As Congress put the finishing touches on the Fugitive Slave Law in August 1850, eight slaves from Clarke County in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley arrived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, followed closely by their owners and slave catchers. Three of the eight – Samuel Wilson, George Brocks, and Billy – broke their journey in the city; the others chose to move on further north. The choice to stay in the city was not unusual. The state capital, with a significant black population – at 10 percent, the largest of any city in the state – was close to the western end of an arc of contested sites of freedom stretching from Franklin County east through Columbia on the Susquehanna River, which emptied into the Chesapeake Bay, then further east through Lancaster to West Chester and Philadelphia. For years, it had been a destination for those seeking freedom. An estimated 150 fugitive slaves made the capital city their home in 1850. The topography of the area, with its mountain ranges running southwest to northeast, was in places remote enough to provide inaccessible sanctuaries for those fleeing slavery in northwest Maryland and the Shenandoah Valley. Pockets of black rural and urban settlements could be found in and around Christiana, Mercersburg, Chambersburg, Gettysburg, Carlisle, York, West Chester, and elsewhere. They and the many Quaker settlements in the area had long been magnets for those fleeing slavery. Columbia, primarily because of its location, and an “insatiable demand for cheap labor,” mainly in its lumberyards, according to Carl Oblinger, “attracted fugitive slaves and manumitted blacks fleeing the Border slave states.” An observer who knew the place well recalled that, during the rafting season, much of the work of stacking and transporting an estimated fifty million feet of lumber on rafts to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Wilmington was done by African Americans. As early as the 1830s, these black communities had formed societies to protect themselves and the fugitive slaves who resided there. Formed in December 1840, the Gettysburg “Slave Refuge Society” assisted fleeing slaves, providing them with shelter, clothing, food, and transportation. Not surprisingly, slaveholders who lost slaves descended on the area in the hopes of reclaiming their property. This region of refuge, David Smith has observed, was also “honeycombed with slave catchers.”