John Fairfield

John Fairfield (died 1861?) was a "conductor" of the Underground Railroad who was extensively involved in operations in present-day West Virginia prior to the American Civil War. He was known for his often unusual and inventive methods for helping runaway slaves escape to free states. He has also been referred to by the name James Fairfield. Bio Fairfield was born to a slave-holding family in Virginia. However, he disagreed with his family's livelihood when he became a young man. When he was twenty, he helped a childhood friend escape from his uncle's farm, taking him to Canada. Upon his return to Virginia, he learned that his uncle was planning to have him arrested, so he took several more slaves belonging to his uncle and led them through the mountains of northern Virginia and on to Canada. He soon became involved with the abolitionist movement and, during the 1850s, quickly establishing himself with a reputation as one of the most cunning conductors on the Underground Railroad. Primarily using routes directly to the Northeastern United States through Appalachia, he specialized in reuniting broken families. In one incident, he had been asked by a group of freed slaves to rescue relatives still enslaved in Charleston, West Virginia (then still part of Virginia) where they worked at the saltworks along the Kanawha River. Fairfield, with the assistance of two freedmen, traveled to Charleston posing as a businessman from Louisville, Kentucky. Ingratiating himself with the local slaveholders, he persuaded them to invest in a plan to build boats to haul salt extracted from the Kanawha salt brines and haul his cargo down river to be sold at a substantial profit. While he oversaw the construction of two boats, his "slaves" would scout the area in order to locate their relatives. During the next two nights, the boats were loaded with runaway slaves and quietly sent down river. Fairfield would raise the alarm hours later, furious over the "loss" of his slaves and property, and took it upon himself to organize a search party to overtake the fugitive slaves. Suggesting they split up to search the surrounding area, he arranged to rendezvous with the group but instead rode off in the opposite direction to catch up with the escaped slaves which he eventually led to Canada.