Ohio History Journal

BYRON D. FRUEHLING AND ROBERT H. SMITH

 

Subterranean Hideaways of the

Underground Railroad in Ohio: An

Architectural, Archaeological and

Historical Critique of Local Traditions

 

 

 

During the decade that preceded the Civil War the underground railroad be-

came increasingly active in Ohio and elsewhere in the north.¹ Although

"underground" originally may have had much the same figurative connotation

that it has today in expressions such as "underground newspaper," it was al-

most inevitable that the term come to suggest in popular imagination not so

much anti-establishment concepts and practices as activity that took place in

tunnels and subterranean places of concealment. Oral traditions about the un-

derground railroad frequently allude to places of concealment allegedly con-

structed by abolitionists for the use of fleeing slaves who were making their

way toward Canada. From the time of Wilbur H. Siebert, whose pioneering

research involved heavy reliance upon such information,² to the present time,

popularizers and no few historians of the underground railroad have tended to

accept personal reminiscences about specially-constructed secret chambers and

escape tunnels largely at face value.

Examples of this reliance on anecdotes recorded years later, some supplied

by participants and others by persons who relied on hearsay, are abundant.

Among Siebert's extensive compilations one finds the statement that Joseph

Morris of Marion County installed partitions in both the attic and the cellar

of his home in order to provide "secret chambers for his swarthy guests."

Siebert goes on to say, largely on the basis of statements he found in a local

newspaper article, that

 

 

 

 

Byron D. Fruehling is a graduate student at the University of Akron. Robert H. Smith is Fox

Professor and Chair of the Program in Archaeology at The College of Wooster. The authors

wish to thank Larry Gara for reading an early draft of this paper and making helpful

suggestions, as well as Dennis Monbarren, Denise Monbarren, and Ethel M. Parker of Wooster

for their assistance in tracking down certain items of information.

 

1. For general orientation and a recent, concise bibliography, see Charles L. Blockson, The

Underground Railroad (New York, 1987).

2. Siebert's most important, and still influential, work is The Underground Railroad from

Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1898).

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Subterranean Hideaways                                                     99

 

the garret was a carefully constructed labyrinth and . . . the cellar had two secret

rooms, each capable of serving as a secure hiding-place for a dozen refugees.

These rooms were hidden by large cupboards fastened to their doors. From the cel-

lar two tunnels led out, one to the barn and the other to the corn-crib. These pas-

sages were concealed in the same manner as the secret chambers and afforded safe

egress from the house when it was surrounded by slave-hunters. It is said that in

several instances Negroes made good their escape while their owners were on guard

outside the house.³

 

Half a century later historian Ralph Watts cited, apparently on the basis of

the recollections of an elderly Mrs. Kent around the turn of the century, inci-

dents in the life of Udney Hyde of Brown County, who was reputed to have

gone to great effort to construct concealed places for fugitive slaves. Having

built a new home, he dug a basement under the cabin that he had previously

occupied, throwing the soil into an old well to escape suspicion; he then cov-

ered the trapdoor entrance with wheat, "so that when anyone approached

whose mission was unwonted, some of the family would be busily engaged

in flailing grain."⁴ In addition, we are told, Hyde concealed fugitives in a

well near his livery barn. "He had a platform placed in the well, which was

an excavation some six or seven feet in diameter, on which the negroes could

stand during the day, waiting to be sent farther on their trip to Canada when

darkness came."⁵ Watts narrates other stories about the deceptions carried out

by this determined abolitionist, through whose underground railroad station

eventually passed, by Hyde's count, an astounding five hundred seventeen

fugitives.⁶ More recently Burke and Bensch have passed on the tradition--as

they label it-that in Hocking County "there was a tunnel under [Hanes']

mill through which many slaves passed to freedom. Among residences in

Mount Pleasant which were known to have hiding places for runaway slaves

was Quaker Hill."⁷ Blockson cites traditions about the resourceful abolition-

 

3. Wilbur H. Siebert, "A Quaker Section of the Underground Railroad in Northern Ohio,"

Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications, 39 (1930), 486-87.

4. Ralph M. Watts, "History of the Underground Railroad in Mechanicsburg," Ohio

Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, 43 (July, 1934), 216. Details about concealed

entrances were, understandably, a stock-in-trade of traditions about hiding places under floors.

An account of the method employed by John Harvey in his home near Savannah in Ashland

County relates that Harvey, having hidden slaves beneath the floor, replaced the floor boards

and had his wife sit atop them in a rocking chair while slave hunters searched in vain for the

fugitives (News Journal [Mansfield, Ohio], Sunday, May 19, 1988). Blockson in The

Underground Railroad, 249, relates an almost identical tale about abolitionist William

Smallwood in upstate New York. Siebert records that an abolitionist near Delaware, Ohio, hid

a female slave and her three children under the floor of his barn, then spread harvested wheat

stalks on the floor and set his horses to tramping out the grain to muffle any noise that the

children might make (The Underground Railroad, 499); a similar story about an episode in

southern Indiana is narrated in William Monroe Cockrum, History of the Underground Railroad

(Oakland City, Indiana, 1915), 71.

5. Watts, op. cit., 220.

6. Ibid., 219.

7. James L. Burke and Donald E. Bensch, "Mount Pleasant and the Early Quakers of

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100                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

ists in Ashtabula County, one of whom was Col. William Hubbard, who

built a tunnel for escaping slaves that allegedly led from his barn to the shore

of Lake Erie.⁸

The primary emphasis in these and many other traditions that have been

transmitted is on the clever deception of opponents and the large numbers of

fugitives that had been assisted. Persons who had no direct knowledge were

often eager to attribute to abolitionists' houses a specialized function in this

romanticized picture of the underground railroad. Indeed, with the passage of

time almost any venerable house, even if constructed after the Civil War or

owned by a person with no known abolitionist associations, could be included

in the mystique of the underground railroad.

