Solomon Northup Day was founded in 1999 by Saratogian Renee Moore to honor and to bring awareness to the life of Solomon Northup, a local free-born Black man who was kidnapped into slavery in 1841.

Solomon Northup Day was founded in 1999 by Saratogian Renee Moore to honor and to bring awareness to the life of Solomon Northup, a local free-born Black man who was kidnapped into slavery in 1841.
Northup was born a free man in Minerva, Essex County, NY, in July 1808. He was a literate man who worked on the Champlain Canal. While working as a cabbie and violinist in Saratoga Springs, he was abducted, held in a slave pen in Washington, DC, and sold into slavery in Louisiana for 12 years before regaining his freedom.
Citizens of Saratoga and surrounding areas were instrumental in arranging for Solomon’s release in 1853 and return to Saratoga. Northup published his autobiography Twelve Years A Slave in 1853 about his ordeal.
It is believed he traveled throughout the region selling his book and speaking out against slavery and was himself an abolitionist. Although Northup sought to bring his captors to trial, they were never prosecuted and he mysteriously disappeared. To date, his burial site has not been identified and it is not known whether or not he was killed, re-captured or died of natural causes.
More than forty descendants of Solomon Northup and his wife Ann Hampton Northup will attend to present poetry and information about their family heritage. Northup’s great, great, great granddaughter will play a violin solo in his honor.
Don Papson, founder of the North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association and the North Star Underground Railroad Museum in Ausable Chasm, NY will present new research on Northup’s life. A representative of the Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region w