How an Irish immigrant’s craftsmanship, Union Army contracts, Owosso’s Underground Railroad,

and the Gould family’s unwavering abolitionism converge in a single horse-drawn carriage

At 120 East Mason Street in Owosso, Michigan, inside a modest carriage house belonging to Nelson-House Funeral Home, sits one of the most quietly remarkable artifacts in American history. It is a horse-drawn hearse, built in 1870 by the James Cunningham Company of Rochester, New York. It is ornate, gold-trimmed, and still in working order. On November 2, 2005, this same carriage carried the casket of Rosa Parks on a seven-mile procession through Detroit following her funeral at Greater Grace Temple, where 4,000 mourners and a procession of American leaders—from Barack Obama to Aretha Franklin—gathered to honor the woman whose quiet refusal on a Montgomery bus in 1955 helped set a nation in motion.

That the hearse now rests permanently in Owosso is, on its surface, a charming piece of local trivia. But pull at the threads and the story unfurls into something far larger: a narrative connecting Irish immigration, Union Army manufacturing contracts, Rochester’s role as a beating heart of the abolitionist movement, Owosso’s own Underground Railroad stations, the Gould family’s financial and moral support of the Union cause, and the long, unfinished work of American justice. The history of this single object links a penniless immigrant in the 1830s to the mother of the civil rights movement in 2005, and places Owosso squarely in the story.

The Maker: An Irish Boy with a Dollar a Week

James Cunningham was born in 1815 in County Down, Ireland, one of seven children in a family soon to be shattered by poverty. His father died when he was five. His older brother’s family joined a British-backed emigration scheme—the so-called “Robinson Emigration”—that resettled thousands of poor Irish in Ontario, Canada, between 1823 and 1825. By 1831, sixteen-year-old James, his mother, and four siblings had followed, joining family near present-day Kawartha Lakes, Ontario. Their homestead became known as Cunningham’s Corners.

In 1833, Cunningham set out for New York City, hoping to find work with a carriage builder. He found nothing. But on his return trip through Rochester, New York, then a booming canal town, he saw opportunity and stayed. Hired as an apprentice at Hanford & Whitbeck for one dollar a week, he spent four years learning the carriage trade from the ground up. By 1838, he and two fellow workers had bought out their employer. By 1842, his partners had walked away during near-bankruptcy, and Cunningham assumed all the debt himself.

It was the kind of bet that only an immigrant with nothing left to lose would make. And it paid off spectacularly. James Cunningham, Son & Company grew into the largest industrial enterprise in Rochester, producing some of the finest carriages, hearses, and ambulances in the country. Later, the firm would pioneer American automobile production, build the first factory-produced motor ambulance in the United States, supply military ambulances to the Allies in World War I, and even manufacture prototype armored vehicles and aircraft. George Eastman—founder of Kodak—was among their automobile customers.

Union Contracts: The War Effort and Immigrant Industry

Here is where the story turns from remarkable to historically significant. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Union Army faced an enormous logistical challenge: it needed to move men, supplies, ammunition, and the wounded across vast distances, often over rough terrain, at a pace the existing infrastructure could not support. The North’s advantage was never just in the size of its army. It was in its industrial capacity—the factories, the workshops, the skilled tradespeople, many of them immigrants, who could produce the materiel of war at a scale the Confederacy could not match.

James Cunningham’s company was one of those essential suppliers. The Civil War brought prosperity to the firm through lucrative contracts with the Union Army. These were not vanity projects or ceremonial commissions. The Union needed wagons, ambulances, and transport vehicles—the arteries through which the lifeblood of the army flowed. Companies like Cunningham’s provided the physical infrastructure that allowed the North to sustain campaigns over years of grinding conflict. Without reliable transport for troops, supplies, and wounded soldiers, the Union’s numerical and strategic advantages would have been severely compromised.

The Cunningham story is a microcosm of the broader immigrant contribution to the Union cause. An Irish boy who arrived in America with no money and no connections was, within two decades, manufacturing the vehicles that helped the United States Army defeat the Confederacy and end the institution of slavery. And he was far from alone. Across the North, immigrant communities—Irish, German, Scandinavian, and others—were fighting and building and supplying the war effort at every level, from the factory floor to the front lines.

