Tradition holds that the community was a station on the Underground Railroad, the last station before fugitive slaves crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey. The surrounding landowners were white Quaker abolitionists, who tolerated the escaped slaves' building cabins on Buckingham Mountain. Selling or giving the land to the squatters would have been a direct violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which made it a federal crime to assist an escaped slave. The mountain's isolation and lookout views in all directions seemed to provide residents with some degree of protection from slave-catchers. At the community's height, reportedly a hundred African Americans lived on the mountain.