Beginning in the late 1990s, an unexplained rekindling of interest in the Underground Railroad began to occur, and none too soon after a long nationwide slumber. Teachers from grade school though university began including instruction on the Underground Railroad in curricula. Owners of buildings which had been used as safe-houses or of properties with Underground Railroad routes began restoring such sites and publicizing their history. In 1994, Anthony Cohen walked the route of his freedom seeker ancestors from Maryland to Canada for a landmark National Geographic story, and in 1996 founded the Menare Foundation, the first nationwide Underground Railroad organization, to document, preserve and restore Underground Railroad safe-houses and environments. In 1998, the United States Congress passed legislation creating a National Park Service program supporting preservation of Underground Railroad sites and history, and in 2004, both Friends of the Underground Railroad and the Freedom Center, an Underground Railroad museum in Cincinnati, were launched.

Two-thousand-four also saw the first of two landmark books on the Underground Railroad, Kate Larson's Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero, which has quickly been acclaimed as the definitive biography of the this most important of all Underground Railroad personages. This was followed in 2005 by Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America, Fergus Bordewich's milestone work which provides the fullest portrait yet of the Underground Railroad enterprise. Others have begun producing works on various aspects of the Underground Railroad from state listings of sites, to the histories of individual safe-houses, to good historical fiction.

These new institutions, writings and the wonderful reawakening surrounding the Underground Railroad are vital, but only underpin the true import of the Underground Railroad today, the nation's vital historical legacy which won the war for the soul of America.

Through the efforts of Friends of the Underground Railroad and others, what began as a spontaneous reawakening of the nation's memory of the Underground Railroad is becoming more and more deliberate. In 2006, Friends of the Underground Railroad plans to inaugurate an annual prize to honor those whose work has led the way in rekindling the Underground Railroad, the Menare Foundation builds on its groundbreaking work, the Freedom Center continues to thrill visitors with its stunning museum and its moving exhibits, and the National Park Service has inaugurated a grant program of financial assistance to Underground Railroad sites and programs.

After a century in which the Underground Railroad came close to slipping from the nation's memory, the star is bright once more for those who continue to travel the Underground Railroad and for all others.