William Wells Brown, who distinguished himself as an anti-slavery lecturer in this country and England, rendered considerable service to fellow-fugitives shortly after his escape from Missouri about 1840.[739] Securing employment on a Lake Erie steamboat, he was able to provide the means of transportation for many runaways across the lake. As the boat frequently touched at Cleveland on its trips to and fro between Buffalo and Detroit, Mr. Brown made an arrangement with some Cleveland friends to furnish transportation, which was done without charge, for any negroes they might wish to send to Canada. The result was that delegations of anxious refugees were often taken aboard at the Cleveland wharf. Brown engaged in this service in the early forties, and his companies were therefore small, but he sometimes gave passage to four or five at one time. "In the year 1842," he says, "I conveyed, from the first of May to the first of December, sixty-nine fugitives over Lake Erie to Canada. In 1843 I visited Malden, in upper Canada, and counted seventeen in that small village whom I had assisted in reaching Canada."[740] John W. Jones, a respected citizen of Elmira, New York, made his way in 1844 from Virginia to the city where he still lives. During the following year he succeeded in aiding two younger brothers to join him, and thereafter he continued, in coöperation with Mr. Jervis Langdon and other abolitionists of Elmira, to succor his brethren in their search for places of refuge. After the construction of the Northern Central Railroad through Elmira, Mr. Jones effected an arrangement with some of the employees of that road by which his friends could be carried through to the Canadian border in baggage-cars. At the same time he was in regular correspondence with William Still, the agent of the central underground station at Philadelphia, who frequently sent him companies of passengers requiring immediate transportation.[741] John H. Hooper, a fugitive from the Eastern Shore of Maryland and an acquaintance there of Fred Douglass, kept a station at Troy, New York, where he settled.[742] Louis Washington, who fled from Richmond, Virginia, to Columbus, Ohio, became a conductor of the Underground Road at that point. Mr. James Poindexter, a well-known colored clergyman of Columbus, knew Washington intimately, and testifies that he had teams and wagons with which he conveyed the midnight pilgrims on their way.[743] There are other cases of fugitive settlers that became members of the large company of underground operators. But a sufficient number have been mentioned to indicate that they were not rare. The first and the last of the seven named did not continue long in the status of escaped slaves. Frederick Douglass secured his liberty in a legal way through the payment by English friends of the sum of $750 to his master. Louis Washington purchased his own freedom. The other five, so far as known, were never relieved by the payment of money from the claims