Michigan itself sent over 90,000 men to fight for the Union—roughly twenty-three percent of the state’s male population. Governor Austin Blair, a committed abolitionist, had pledged Michigan’s support even before Fort Sumter. When Lincoln asked the state for one regiment, Blair sent seven. When the first Michigan volunteers arrived in Washington, Lincoln was said to have exclaimed, “Thank God for Michigan!”

In a letter to his wife, one Michigan Union soldier captured the spirit of the cause: “The more I learn of the cursed institution of slavery, the more I feel willing to endure, for its final destruction. After this war is over, this whole country will undergo a change for the better. Abolishing slavery will dignify labor; that fact of itself will revolutionize everything.”

Rochester: Where the Hearse Was Born, Where Freedom Found a Voice

The city where Cunningham built his empire was no ordinary boomtown. Rochester, New York, was one of the great nerve centers of the American abolitionist movement. Frederick Douglass—the escaped slave who became the most powerful orator and writer of the antislavery cause—called Rochester home from 1847 to 1872, longer than he lived anywhere else in his life. It was in Rochester that Douglass published the North Star, his abolitionist newspaper, whose motto declared: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.”

Douglass’s home was a station on the Underground Railroad. Historians estimate he personally assisted some 400 freedom seekers during his years in Rochester, helping them cross Lake Ontario to safety in Canada. He worked alongside fellow abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer Susan B. Anthony; both are buried at Rochester’s Mount Hope Cemetery. Rochester was the city where Douglass delivered his searing “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech in 1852 at Corinthian Hall—widely considered one of the greatest antislavery addresses ever given.

Cunningham’s factory stood on Canal Street, just north of West Main. Douglass’s office for the North Star was on Buffalo Street. They were contemporaries operating in the same small city at the same time. While Cunningham was building the carriages and hearses that would become synonymous with American craftsmanship, Douglass was sheltering freedom seekers and writing the words that would reshape the nation’s conscience. The city that produced the hearse was the same city that harbored the escaped and gave voice to the cause of freedom.

Owosso’s Underground Railroad: Secret Doors and Station Masters

The hearse now resides in a city with its own deep roots in the struggle for freedom. Owosso, Michigan, was an active station on the Underground Railroad. Dr. John B. Barnes, a physician and judge who moved to Owosso in 1842, operated a waystation on Oliver and Water streets with his wife Sophronia, providing shelter and aid to enslaved African Americans fleeing north to Canada. Barnes was known locally as the “director of the Underground Railroad” and was a regular contributor to Michigan’s antislavery newspaper, the Signal of Liberty, published in Ann Arbor.

A house at 400 West Main Street also served as a station, most likely operated by Aaron and Maria Hinckley before and during the Civil War. Oral history from the granddaughter of later residents recalls a secret door in the attic, accessible only by climbing a pear tree at the back of the house—a hidden passage designed to shelter those making the desperate journey to freedom. Owosso was part of multiple Underground Railroad routes running through Michigan, with Durand and Owosso serving as key waypoints where freedom seekers were concealed along corridors leading to Canada.

Beneath Owosso’s streets, a network of underground tunnels has long fascinated residents and historians. These passages, connecting the Gould homes and local businesses, have become intertwined with local lore about the Underground Railroad. While the metaphorical “railroad” typically operated through safe houses and hidden rooms rather than literal tunnels, the existence of these subterranean passages adds another layer of intrigue to Owosso’s role in the fight against slavery.

The Gould Family: From Auburn to Owosso, Financing Freedom

No account of Owosso’s role in the Civil War era is complete without the Gould family, and the Gould story begins in a place of extraordinary significance: Auburn, New York.

Amos Gould arrived in Owosso from Auburn in 1843. He would become the city’s first mayor, its first lawyer, the founder of its first bank, the organizer of its first school district and cemetery association, and the driving force behind the railroads that connected the settlement to the wider world. But it is the place he came from that illuminates the moral universe in which the Goulds operated.

