Lumon Pellom (who also appears in legal records as Luman T. Pelham) was born in Vermont to parents who, according to census records, were also natives of the Green Mountain state. Long before the era of the Great Migration of African Americans, Pellom’s sojourn to Connecticut and then New York, demonstrates pathways of African American mobility in the nineteenth century. Free people of color were willing to move, to explore opportunities that lay beyond their places of birth. The routes they took, and the new roots they established, are important lenses for exploring how African Americans envisioned the relationship between mobility and freedom.