The folkloristic elements in many of the stories are patent. Larry Gara,

who is among the few historians who have evaluated critically the data per-

taining to the underground railroad, has pointed in The Liberty Line to the

tendentious features that exist in some of the oral traditions, as well as to the

inconsistencies between anecdotal material and available statistics pertaining

to the migration of slaves. He is aware of the tendency for anecdotes to be at-

tached to the homes of well-known abolitionists, and argues convincingly

that far fewer abolitionists actually gave refuge to fleeing slaves than they

later claimed. "Each local story," he insists, "should be investigated, the ba-

sis for the tradition [be] examined, and the sources [be] evaluated,"⁹ though

he gives little indication as to how such investigation should be carried out.

Gara's own judgment, based chiefly on a rational critique of the data rather

than field investigations, is that many of the places that local tradition de-

clares to have been constructed for the concealment of fugitive slaves were

simply storage places, cisterns, air shafts or other commonplace features of

American life in the mid-19th century.¹⁰

Clearly one of the methods of evaluating traditions about secret compart-

ments or tunnels constructed specifically to assist fugitive slaves is on-site

 

Ohio," Ohio History, 83 (Autumn, 1974), 245-46.

8. Charles L. Blockson, The Underground Railroad, 211. Blockson does not stress the

question of the historical accuracy of the accounts of concealed chambers which he cites. In

his "Escape from Slavery: The Underground Railroad," National Geographic Magazine, 166

(July-December, 1984), 25, a photograph shows a sliding shelf beside the stairway in the home

of the Alexander Dobbin (now a restaurant) in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which slides back to

reveal a crawl-space which the caption says is "large enough to hide several adults"--wording

that implies that the space was, in fact, designed for that purpose and presumably was so used.

Other photographs in the article show Joseph Goodrich's inn in Milton, Wisconsin, constructed

ca. 1835-1845, which has a tunnel in its basement that leads to the cellar of a log cabin forty

feet distant (ibid., 22-23); the caption states that "if any customers were slave catchers, the

fugitives resting and eating in his basement could exit to the cabin and follow creek beds and

lakes north to Canada."

9. Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington,

1961), 192.

10. Ibid., 11. See also his "The Underground Railroad: A Re-evaluation," Ohio Historical

Quarterly, 69 (July, 1960), 218.

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Subterranean Hideaways                                           101

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102                                                             OHIO HISTORY

 

investigation. At the time Gara wrote, scarcely any houses had been sub-

jected to architectural, much less archaeological, investigation. In the subse-

quent decades the few investigations that have been carried out, mostly outside

Ohio, have produced generally negative results. A case in point is the

William Tallman House in Rock County, Wisconsin, constructed in 1855-

1857. Although Blockson describes this house as probably the most impor-

tant underground railroad station in Wisconsin, "specifically built to accom-

modate the movement of fugitive slaves,"¹1 Iva Herzfeldt, site manager of

the Tallman Restorations, points out that no evidence exists that would sup-

port such an assertion, or that would demonstrate that the house was a station

of the underground railroad.¹² A stairway ascending from a second-story

closet to the roof, claimed to have been designed as a secret passageway for

use by fugitive slaves, appears to have served the more prosaic function of

providing access to the gutters for purposes of cleaning; large containers in

which the water from the roof was collected are, in fact, still extant in the at-

tic. A tradition about an escape tunnel from the cellar may have originated

with a drainage pipe, too small for a person to crawl through, that runs from

the house to the Rock River.¹³

However desirable the examination of actual sites may be, one cannot in-

vestigate all of the hundreds of such claims; selectivity is required. True, ran-

dom sampling would be impractical, but the investigation of a group of such

houses situated within a coherent, limited geographical region is feasible.

The determination of a suitable part of the state for investigation was carried

out primarily with the aid of Siebert's map¹⁴ and Galbreath's list of under-

ground railroad stations.¹⁵ The area selected comprised Ashland, Wayne and

Holmes Counties in northeastern Ohio, through which ran two of the under-

ground railroad routes from the Ohio River to Lake Erie (Fig. 1). One route

 

11. Blockson, The Underground Railroad, 194, who describes the Tallman House as having

"hiding places in both the basement and the attic and a special lookout on the roof.... When

fugitives approached the house, a bell was rung to alert the servants and then a signal was

given to the fugitives from a large stained-glass window. When the slaves saw the dim light,

they proceeded to enter the cellar door that was always left open. The ingenious Tallman led

his charges through a secret stairway in the maid's closet and finally through an underground

tunnel, which led to the Rock River, where an Underground Railroad agent took them by

riverboat to Milton."

12. Telephone interview with Iva Herzfeldt, April, 1991; see Debra Jensen-De Hart,

"Uncovering the Secret of Slaves," Janesville Gazette, March 31, 1991. The structure of the

Tallman House was investigated when a restoration was carried out some years ago.

13. Allegations of concealed chambers and tunnels of the underground railroad are abun-

dant throughout the Northern states. Sometimes undocumented claims are given credence by

leading periodicals, such as the United Press release in the Christian Science Monitor on May

23, 1979, asserting that a city work crew in Erie, Pennsylvania, had uncovered a brick-lined

tunnel four feet in diameter lying twelve feet below the surface that had been used by runaway

slaves. Ken Pfirman, Archivist of the Erie Historical Museum, notes that the tunnel proved to

be an early storm sewer (telephone interview, August 8, 1991).

