Underground Railroad activity today resides mostly in programs, collections and writings around the nation, and it is often in these places where one finds the new fermentation on the Underground Railroad. But the actual Underground Railroad itself remains what it has always been, the network of safe-houses and the routes connecting them that began in the time of freedom seekers and still exists today. Unavoidably, the identity of many of these places has receded into the mists of time never to be known again, but a surprisingly large number of Underground Railroad sites remains known today mainly through oral traditions passed down over nearly 150 years, and a much smaller number through written accounts.

The number of safe-houses identified just in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio now runs into the hundreds, and the pattern of the network of routes among these places, often unclear even in its day, is now emerging. It should not be too long before the general public, the tourist and the scholar will have interesting guide maps showing the locations of many safe-house and routes.

A recent controversy surrounding today's Underground Railroad is whether plantations and other places of enslavement which stood in opposition to slavery and to the Underground Railroad should be considered Underground Railroad sites because freedom seekers' journeys began at such places. Some feel that a freedom seeker's starting place, no matter how opposed it was to freedom, should be regarded as part of the Underground Railroad, while others believe that the Underground Railroad was an anti-slavery phenomenon consisting only of places which supported the quest for freedom. This is an ongoing debate. Friends of the Underground Railroad as an organization has not subscribed to the view of places of enslavement being part of the Underground Railroad.