Guilford will expand and improve the trail while also teaching visitors about the plants that provided freedom seekers with food and medicine.
Guilford College will expand and improve a section of the Underground Railroad Trail that cuts through the College’s woods as part of a federal grant announced this month.
The $42,800 grant from the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program will enable the College to install new interpretive wayside markers at key entry points near the trail with smaller QR-code markers that help educate hikers using a website students will help create. The grant will also help the College build a pair of trailhead kiosks with orienting information, and create a mural at the dam ruin that will represent freedom seekers’ journeys along the trail and plants they might have encountered on their journey through Greensboro. The College will commission an art student to paint the mural.
The current trail is about a half-mile long. The grant will also fund creating a link near the dam between the Underground Railroad Trail and the main gravel trail in the woods. A website will be built in the spring and work on the trail will take place next summer. Tony Van Winkle (above), an Assistant Professor of Sustainable Food Systems and Environmental Studies, says work should be completed by December of 2024.
Most of the trail improvements will be tied into a new ethnobotany class being taught by Tony.
Ethnobotany is the study of how people have known, used, and interacted with plants through time and space, in this case the freedom seekers who used Guilford’s woods on their journey North. Along the way they relied on the woods to conceal themselves, to find food and heal themselves, and evade capture by connecting with and understanding the nature around them, says Tony.
Tony says he’s wanted to teach an ethnobotany class since he arrived at Guilford in 2021 “The interaction between humans and plants has always been kind of my bread and butter,” says Tony.
Sixteen students are enrolled in Tony’s People & Plants: An Introduction to Ethnobotany class this semester. “It’s a nice eclectic, across-the-board mix of students who are really enjoying the class.”
The grant will also go toward helping students better understand the relationship freedom seekers had with native plants. “I think the students are seeing things from a perspective, a lens they might have never seen before and that’s great.”