Underground Railroad to Mexico project is using major grant to archive history

• The grant, announced in October, will also help create an interactive mapping project and infrastructure improvements at the Webber Ranch cemetery in Texas.

Flashback: The Underground Railroad to Mexico was a loosely organized path allowing enslaved Black people in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alabama to escape bondage by fleeing south.

• Oral histories, archives of slave escape ads, and narratives of formerly enslaved people show that fleeing to Mexico was a possibility in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War.
• Mexico abolished slavery in the 1830s, and escapees changed their names and started new lives there.

Zoom in: The Webber Family Preservation Project is made up of descendants of Silvia Webber.

• Their project recently created a nonprofit to preserve the history of a woman known in the region as "Aunt Puss."
• The group is also raising money to maintain a Webber cemetery in South Texas and learn more about the woman who risked her life to help others seek freedom.
• "We're not going to stay quiet, and we're going to ensure that the story, and this history and others like this, get out there," Omar "O.J." Treviño, a descendant of Webber, tells Axios.

Zoom out: Webber was the wife of John Webber, a white man who purchased her freedom before they settled in Webberville, Texas, which is now part of Austin.

• The couple operated a ranch and built a ferry landing on their property to help slavery escapees move along the Colorado River toward Mexico, according to Ohio State history professor María Esther Hammack.
• The couple had 11 children and used their ranch as a stop in the underground railroad to Mexico until racial discrimination forced them to move to South Texas, where they continued their undercover mission, Hammack tells Axios Latino.

What they're saying: "This means as an organization comprised of descendants, we can aid others in reclaiming this shared history," Leslie Alexis Dutcher-Trevino, O.J.'s wife and president of the Webber Family Preservation Project, tells Axios.

• Ohio State history professor María Esther Hammack helped the project obtain the grant after news stories spread about the Webbers.