[4] Isaac and Dinah Mendenhall were committed abolitionists and champions of the temperance, women's suffrage, pacifism, and "free expression of thought upon religion."

For more than thirty-five years, they served as station masters and conductors on the Underground Railroad, part of a network that included many Quaker farmers in the Kennett Square area.

To forestall imposters, he would write a note for freedom seekers to hand to the Mendenhalls stating that Garrett had sent a specified number of "bales of black wool.

[5] Conductors then smuggled or guided enslaved persons to the Underground Railroad's next station stops in towns such as Darby, Pocopsin, East Bradford, Newlin, Lionville, or Philadelphia.

[1] In the aftermath of the Christiana Riot of 1851, in which a white slave hunter was killed, the Mendenhalls sheltered William Parker, Alexander Pinckney, Abraham Johnson, and a fourth fugitive whose name was not recorded.

[1][5] A prominent social activist in her own right, Dinah was a member of an abolitionist committee that met with President Abraham Lincoln in 1862 to urge him to enact the Emancipation Proclamation.

[2] In 1851, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote to the Mendenhalls: "Whenever and wherever the cause of freedom needed aid and coutenance, you were sure to be found with the noble band of Chester County men and women to whose mental culture, moral stamina, and generous self-sacrifice I can bear empathetic testimony.