CUMBERLAND, Md. -- The short stretch of tunnels and paths that makes up a portion of the Underground Railroad remains as relevant today as it ever did.

The Rev. Edward Chapman of the Emmanuel Episcopal Church said "several thousand" students, scholars and curious travelers visit the trenches and tunnels under the church each year to follow firsthand the footsteps of an unknown number of slaves who used the basement of the church as an oasis before resuming their quest for freedom.

According to oral history passed down through generations, a slave named Samuel Denson escaped from a plantation in Vicksburg, Miss., and traveled along the Underground Railroad until he reached Cumberland. For unknown reasons, Denson, then just about 14 years old, stopped running. He was offered a job as church janitor by the Rev. Hillhouse Buell.

Buell was from New York and a known sympathizer to slaves. By hiring Denson, Buell risked his own freedom and social standing.

Buell, Chapman said, "was white and prominent ... he is likely to have been able to afford a good attorney. He probably would not end up serving more than a few decades in prison" if he'd been caught.

Denson, however, "would have been executed and the escaping slaves would have been returned to their masters," Chapman said, "and, under the law, the masters could do anything they wanted to -- torture, dismember or kill" them.

The church sits on a hill overlooking Wills Creek and the former Shanty Town, which served as an eclectic mix of indentured servants working on the construction of the C--O Canal, slaves and free blacks. The church is on the site of the old Fort Cumberland, and it is the trenches dug in defense of the fort that later served as part of the Underground Railroad.

Chapman said the trenches were extended under Washington Street to what is now the Allegany County Library building -- formerly a private school called Allegany Academy -- as well as the church rectory, now a law office. Denson was janitor for all three buildings and likely used the trenches at first to move from building to building in a convenient manner.

That convenience was soon extended to slaves seeking their freedom. Part of Denson's job, Chapman said, was to ring the church bell. At 1 a.m., it would have been proper to ring the bell once. But at that time of day, few would have noticed the bell ringing twice -- and even fewer would have suspected the second ring signaled to slaves waiting in brush along the canal towpath that the coast was clear.

"The runaways would come up the hill to a gate, which led into the maze of tunnels under the church," wrote Vernon Roberts for the Maryland State Archives. "After resting, receiving food and instructions, the runaways were taken through the tunnels that exited to the other side of the rectory which was across the road. From this point, it was only a five-mile walk to the Mason-Dixon Line and freedom."

That changed with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave broad powers to Southern states to track down escaped slaves even in free states.

Chapman, who has served as church pastor for some 25 years, said he was taken aback when blacks and others would come to see the tunnels for themselves.

"We didn't know any of that," Chapman said of the history. "I thought they were mistaken."

But Chapman later learned that the Underground Railroad, little more than a loose network of trails and paths known to be sympathetic toward escaping slaves, were kept "a deep secret."

The tunnels are open for visitors throughout the year, Chapman said.

Kevin Spradlin writes for the Cumberland (Md.) Times-News. He can be reached at kspradlin@times-news.com.