A look at Elmira's Emancipation Day celebration almost 150 years later

A 20th-century depiction of Grove Park

ELMIRA, N.Y. (WENY) -- On an August day 143 years ago, John W. Jones was showing Frederick Douglass around Elmira. After a stroll through the 1880's downtown, the two Black men stepped into Park Church, to pay homage to Mark Twain's father-in-law, Jervis Langdon. 

Langdon was a station master on the Underground Railroad and ushered many escaped slaves through the Park Church's stead. Jones and Douglass knew him throughout their time working on the Underground Railroad. Elmira was one of, if not the final stop for many escaped slaves looking for freedom. Langdon's portrait still stands in the church today as it did on August 3, 1880. 

"it's something that's worth being proud of, it's worth remembering how important Elmira was as a destination for the migration of emancipated people. This was a very important hub in the networks of freedom, and I think that's something that we shouldn't easily forget," said Matthew Seybold, resident scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies.

This was not the pairs only stop that day. Douglass was to give a speech to a crowd of about 15,000 people gathered in the city for an Emancipation Day celebration. 

The prominent abolitionist Douglass spoke in what is now Grove Park, called Hoffman's Grove then, for two hours. Douglass covered topics ranging from the joys of emancipation, and the failures of reconstruction in the south.

"The day we celebrate is pre-eminently the colored man’s day. The great event which has distinguished it, and which will forever distinguish it from all other days of the year, has justly claimed the thoughtful attention of the Statesmen, and of social reformers throughout the world," said Douglass, according to a compilation of manuscripts confirmed by Seybold.

The park was filled with African Americans from across New York and Pennsylvania, with few Caucasians in attendance, according to Seybold. One of them in attendance was Mark Twain. Seybold says the speech had such a profound affect on the author, the event influenced the direction of two of his works.

Seybold argues that Douglass' speech directly changed Twain's focus on the novel 'Huckleberry Finn'.

"Just after Emancipation Day, Twain books his first return travel to the South. He goes back to the Mississippi River Valley for the first time since before the Civil War. It seems to me, the reason he does so is that Douglass has painted this picture of the failure of reconstruction, of an exploitative, racist sharecropping system. Twain wants to go and see it for himself," said Seybold.

The other work Seybold says Douglass contributed to is 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'.

"He starts writing about being part of this vast, large, multiracial crowd, and of being... one of the relatively few white men in that vast, large, multiracial crowd, and the sort of discomfort that that creates," Seybold said. "This is the first piece of 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'. He doesn't take up the whole narrative until many years later, but it's very clear that this is the first scene he writes that then becomes part of that story."

Seybold says with the size, scale and presence of Douglass at Elmira's Emancipation event, it is a part of history that residents shouldn't forget.