14. Siebert, The Underground Railroad, map facing p. 113.

15. Charles B. Galbreath, History of Ohio, vol. II (Chicago and New York, 1925), 215.

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Subterranean Hideaways                                                    103

 

passed through Coshocton, Millersburg, Holmes (Holmesville), Wooster,

Seville and Oberlin, before bifurcating to Sandusky or Cleveland. Another

ran about twenty miles farther west, passing through Mount Vernon,

Loudonville, McKay, Hayesville, Ashland and Savannah, then on to

Oberlin.¹⁶ Numerous houses along these routes in the three counties have

traditions of subterranean chambers or tunnels. Regrettably, some of the

houses have been so extensively altered that relevant original features are not

visible, and occasionally the owner's permission for on-site inspection could

not be secured. Even with these limitations more than a dozen houses were

investigated, yielding significant information.¹⁷

 

 

1. The Keifer Croco House

 

The Croco House constitutes a prime instance of underground railroad leg-

end intertwined with history. Keifer Croco was the descendant of an aristo-

cratic Polish family who took their patronym after Krakow, the city from

which they migrated to the New World.¹⁸ Keifer's grandfather, Peter, came

to America as a Hessian with the British army during the Revolutionary War,

but defected to the colonists' side. His son, Peter Jr., settled in Holmes

County in 1813, and later served as a district judge in Ohio.¹⁹ The house is

located on a bluff above Salt Creek, approximately one mile northwest of

Holmesville on State Route 83. Constructed of red brick with a sandstone

foundation, it is a nearly square structure in Italianate style, and retains its

original widow's walk and cupola. Investigation by the current owners places

the construction ca. 1851,20 well within the most active period of the under-

ground railroad. The only major alteration to the house was the addition of a

first-story kitchen in 1873.

 

 

 

 

16. The route from Loudonville to Savannah is inferred from locations on a map in the Ruth

Satterfield Underground Railroad Collection in The Ashland Historical Society.  The

Satterfield Collection also includes a tabular sheet of the sites that appear on the map, as well

as color slides of those structures that were extant in the late 1950s. See also Betty Plank,

Historical Ashland County (Ashland: The Endowment Committee of the Ashland Historical

Society, 1987), 287.

17. Because of the very nature of oral tradition, a complete and authoritative list of houses

having alleged places of concealment related to the underground railroad cannot be compiled,

but the authors believe that they have considered the major alleged sites in the tri-county area.

18. The family name is pronounced as if it were spelled Crocko, and in fact appears with

that orthography in some old documents and in Siebert's publications. The first name appears

in the more orthographically correct form Kieffer in some early records.

19. Roy Stallman, "Croco History," in Holmes County to 1985 (Salem, W. Va.: Holmes

County History Book Committee, 1985), 31; Rosanna Painter, "Old Buildings, Croco Home," in

ibid., 251.

20. Interview with owner Rod Stefano, January, 1991.

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104                                             OHIO HISTORY

Siebert includes Peter's sons, Keifer and John, in his list of those who op- erated an underground railroad station.21 Other sources provide a few anecdo- tal details. Keifer, the leader of the station, is alleged to have taken escaping slaves across the road to his brother's farmstead when he could accommodate no more persons, and the Croco brothers were said to have been involved in a skirmish with slave hunters outside Keifer's house.22 Charles Crawford, a Croco descendant, is quoted in a newspaper account as stating that the house was equipped to accommodate slaves in the attic, reached through a trapdoor in the ceiling of a second-story room, the entrance being concealed by the use of matched boards.23 That statement is, however, erroneous, for the second story proved upon examination to contain an ordinary staircase giving access to the attic, from which a ladder leads to the cupola and widow's walk. The attic was never floored. The second floor itself contains no concealed spaces, and there is no evidence of significant alterations to the second story and attic of the house since their construction. One newspaper account alludes to rumors about tunnels constructed beneath the house to facilitate the escape of slaves from bounty hunters. The pas- sages allegedly led from the basement to "caves on the estate," but subse-   21. Siebert, The Underground Railroad, 423. 22. Ed McGraw, "Runaway Slaves Found Haven," New Philadelphia-Dover Times- Reporter, Holmes County edition, ca. 1980-85; Francy Howland, "Writer Traces Slave Underground Railway in Holmes, Wayne Counties," The Daily Record (Wooster, Ohio), ca. 1950-55. 23. Howland, op. cit.

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Subterranean Hideaways                                              105

 

quently "the basement was sealed off and the passages have now been filled

in, as have any tunnels to the caves."²⁴ Just how, if at all, "passages" dif-

fered from "tunnels" is not explained. Local residents interviewed for this in-

vestigation offered a number of versions of this tradition, variously claiming

that a tunnel led some 200 yards northeast from Keifer Croco's house to that

of his brother, or ran a short distance southward from the house to Salt Creek

where slaves could follow the stream into a swamp, or even extended as far

north as another reputed underground railroad station situated some two miles

away. One local informant stated that when he was a boy of ten or eleven he

had entered a tunnel from the basement of the house, but that the entrance had

subsequently been sealed up. Upon examination, however, the stone founda-

tion of the house which forms the basement walls proved to be both original

and solid, with no possibility that an entryway to a tunnel ever existed.

It is clear from this evidence that even though the Croco House may have

been a station of the underground railroad, no architectural constructions in-

tended specifically to conceal slaves or assist their flight were incorporated

into any part of the structure, either at the time of its construction or subse-

quently.

