The Underground Railroad was a stealth and covert operation meant to keep the conductors (people who helped to guide enslaved folk to freedom), stationmasters (people who provided clandestine lodging and food along escape routes) and investors (people who financed railroad and steamship passage, food, and funds bribe local and state officials) totally anonymous. Amanda Taylor (1806-1904) was born in an unknown section of New York with free papers. She somehow ended up in Arkansas where she worked as a nurse for Arkansas’ first governor, democrat James Sevier Conway (1798-1855). Conway served as governor from 1836-1840. In Arkansas Taylor used her “free papers” to help a young fugitive slave girl escape before Taylor returned to New York in 1837. She married Henry Foster, a barber, about 1845 and eventually opened what became a popular confectionery business in Tarrytown, New York in Westchester County. Proceeds from the confectionery store along with donations from the local Dutch Reformed and Methodist churches and residents in the Tarrytowns helped establish what became Foster African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Before the abolition of U. S. slavery, Amanda Foster and Foster AME feed and sheltered runways as a station house on the Underground Railroad. Today Foster AME, still located at 90 Wildey Street in Tarrytown, is a Nationally Registered underground railroad Station.
