Lancaster County Sheriff, ‘Dare Devil Dave’ Miller secretly liberated women jailed by bounty hunters

Fulton Theatre, directly opposite of this block, is among the nation's oldest continually operating performance halls. When this site was the location of the Lancaster County Jail, a dramatic episode in the Underground Railroad history occurred. The eighteenth-century Prison and Workhouse was demolished down to its foundations in 1851. The Fulton was built on portions of those prison walls, remnants of which are visible along North Water Street.

An unusual escape occurred here in 1835. Two formerly enslaved African-American women, Mrs. John Urick and Mrs. William (Margaret) Wallace, were living freely with their families in rural Lancaster. Bounty hunters abducted the women and Wallace's oldest child took them by wagon to Lancaster County Jail, with plans to hold them temporarily before returning to the Carolinas.

But an unlikely co-conspirator, Sheriff David Miller, released them.

Surprisingly, the women and child appeared the next morning at the farm of Abolitionist Daniel Gibbons, telling of an incredible escape using only a knife. "I broke jail," one woman said. For several days they moved from safe-house to safe-house telling this story and 'covering' for Miller, who years later admitted to a confidant he opened their cell and let them walk out.

Known as "Dare-Devil Dave," Miller was a



veteran, horse racer, entrepreneur and humanitarian. As Sheriff, he suppressed race riots against African Americans in Columbia, Pennsylvania in 1835. The secret jail release was documented in a 2008 report to the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, earning the Fulton and its workhouse foundations the designation as a site with an authentic Underground Railroad connection.

Read this report at:
LancasterHistory.org/aah-markers

[Aside:]
"Dave delivered the papers to the Courtroom on horseback."
The Sunday News, Lancaster, PA. July 8, 1934. Article details many tales of the swashbuckling sheriff who once rode his steed into a courtroom to impress a judge.

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