 

 

2. The James Lawson House

 

This house is located on Townline Road (formerly Noble Road), three

miles west of Savanah in Clearcreek Township, which had been settled by

Scotch Presbyterians and was a center of abolitionist sentiment. Although

James Lawson's brother John is listed by Siebert among the abolitionists in

Ashland County, little is known about James himself; nevertheless, an oral

tradition arose regarding the use of his house in connection with the under-

ground railroad. Ruth Satterfield, who in the late 1950s gathered traditions

about abolitionists and underground railroad stations in Ashland County,

states that "a trapdoor from the kitchen led to a dungeon in basement."²⁵ A

chamber does exist, located, as Satterfield notes, in the northeast corner of the

house beneath the kitchen, two of its stone walls being those of the founda-

tion of the house.

The structure is clearly a cistern, an installation that is by no means rare in

19th--and even early 20th-century houses in Ohio. The interior is lined with

eight-inch-thick brick that has coats of plaster totalling an inch in thickness.

 

24. Cathy Wogan, "Underground Railroad House," The Holmes County Farmer-Hub, Oct-

ober 22, 1981, 1-2.

25. Tabular sheet in the Satterfield Collection, which identifies each building (whether

extant or not) by the abolitionist owner's name, the location of the building, any place of

concealment or "peculiarity" in the structure, the ancestry of the owner, and the names of

subsequent owners, including the owner as of February, 1960. "Dungeon" is Satterfield's

idiosyncratic term for a chamber without doors or windows.

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106                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

A hole near the top of one of the outside walls presumably once accommo-

dated a pipe that brought rain water from the roof. The floor has three dis-

cernable layers of plaster above a stone or mortar base, and was found covered

with an inch or two of fine sediment, above which lay scattered pieces of

wood and plaster debris; the outlet drain, if any, was not evident. This cistern

retains its original trapdoor, an opening 18 3/4 by 16 1/4 inches which had

been sealed from above when the kitchen was later renovated but which oth-

erwise appears to be intact. Attached to the frame is a rectangular wooden

chute 20 1/2 inches deep that may have prevented ascending buckets from

bumping the trapdoor frame and spilling their contents. Any inference that

this commonplace domestic installation was constructed with the concealment

of fugitive slaves in mind is out of the question, and there is no reason to

suppose that it was secondarily used for such a purpose.

 

 

3. The Jane Forbes House

 

This house fronts Ashland County Road 686 (also known as Old County

Road 10A) some two miles northeast of the James Lawson House. The

large, two-story white frame structure stands on a slight rise in the fields,

one-half mile west of the Vermillion River. The architectural style suggests

a date in the mid-19th century. Satterfield states that the house had "a dun-

geon with a trapdoor from the kitchen."²⁶ Interviews with several longtime

residents in the area also brought to light not only the familiar rumor that

there was a tunnel that led from the house to the river, but also the tradition

that a cup tied to a string could be sent down through the tunnel to the river

and be pulled back containing fresh water.²⁷

Upon investigation the house did prove to have a doorless, windowless

chamber with exterior dimensions of approximately 12 by 8 feet, projecting

from the north wall of the rectangular one-room basement. The walls of the

chamber vary somewhat in thickness and, like those of the foundation walls

of the basement, in composition. An opening crudely cut into one of the

walls to accommodate a heating duct to the present kitchen facilitated inspec-

tion of the interior. White plaster is visible on all of the walls and the floor,

making the masonry smooth and watertight. It thus immediately becomes

apparent that the chamber is nothing more than a disused cistern analogous to

that in the Lawson House. An eight-inch circular opening near the top of the

west wall contains the remnant of a metal pipe, presumably one that chan-

neled water from the roof. Embedded in the floor is a one-inch drain pipe,

toward which the floor gently slopes. The bottom of the cistern was found

 

26. Tabular sheet, Satterfield Collection.

27. Interviews with Jed Troxel, Stanley Hissong, Dale Ramsey and Larry Bittinger in

February and March, 1991.

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Subterranean Hideaways                                              107

 

covered with four inches of fine sediment that had accumulated during the fi-

nal years of its use, on top of which was debris from the duct installation and

a rebuilding of the floor of the chamber above. Although the latter is now a

bathroom, it originally may have been the kitchen, since the present kitchen

is an addition to the house. The tradition that a cup lowered on a string could

be brought up filled with water is thus readily explained. No evidence of a

trapdoor has survived, for the floor of the room above the cistern has framing

that was put into place when the modern bathroom was installed.

The tunnel that local informants recalled as running from the basement of

the Forbes house to the Vermillion River did not exist. Although the founda-

tion of the house is not entirely uniform, there are neither openings nor sealed

entrances anywhere in the walls. The house therefore has no physical features

that can be associated with the underground railroad.

 

 

4. The Ezra Garrett House

 

The Garrett farmhouse is at the north edge of Savannah, seventy-five yards

west of State Route 250. A one and one-half story frame structure, the house

is small by comparison with the other buildings discussed here. Despite its

modest appearance, it has been featured frequently in histories and popular ac-

counts about the underground railroad in northern Ohio. Siebert identifies

Garrett, who was a farmer of modest means, as an abolitionist,²⁸ and the

house is at the head of Satterfield's list of Ashland County underground rail-

road stations. Garrett is credited with transporting four to five hundred slaves

during a thirteen-year period prior to the commencement of the Civil War.²⁹

Published accounts³⁰ and local informants refer to Garrett's use of places of

concealment and escape tunnels for fugitives. Satterfield comments about the

house with her formulaic phrase "dungeon in basement with entrance from

room above by trapdoor," but also adds, "tunnels to the spring in ravine and

to wagon shed." Dale Ramsey, a local man who grew up near the Garrett

House, alleges that when he was a boy he went down a trapdoor in the house

which gave access to a tunnel that he followed for 200 feet in a westerly direc-

tion, and Connie Huff, a woman who was a resident in the house in the

1940s, reports that as a youngster she and her brother opened a trapdoor in the

floor, three feet from the northwest corner of the main floor of the house, and

 

 

28. Siebert, The Underground Railroad, 416.

29. Article in the News Journal (Mansfield, Ohio), May 29, 1988. Both Emma and Martha

Garrett, Ezra's daughters, are said to have vouched for the information given in the article

concerning their father's abolitionist activities (William A. Duff, History of North Central Ohio

[Topeka, 1931], vol I, 180). That Garrett assisted as many as four or five hundred slaves may,

however, be questioned.