Auburn, New York, was the home of William Henry Seward—the governor, senator, and Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln who would become one of the most consequential antislavery politicians in American history. Seward’s Auburn home was an active station on the Underground Railroad; his wife Frances sheltered fugitive slaves while Seward fought slavery in the halls of government. Seward defended William Freeman, a mentally ill Black man, in a case that drew national attention and advanced the cause of racial justice in the courts. He championed immigrant rights and Catholic education. He argued that there was “a higher law than the Constitution” when it came to human freedom. And in one of his most famous acts, Seward sold land to Harriet Tubman, providing her a home in Auburn where she lived for the rest of her life.

The archival papers of the Gould family, held at Central Michigan University’s Clarke Historical Library, list William Henry Seward as a correspondent. This was not a casual connection. Amos Gould came from the same community as one of the most prominent antislavery figures in America. He carried that moral framework with him to Owosso and put it into practice.

When the Civil War broke out, Amos was serving as Owosso’s mayor. He and his brother Ebenezer faced the decision of who would enlist and who would stay behind to manage their law practice and care for both families. They flipped a coin. Ebenezer won the toss—and went to war.

Ebenezer Gould was commissioned as a Major in the 5th Michigan Cavalry in 1862, at the age of 44. He was promoted to Colonel in 1864 and was wounded in action at Hagerstown, Maryland, in July 1863—just days after the Battle of Gettysburg. He returned to Owosso a hero.

Amos, who lost the coin toss, fought on a different front. He was a strong Union man who gave direct financial support to the wives and families of Union soldiers while their husbands and fathers were away fighting. He used his resources and influence to sustain the community’s commitment to the cause. And when the war ended, the Goulds’ work did not stop.

In correspondence with Henry Cherry, a Union Army chaplain stationed in Knoxville, Tennessee, Amos Gould discussed plans for Reconstruction. Together, they organized “Good Northern Men” and “strong Union professors” to rebuild what Cherry described as “the destructed state of the churches divided and impoverished by the war.” In what the Gould Historic website describes as “true American fashion,” they participated in converting captured Confederate properties into schools and churches for Black communities. The Goulds were not simply financing a war. They were financing freedom—and the hard, unglamorous work of building a more just society in its aftermath.

The Ingersoll Rifles: Owosso’s Boys at Gettysburg and Beyond

While Amos Gould sustained families at home and Ebenezer led cavalry charges, Owosso’s young men were already fighting and dying on the front lines. In 1861, a company of local volunteers known as the “Ingersoll Rifles” mustered out of Owosso under the command of Captain Louis B. Quackenbush. They were absorbed into the 5th Michigan Infantry Regiment—a unit that would earn the grim distinction of suffering the fifth-highest casualty rate of any Union regiment in the entire war.

The Fighting Fifth, as it became known, saw action at nearly every major engagement in the Eastern Theater: the Peninsular Campaign, the Second Battle of Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and the Siege of Petersburg. At Gettysburg, the regiment arrived on July 2, 1863, at four in the afternoon and went directly into combat. Within a single hour, they lost 105 men killed and wounded—roughly half the men in the regiment. The loss of officers was especially severe.

What made the 5th Michigan especially remarkable was its composition. Because Michigan had only achieved statehood in 1837, many of the men who filled its ranks were not native Michiganders. They came from New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Florida—and from countries across Europe. Nearly a third of those fighting were immigrants. They were Irish and German and English, men who had come to America seeking a better life and found themselves fighting to make good on the promise of that life for others. The regiment was, in miniature, the American experiment itself: people from everywhere, fighting together for the principle that no person should be property.

Nelson-House: A Local Institution Since 1880

Nelson-House Funeral Home, the custodian of the Cunningham hearse, has its own deep roots in Owosso. The funeral home at its current location on the corner of Park and Mason Street was established in 1880 by Myron H. Knapp and John Peters. It passed through several hands over the decades before Bob Nelson and his cousin Harold “Sonny” House Jr. purchased it in 1980, incorporating it as Nelson-House Funeral Homes.

The firm acquired the antique Cunningham hearse in March 1981. The carriage, originally retired from funeral service by the Drowns Funeral Home in Ellensburg Depot, New York, had been restored in 1976 and used in the U.S. Bicentennial Parade in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Under Nelson-House’s stewardship, it became a beloved fixture in Mid-Michigan parades, taking top honors at the Curwood Parade, the Michigan State Fair Grand Opening Parade, the 75th United Auto Workers Parade, and the Genesee County 150th Birthday Celebration. It was also loaned to and displayed at the R.E. Olds Museum in Lansing.

