound for Philadelphia. Within days, her enslavers posted a $150 reward for her capture.

Green did not make the journey alone. On deck traveled her future mother-in-law, a free Black woman. From her vantage point she could move easily, slipping to the crate when the ship quieted at night, lifting the lid just enough to give Lear fresh air and comfort. The plan worked. At last, the box was unloaded at Pier 3 in Philadelphia, and Lear emerged alive, unbroken, and free.

From there, the women traveled to Elmira, New York.

Elmira was more than a stop on the Underground Railroad—it was a destination. The Black neighborhood called Slabtown was thriving, filled with shops, businesses, and families who had built a solid middle-class community. Many who had planned to move on to Canada instead chose to stay. Lear did too. She married William Adams, the man she had risked everything to reach, and settled with him in Slabtown.

But their time together was short. Lear died of unknown causes just before the Civil War began. William disappears from the record after her death.

Elmira itself soon became infamous as the site of a Confederate prison camp, remembered bitterly as “Hellmira.” Thousands of soldiers died there, buried by John W. Jones—himself an escaped slave from Virginia and a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Jones helped more than 800 enslaved people find freedom. It’s very likely that Lear and William knew him.

Today, the house she fled still stands at 504 South Broadway in Baltimore. The docks she was carried to are now Baltimore’s bustling Inner Harbor. Most visitors never realize that in 1857, a wooden crate held not just a young woman but a story of hope, courage, and freedom.

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I first read her story in Forbidden Fruit by Betty DeRamus and have adapted it here in a shorter form. The dock workers who made her escape possible, along with the escapees themselves, embodied what Frederick Douglass and William Still called “Invisible Agency.” They were not just participants but living proof of the Abolitionist movement in action.

The men and women who worked as deckhands and dock workers have been largely overlooked in popular history. Yet they played a critical role in freedom stories like Lear Green’s. I first came across their importance in The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina by David Cecelski and Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea by S. Charles Bolton. These works show how Black maritime workers used their knowledge of ships, tides, and ports to turn the waterfront into a pathway out of slavery.