30. Plank, Historic Ashland County, 287.

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108                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

peered into a void.³¹ Perhaps significantly, however, Emma Garrett's recol-

lections of the activities of her father and other abolitionists make no mention

of either tunnels or concealed chambers.³²

No trapdoor is presently visible anywhere in the first story of the house,

where all of the flooring appears to be original. The basement is a rectangu-

lar room with walls constructed of large, well-trimmed stones laid with a

minimum of mortar. The ceiling is somewhat more than six-feet high and

has large, handsawn joists, some of which still partially retain bark. There is

only one modern and no original openings in the walls, nor is there evidence

that any ever existed. There is, however, a doorless, windowless space in the

basement which may have served as the basis for Satterfield's notation about

a dungeon. Measuring 8 1/2 by 18 feet in length, it extends along the entire

north end of the house.³³ It is separated from the rest of the basement by a

double brick wall, reported by Huff to be intact at the time that she lived there

in the late 1940s, partly removed by the time Satterfield made a photograph a

decade later,³⁴ and now largely dismantled. There is no evidence of a trapdoor

anywhere in the basement ceiling.

The compartment was filled with soil to about half its height, with only a

crawl space left below the joists. Because the soil might contain useful in-

formation, or even conceal the entrance to a tunnel, two archaeological test

pits were excavated on the west side of the enclosure, where informant

Ramsey had allegedly entered a tunnel. No opening of any kind was encoun-

tered. Significantly, however, these pits revealed that inside this chamber the

foundation walls become much shallower toward the north end of the house,

and that the virgin soil had never been excavated to the floor level of the

basement. Some occupational debris was present in the soil above the foun-

dation level. The sounding in the northwest corner yielded pieces of wood

which appeared to be construction detritus, along with chunks of charred wood

(some of it wet from dampness coming into the basement), compacted grav-

elly, grayish-brown soil containing flecks of charcoal, and a shard of blown

glass. The other pit, dug at the southwest corner of the chamber, produced

fragments of cattle and fowl bones, shards from several different kinds of

household dishes, and a corroded 1845 Liberty penny.

Although it is initially tempting to see these artifacts as evidences of hu-

man occupation, and to hypothesize that the occupants were, as tradition

would have it, fugitive slaves, the evidence actually points in quite a different

direction. Since this portion of the basement was left partly unexcavated by

 

 

31. Interviews with Dale Ramsey and Connie Huff in March, 1991.

32. See note 29.

33. If Ramsey's recollection has any basis in fact, it may be that what he did was to traverse

the length of this narrow enclosure. To a small boy, an eighteen-foot length of crawl space

might well later be recalled as a long tunnel.

34. The photograph is in the Satterfield Collection.

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Subterranean Hideaways                                        109

 

the builders, it is clear that there never was a habitable chamber here at all.

Evidently workmen had tossed both soil and refuse, some of it from work-

men's cooking fires and meals and some from the construction of the flooring

of the house, into this space. The brick crosswall forming the south side of

the enclosure presumably was installed during the construction of the house

to prevent slippage of the unexcavated soil, as well as to block off the unex-

cavated area from the rest of the basement. It is clear, then, that this con-

struction was not carried out for the purpose of providing a place for conceal-

ing slaves; if such had been the case, the space would have been made more

tolerable for occupants.

 

 

5. The Dienes House

 

This house, so identified by virtue of its present ownership, is located di-

rectly between the Forbes and Garrett Houses in Ashland County. A local

teenager alleged in interview that the basement gives access to a tunnel

through which she had walked as a child of about six, ca. 1978-80. The in-

formant stated that she traversed the tunnel for about two miles until it came

to a dead end at a concrete wall.³⁵ Upon inspection the house proved to have

a basement divided into two sections, one of which, at the bottom of the

basement stairs, is a roughly square room with foundation walls of field

stones; the other, linked with the first by a doorway, is L-shaped, ending in a

modern cinderblock wall-presumably the wall that the child saw. Because

the house stands on a small rise, no tunnel could have extended from the

basement in any direction.

 

 

6. The Augustus A. Taylor House

 

Loudonville, in southern Ashland County, is the location of the Taylor res-

idence, which at present is a restaurant called Mohican Manor. The fine brick

structure, which perches on a hillside at 105 North Mount Vernon Avenue,

was constructed in Italianate style in 1851,36 and is architecturally similar to

the Croco House. It was built for the prosperous founder of several regional

mills that produced Taylor's Best Flour.³⁷ Underground railroad documenta-

tion of this house is scarce, yet Loudonville residents have heard about a con-

cealed basement chamber or tunnels on the premises. One tradition avers that

a tunnel from this chamber led eastward under the road and emerged in the

basement of a house several blocks away, while another claims that a passage

 

35. Interview with the daughter of Clarence Mosely, February, 1991.

36. Interview with owner Bonnie Bright, March, 1991.

37. One of the mills still exists in Loudonville under the name of the Conagra Mill.

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110                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

linked the residence with its large carriage house (still extant at the rear of the

property, though not of the same age as the house).³⁸

The basement of the residence contains a walled-off space 41 feet 2 inches

long by 4 feet 8 inches wide (interior measurements) extending across the en-

tire north end. The wall that sets this "chamber" apart from the rest of the

basement is a massive 21 inches thick, and was constructed in the same style

of masonry as the foundation walls; it bonds with the east and west walls, and

thus it is unquestionably a part of the house as originally built. Although all

of the interior faces of the walls of the basement room are dressed and plas-

tered, those of the walls that enclose the narrow compartment consist of un-

hewn field and river stones laid with minimal mortar and unplastered. A 23

by 14 inch decorative iron ventilation grill is located near the center of the

separation wall just below the joists, and affords access from the basement

room. The north foundation wall of the house has two blocked-up decorative

iron grills just below the joists, which at one time provided outside ventila-

tion. Two heating ducts, additions that probably were made when the house

was renovated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,³⁹ begin at the fur-

nace in the basement room, cross the compartment just below the joists, and

turn upward through the floor into the parlors above.