Then came the call in 2005. When the funeral arrangements for Rosa Parks required a horse-drawn hearse befitting the gravity of the occasion, Nelson-House and their Cunningham carriage answered. The hearse carried Parks’s flag-draped casket from Greater Grace Temple through seven miles of Detroit streets to Woodlawn Cemetery, while thousands of mourners lined the route releasing white balloons. The Michigan National Guard provided an honor guard. President George W. Bush ordered flags flown at half-staff across the nation.

Convergence: 135 Years in a Single Carriage

Step back far enough and the full picture comes into focus. The hearse on Mason Street is not merely an antique. It is a physical intersection of nearly every thread in the American story of freedom:

It was built by an Irish immigrant who arrived in America with nothing and, through sheer craft and persistence, built one of the country’s great manufacturing firms. It was built in a city—Rochester, New York—where Frederick Douglass published the North Star, sheltered freedom seekers, and delivered some of the most powerful antislavery rhetoric in American history. It was built by a company sustained through its most precarious years by Union Army contracts—contracts that directly supplied the men and materiel needed to defeat the Confederacy and end slavery. It is maintained by a funeral home in a city—Owosso, Michigan—that operated its own Underground Railroad stations, where secret doors and hidden attics sheltered those fleeing bondage. It resides in the community of the Gould family, who arrived from Auburn, New York—the home of William Henry Seward and Harriet Tubman—and who financed the Union cause, sent their own to fight, supported soldiers’ families, and after the war, helped convert Confederate properties into schools and churches for Black communities. And it carried Rosa Parks, the woman whose quiet refusal on a Montgomery bus in 1955 reignited the long struggle for justice that all these earlier actors had fought for.

A Golden Thread

The story of the Nelson-House hearse is, at its heart, a story about what immigrants and ordinary people built in America. An Irish boy with a dollar-a-week apprenticeship built a company that equipped the Union Army. A family from Auburn, New York, brought abolitionist convictions to the Michigan frontier and put their money, their family, and their futures on the line for the cause. A small-town company of volunteers—the Ingersoll Rifles—marched out of Owosso and into the worst fighting the Civil War had to offer, losing half their number in a single hour at Gettysburg. Doctors and homesteaders hid freedom seekers in their attics and basements. And a local funeral home, carrying on a tradition of care stretching back to 1880, took the call to carry a civil rights icon to her final rest.

These are not separate stories. They are one story—a story about good people, many of them newcomers to this country, working at every level to build a nation worthy of its promises. The hearse at 120 East Mason Street is the thread that ties them all together. It sits quietly in its carriage house, still in working order, still available for service. It has carried the honored dead for over 150 years. And in its wood and glass and gold trim, it carries something more: the accumulated weight of the American idea that all people are created equal, and that ordinary people in ordinary places have always been the ones who make that idea real.

Sources and Further Reading

James Cunningham, Son and Company Records, Rochester Museum & Science Center and Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Amos Gould Family Papers, Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University; and Autry National Center.

“About the Gould Family and Home History,” Gould Historic (gouldhistoric.com).

“Owosso History,” Owosso News Yesteryear and Events (owossonye.com).

“The James Cunningham, Son & Company, Pt. 1 & 2,” Local History Rocs, Rochester Public Library.

“Abolitionist helped slaves escape through Shiawassee County,” The Argus-Press, April 2011.

“The 5th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War,” Military History of the Upper Great Lakes, Michigan Technological University.

“Frederick Douglass and the Underground Railroad,” Landmark Society of Western New York.

“William H. Seward and the Emancipation Proclamation,” American Battlefield Trust.

Nelson-House Funeral Homes, “Our History” (nelson-house.com).

“Rosa Parks honored by thousands at funeral,” NBC News / Associated Press, November 2, 2005.

Walk of History Historical Marker, Owosso, Michigan (hmdb.org).

Find a Grave memorials: James Cunningham (1815–1886); Col. Ebenezer Gould (1818–1877).

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Rosa-Parks-defiance-in-Alabama-inspired-many-in-2598991.php