Term used for the route used by runaway slaves to reach freedom either in the North or Canada. Eber M. Pettit wrote of the URR, "It had, like all other railroads, its officers and stations, engineers and conductors, ticket agents and train dispatchers, hotels and eating houses." According to Rush Sloane, the term was first used in 1831 when the slave Tice Davids ran away from his master. Davids swam across the Ohio River and his master could never find a trace of him afterwards. The master commented that his slave "must have gone off on an underground road." Reverend William M. Mitchell tells a similar storey in which a master, in frustration at his inability to retrieve a runaway, says, "The damned Abolitionists must have a Rail-road under the ground by which they run off slaves."