As in the Garrett House, the soil level in this space is high, leaving a fairly

uniform crawl space of about three feet. The uppermost soil layer proved

upon examination to be extremely rubbly, containing many stones resem-

bling those in the walls, though generally smaller. On the surface, directly

below the ducts, were remnants of sawn and hacked wood, representing con-

struction debris from the cutting of the flooring during installation of the

ducts. Several objects lay near the midpoint of the long enclosure, not far

from the access grill: a tobacco pouch, a button of porcelain and metal, a pair

of trousers with a burlap rope belt lying beside them, and a deteriorated leather

shoe sole. A foot away from this assortment, but six inches below the sur-

face, a well-preserved 1857 Flying Eagle penny was reportedly discovered by

one of the owners using a metal detector.

The trousers proved to be the most informative of these artifacts. They

were of sturdy cotton cloth, machine-made but handsewn, much worn and of-

ten repaired. The original stitching around the buttonholes of the fly was neat

and fine, the repairs much more haphazard. Both knees had unrepaired tears.

Small clumps of mortar or plaster clung to the pants in two places. The pos-

sibility that the trousers might have been deposited relatively recently by an

Amish workman, of whom there are many in the vicinity, could be excluded

 

38. Not surprisingly, the legend of treasure has also been linked with the house. A former

owner's family, it is said, hacked holes in the walls in their search for hidden gold.

39. The ornate iron floor grill in the parlor above the duct is in a style contemporary with

the renovations made to the house prior to 1900, which included the installation of new door

surrounds and stone mantles in the two front parlors.

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Subterranean Hideaways                                             111

at the outset by the presence of buttons and a metal clasp at the back of the waist, both of which are proscribed by Amish custom. Ellice Ronsheim, cu- rator of textiles at the Ohio Historical Society, examined the trousers and reported that they are work pants dating from 1850-1890.40 There is nothing about the other objects that would prevent them from being regarded as contemporary with the trousers. Although these artifacts might suggest some kind of temporary occupation of this space, and the worn state of the clothing further brings to mind indi- gent fugitive slaves, a less romantic explanation is more plausible. While the nature of the artifacts does not preclude a pre-Civil War date, any escaping slave who occupied the space for more than a very brief time would surely have removed some of the sharp stones and reshaped the soil of the crawl space into a more comfortable configuration for sitting and sleeping. The simplest explanation is that the trousers were discarded by a workman at the time of the installation of the furnace ducts. The other objects also probably were left either by the same workman or by others working on the project, who found the crawl space a convenient place for discards. The evidence, however, does not categorically exclude the possibility of a date of deposition contemporary with the construction of the house. A controlled excavation made at the southwestern corner of this area of the basement revealed that the foundation becomes much shallower at the west   40. Letter and telephone conversation with Ellice Ronsheim, March, 1991.

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112                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

end of the building, and that beneath a layer of construction debris and rocky

earth lies virgin soil, much higher than the floor level of the basement. The

foundation construction thus proved to be virtually identical with that found

at the north end of the Garrett House.⁴¹ It can be seen that this crawl space

was never a habitable chamber at all, much less one specifically designed to

accommodate slaves being transported via the underground railroad. The

builder intended from the outset that a portion of the space beneath the house,

where the foundation was built more shallowly, remain unexcavated, and this

he isolated from the rest of the basement at the time of construction.

Backfilling of above the virgin soil during construction of the house probably

accounts for the presence of the Flying Eagle penny-if indeed the house was

not constructed prior to 1857.

Once again, the examination of the actual premises has not supported the

tradition that fugitive slaves were given refuge in a specially-constructed

basement chamber. The lack of convincing evidence tends to be corroborated

by the fact that Augustus Taylor does not appear in Siebert's list of abolition-

ists,⁴² nor apparently in any other early source.

 

 

7. The John Bebout House

 

This house, on Crum Road three miles west of Savannah in Ashland

County, is alleged by Satterfield to have had a "dungeon" measuring 15 x 18

feet, complete with a trap door.⁴³ The house burned about 1970. A former

resident who was interviewed stated that the space was located beneath the

floor of the kitchen and back room and was approximately three to five feet

high.⁴⁴ The descriptions collectively suggest that the chamber was either a

disused cistern like those in the Forbes and Lawson Houses or a narrow foun-

dational compartment similar to the ones in Garrett and Taylor Houses.

 

 

8. The Andrew Paxton House

 

This house, still standing a half-mile southeast of Savannah on County

Road 191 in Ashland County, is said by Satterfield to have had "a dungeon

room and tunnels leading to a ravine west of [the] house."⁴⁵ The current

 

 

41. Manifestly inaccurate, therefore, is a drawing depicting this space in the Taylor House

as a floored chamber outfitted with benches for the comfort of fugitive slaves, which historian-

artist Jim Baker presented in his syndicated feature "As You Were" in Ohio newspapers on

February 2, 1979.

