ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — A historic site along the Genesee River will be the focus of Rochester’s first official commemoration of New York’s Abolition Commemoration Day.
Kelsey’s Landing, located in Maplewood Park, is known as a gateway to freedom. A marker at the site explains how the port served as a final stop on the Underground Railroad, where historians say Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman helped guide dozens of people escaping slavery onto ships bound for Canada in the 1800s.
While many associate July 4 with Independence Day, it also marks the day slavery was abolished in New York state in 1827, decades before the Emancipation Proclamation…