Abraham Walton Sr. was born in 1777 in Amherst, New Hampshire, then still a colony, to William and Hannah Littlehale Walton. He married Mary “Polly” Hutchinson, born in Amherst in 1778 to Ebenezer and Hannah Littlefield Hutchinson, in Oxford County, Maine, in 1799. 

The couple’s first six children were born in Maine: Abraham Jr., 1799; Ellen, 1802; Dudley, 1804; Mary, 1807; Sarah, 1809; and Isaiah, 1812. Daughter Irene was born in 1815 in Ohio; daughters Mariah and Matilda (Malinda) were born in Jefferson County in 1821 and 1823, respectively. Sadly, their daughter, three-year-old Ellen, died from burns sustained after wandering from the house and getting to close to a fire her father had made to discard of wood and brush.

Abraham Sr.’s grandson, Hiram Hall, wrote in 1922 of having Abraham’s land deed for a quarter section in Graham Township, Jefferson County, Indiana, dated May 10, 1815, and signed by President James Madison, according to historian Mark Furnish, PhD. Around 1818, Abraham and his sons built a two-story stone house on the property, which still stands, though has been empty for many years and is in disrepair.

In 1824, Abraham served as one of the founders of the Lick Branch Baptist Church. In 1839, he, Polly, and several of their children signed as founding members of the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Society, along with the families of Samuel Tibbets, Lyman and Benajah Hoyt, John Nelson, Lewis Hicklin, and others. The NCASS was formed as an “auxiliary to the Indiana Anti-Slavery Society,” formed a few months earlier, Furnish writes.

The NCASS split and in 1846, Walton, John Tibbetts, and others formed the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Baptist Church, which was the entity that founded Eleutherian Institute in 1848. 

Individuals involved in Underground Railroad activity rarely kept records or anything that could be used to connect them to such work; the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 granted southern slaveholders the right to recapture any of their human property that had fled north. The law, in turn, boosted the slave-catching industry, in which bounty hunters went out in search of fugitives and bring them back to the slaveholders, who paid them well for their efforts. That situation only worsened as high demand for slaves in the Deep South prompted unscrupulous en to kidnap free people of color and sell them south into slavery. 

Then came the passage of a Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced penalized officials in Northern states to cooperate with the capture and return of blacks seeking freedom. Additionally, it made an outlaw of regular people in the North charged with aiding fugitives; if caught, a person could face six months in prison and be fined $1,000 — more than $37,000 in today’s dollars. 

In Jefferson County, those laws would have been carried out by Sheriff Robert Right Rea, a pro-slavery resident of Madison, Indiana, who was a cunning slave-catcher feared throughout southern Indiana, southwestern Ohio, and northern Kentucky by fugitives and those involved with UGRR activities. 

Based on their involvement with the anti-slavery society and Eleutherian, which was established to educate students regardless of race or gender, it’s likely Abraham and Polly Walton and members of their family worked as UGRR operatives. They likely provided aid to many fugitives from the South by feeding and clothing them, and providing them a safe place to rest before helping them continue the journey north to freedom in Michigan and Canada, in spite of the federal law and the prospect of harm that could befall them—both physically and financially—by bounty hunters and pro-slavery neighbors.