42. Siebert, The Underground Railroad, 416.

43. Tabular sheet, Satterfield Collection.

44. Interview with Robert Eby, February, 1991.

45. Tabular sheet, Satterfield Collection.

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Subterranean Hideaways                                        113

 

owner reported that the basement has a separate area that is a crawl space,

which was closed off during remodelling.⁴⁶ His description suggests that this

basement construction also was similar to that of the Garrett and Taylor

Houses.

 

 

9. The Isaac Buchanan House

 

This early log house on State Route 545 at the first crossing southwest of

Savannah in Ashland County no longer exists, but the current owner of the

property reaffirmed the story that the cabin had served as an underground rail-

road station, as had a later house that still stands to the east. Tradition places

a tunnel under the latter building.⁴⁷ Visual inspection in a crawl space under

a modern addition to the latter building revealed some small, unremarkable

construction anomalies, but nothing suggesting a tunnel; an archaeological

excavation, impractical under present circumstances, would be required in or-

der for the claim of a tunnel to be investigated, but the prospects are not

promising.

 

 

10. The "Mayor's House"

 

This structure, named for its best-known resident, William L. Long, Mayor

of Wooster during 1934-1939, is located at 658 Pittsburgh Avenue in

Wooster (Wayne County). It is one of several houses clustered in an old

area of the city where underground railroad traditions have long existed.

Folklore attaches several claims to this house, one of which is that a tunnel

led from the basement to the track of the Pennsylvania Railroad, located only

75 feet to the north, so that fugitive slaves could stow away on passing

trains. A more extravagant claim is that a tunnel led from the house to the

Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, situated three miles

away with an intervening valley, stream and hills. Examination of county

maps revealed that this house was constructed near the end of the 19th cen-

tury, as for that matter was the first building of OARDC.

 

 

11. The Pittsburgh Avenue School

 

This old school in Wooster has been razed, but a long-time employee

claims to have entered a basement tunnel while the building yet stood, where

 

 

46. Interview with Warren Jordan, February, 1991.

47. Interview with Clarence Mosley, February, 1991. The log cabin is listed on the

Satterfield tabular sheet.

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114                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

she saw what appeared to be makeshift benches or beds dug into the walls of

the passageway. Although she did not claim to have walked the length of

the tunnel, the informant stated that the passage continued in a westerly direc-

tion toward the Jeffries House (no. 12). One of two persons whom the in-

formant alleged could verify her statement had, however, no recollection of

any tunnel, much less of having entered one. If there was a tunnel of any

sort, it was not connected with the underground railroad, since the building

was constructed in 1902.

 

 

12. The Jeffries and Pardee Houses

 

The Jeffries House, at 745 Pittsburgh Avenue in Wooster, was built in

1843 by Judge John P. Jeffries, and has long been rumored to have been an

underground railroad station with a tunnel leading to another house, but Lola

Jeffries, daughter of Judge Jeffries, emphatically stated in 1952 that her father

had nothing to do with the underground railroad and that there was no tunnel

in the house.⁴⁸ Interwoven in local tradition with the Jeffries House was the

nearby Eugene Pardee House, a large structure no longer extant that was situ-

ated about 100 feet north of Pittsburgh Avenue, which was the home of a

19th-century Wooster attorney and strong abolitionist.⁴⁹ A red-brick barn or

carriage house associated with the Pardee mansion still stands at 124 Massaro

Street, converted into a two-story single-family dwelling. Local rumor al-

leges not only that the basement of this structure was an underground railroad

station but also that Harriet Tubman found refuge there. Some persons

whose property adjoins the converted barn mention the existence of unex-

plained depressions in their lawns, as if caused by a collapsed tunnel, and one

inhabitant reported that a clothesline pole once abruptly sank into the ground.

Such cavities are not, however, unusual in old urban areas and may represent

any number of phenomena having nothing to do with escape tunnels.

Inspection of the basement revealed no evidence of a tunnel or any sealed

openings in the walls.

 

 

13. The Watters House

 

This house, situated at 714 Pittsburgh Avenue in Wooster, was alleged to

have contained two tunnels, one linking the basement with that in another

 

 

48. E. H. Hauenstein, "Underground Depots in Wayne Help Free Slaves," The Wooster

Daily Record, February 9, 1952.

49. Ibid. Pardee is perhaps identical with the "Perdu" (no first name given) who appears in

Siebert's list of underground railroad operators in Wayne County (The Underground Railroad,

430).

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Subterranean Hideaways                                       115

 

house of the same street, and the other extending toward the Pennsylvania

Railroad tracks. Listed among the "Pioneer Homes" of the city and perhaps

constructed prior to 1860, the structure no longer exists.

 

 

14. The "Ohio House"

 

This house, a former stagecoach tavern located at Madison Avenue and

Spruce Street in Wooster, was alleged at an early date as an underground rail-

road station. There is no documented evidence of any tunnels or hidden

chambers in the building, which was razed in the 1940s.

 

 

15. The John H. Kauke House

 

This now-razed residential building, which stood on the northeast corner of

the intersection of Bowman Street and Beall Avenue in Wooster, is rumored

to have had shackles in the basement to keep slaves from wandering around

the town during daylight while waiting to move to the next underground rail-

road station. The absurdity of the idea that operators of stations would

shackle those whom they were helping to liberate is patent. No secret rooms

or tunnels are documented. Historical research has shown that the building

was, in fact, constructed after the Civil War.

 

 

16. The Creston Antique House

 

This residence on State Route 3 at the south edge Creston, Wayne County,

which has been used in recent years as an antiques shop, is an alleged under-

ground railroad station. A former owner of the shop stated in an interview

that there was a small tunnel leading off from the basement in the direction of

a house located directly across the street, and that his wife had fallen into a

hole in the yard that presumably was a collapsed portion of the tunnel.⁵⁰

Although the building may predate the Civil War, the basement has been re-

modelled and the house across the street no longer exists.

 

 

17. The Deer Lick Farmhouse

 

This house, located approximately two miles southwest of Burbank at the

northern edge of Wayne County, is a local favorite for rumors of secret con-

struction related to the underground railroad. Built by a wealthy railroader fol-

 

50. Interview with William Firebaugh, January, 1991.

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116                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

lowing the California Gold Rush of 1849, the farmhouse is alleged by a long-

time local resident to have had a tunnel leading from a fruit cellar to an out-

building; the entrance was said to have been concealed by a movable wooden

shelf.⁵¹ Visual inspection showed no tunnel, sealed entrance or evident re-

modeling of the basement.

 

 

Although the evidence provided by these investigations does not, and can-

not, prove that participants in the underground railroad in these Ohio counties

never constructed special places of concealment for fugitive slaves, it suggests

that if such constructions existed at all they must have been extremely rare.

The accounts left by both agents and fugitives involved with the underground

railroad show that while discretion needed to be practiced, especially after the

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave increased sanction to the searching of

premises, there was seldom excessive preoccupation with secrecy on the part

of the abolitionists who were involved, and little or no concern to construct

special hideaways for the fugitives.

If the agents of the underground railroad rarely constructed secret chambers

or escape tunnels, how were transient fugitives accommodated? Mordecai J.

Benedict recalled in later life that during his boyhood in an active anti-slavery

Quaker settlement at Alum Creek, in Morrow Co., prior to the Civil War, he

had "seen the floors of the sitting- and dining-rooms [of his parents' house]

covered with the forms of sleeping Negroes when he came downstairs of a

morning."⁵² The homestead of Aaron Benedict, built at Alum Creek in 1857,

was a station where, in situations of potential danger, Benedict simply moved

the fugitives to a barn or to outbuildings across the creek.⁵³ Benedict's

relative Griffin Levering sometimes temporarily housed fugitives in his

cellar, but without any reported attempts at special concealment. Even in

situations where concealment was essential, fugitives who were given

overnight accommodations were generally quartered in common places such as

an upstairs bedroom, a cellar, an attic, a hayloft, an outbuilding, or even in a

nearby field or woods. Levi Coffin, whose autobiography describes authentic

activities of the underground railroad in Indiana and Ohio, says nothing about

constructing escape tunnels or secret chambers, but speaks characteristically

of the use of existing household facilities:

 

Our house was large and well adapted for secreting fugitives. Very often slaves

would lie concealed in upper chambers for weeks without the boarders or frequent

visitors at the house knowing anything about it. My wife had a quiet unconcerned

way of going about her work as if nothing unusual was on hand, which was calcu-

 

 

51. Interview with Gary Gallion, March, 1991.

52. Siebert, "A Quaker Section of the Underground Railroad in Northern Ohio," 481.

53. Ibid., 482.

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Subterranean Hideaways                                               117

 

lated to lull every suspicion of those who might be watching, and who would have

been at once aroused by any sign of secrecy of mystery. Even the intimate friends

of the family did not know when there were slaves hidden in the house, unless they

were directly informed. When my wife took food to the fugitives she generally

concealed it in a basket, and put some freshly ironed garment on the top to make it

look a basketful of clean clothes. Fugitives were not often allowed to eat in the

kitchen, from fear of detection.⁵⁴

 

The abolitionist John Finney, who maintained an underground railroad station

at his farm in Richland County, on at least one occasion provided accommo-

dations for women fugitives in the loft of his house and men in his barn.⁵⁵

Examples of such common sense activities could be multiplied.

Further evidence comes from the fugitives themselves, some of whom later

recounted their long and arduous treks toward Canada across fields, forests and

rivers, as well as through unfamiliar and often hostile regions. The numerous

accounts of their experiences amassed in Drew's The Refuge and Still's The

Underground Railroad, as well as ones found in many scattered publications,

incontestably reveal not only how comparatively few slaves were assisted by

the underground railroad but also how insignificant a role-if indeed any at

all-secret chambers and tunnels played in their journeys to freedom.⁵⁶ The

fugitives needed, to be sure, to draw as little attention to themselves as possi-

ble, but most often seem to have found impromptu accommodations on their

own initiative.

Knowledgeable examination of buildings alleged to have features con-

structed for the concealment of fugitive slaves constitutes a useful check on

the claims of oral tradition. Investigation of this kind is particularly impor-

tant at the present, when an increasing number of putative stations on the un-

derground railroad are being registered, remodelled and opened to a paying pub-

lic, sometimes replete with guided tours that feature secret compartments or

passages. The risk of creating places and events not as they were but as they

exist in faded memories and romantic imagination is a continuing danger in

the reconstruction of the history of the underground railroad.

 

 

 

 

54. Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin (Cincinnati, 1898), 301. In one early instance

Coffin and his wife hid a negro man "in a feather bed" (ibid., 151).

55. A. J. Baughman, "The Underground Railway," Ohio Archaeological and Historical

Publications, 15 (1906), 190.

56. Benjamin Drew, The Refugee; or, the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, Related

by Themselves (Boston, 1856); William Still, The Underground Railroad, a Record....

(Philadelphia, 1872). Still was concerned, among other things, to emphasize the initiative of the

fugitives and their relative independence from the patronage of white sympathizers along their

journey, and thus serves as a corrective to the exaggerated claims that some abolitionists had

made about the numbers of slaves that they had assisted in maintaining underground railroad

stations.

• 20