|
The Iowan Archives
In the January/February 2005 issue of The Iowan
Iowa’s Underground Railroad
"Yes, we all shall be free when the Lord shall appear"
At sites that dot the state, Iowa is reclaiming its rightful place
as a vital part of the Underground Railroad.
[ Story by Mary Kay Shanley ]
To download a PDF of this story, CLICK HERE
[Editor's note: This information dates from our original story research done in 2004,
please check with sites and museums for current hours.]
|
|
|
|
Thomas A. Jenkins journeyed to Springdale on the Underground Railroad. He died there in 1902 at age 83. His epitaph reads “called as a slave, died a free man.”
Courtesy Iowa State HIstorical Society
|
|
In 1859, two runaway slaves from Missouri were traced to the Lewis area in southwest Iowa. A large bounty had been posted for the men, and for days, the Cass County sheriff and the keeper of the East Nishnabotna ferry watched passengers cross the river on the cable ferry.
One beautiful Sabbath morning, an area farmer and his family — two closely veiled ladies — arrived at the Ferry House and were taken across to continue on to church. Instead, the farmer drove to Lewis, then headed toward Adair County where he passed on his “veiled ladies” to the next conductor on Iowa’s Underground Railroad [UGRR].
That story and others embody the high drama, danger, courage, and grit that give form, still today, to the mid-1800s, one of the most challenging periods in Iowa history. That’s when human beings of African descent — chattel — sliced silently through the bottom four tiers of young Iowa’s counties, desperate to reach Canada. Abolitionists — many of whom were Congregationalists and Quakers — disregarded the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which mandated the return of runaway slaves to their owners. By ignoring the act they aided in the slaves’ journies. It’s also a time when others, although sympathetic, looked away because aiding and abetting was illegal, and when still others turned over to authorities those who were fleeing and those who were helping them.
How curious, then, that this dramatic part of Iowa history came close to evaporating into the netherworld. In fact, until around 1970, almost no attention was paid to the UGRR or its physical remnants. But visions shared by a sprinkling of volunteers over the last several decades are responsible for saving, restoring, and promoting this piece of history. Now, the National Park Service (NPS) and the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs have joined in the renaissance effort.
Behind the Name
Any discussion of the UGRR must be p refaced with clarification of two misconceptions: The UGRR was neither a railroad nor was it underground. Visitors to Iowa ’s designated stations ask those questions all the time — and not just the children . “ We talk about routes to fre edom, but, in essence, they were simply broad directions ,” says James Hill, midwest regional coordinator of the NPS’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. “ We’ve come to know the phenomenon of resistance through the metaphor of transportation. That implies there is a track or a road, which there wasn’t .”
Hill says there are variations on the story of how the name evolved. One concerns Tice Davids, who escaped Kentucky via the Ohio River with his owner in a boat behind him. When Tice reached the Ohio shore, the owner lost sight of him and said later, “It was as if he were whisked away on an underground road.” Hill says, “ Today that would be like whisking someone away on a plane.”
Hill says we’ll probably never know how many fugitives escaped. “ Nationwide, some estimates range as high as 100,000 prior to the Civil War,” he says. “ Others have suggested 1,000 to 2,000 per year during the late antebellum years — roughly 1840 to 1860.”
Abolitionists would have been inclined to ex aggerate the number of slaves helped to freedom; slaveholders might have exaggerated their losses to encourage passage of more stringent fugitive slave laws. G. Galin Berrier wrote in Outside In: African-American History in Iowa 1838-2000 that it was “safe to assume that legend has multiplied their numbers many times over. The risks were too great to attract many passengers to this northbound, subterranean line.”
According to Dr. Lowell Soike, deputy state historic preservation officer, the U.S. Census reported that “between 1850 and 1860, about 500 slaves escaped from the border slaveholding states into the free states, with the greatest reported increase in escapes from Missouri. This made Iowa and Illinois significant receiving states for fugitive slaves.”
The first recorded incidence is an advertisement in the March 23, 1839, Iowa Territorial Gazette, offering a $200 reward for “2 Negro men whose names are Winston and Henry, but they having been run away since the 11th of Aug. last (1838) have called themselves Jack and Bill.”
As to when activity ended, the NPS has been challenged by historians and scholars who say it ceased when the Civil War began. “ But,” says Hill, “some of the most well-known cases occurred during the cataclysmic Civil War years. Although we tend to stop [counting] with passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Juneteenth observance originated because enslaved individuals on plantations in southern Texas were not told about the end of the war until several months after it had occurred.”
Early activity was in eastern Iowa, but with passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, abolitionists rushed to settle the new territories. With their presence, and a growing population in western Iowa, freedom seekers from Missouri began entering southwest Iowa by way of Kansas and Nebraska.
 |
 |
 |
|
LEFT A preliminary hearing in the Daggs v. Frazier fugitive slave case was held at the Henderson Lewelling home in Salem in 1850. Courtesy Friends of Lewlling House, Salem | CENTER John Brown’s anti-slavery efforts in Kansas were supported throughout Iowa — in Tabor, Lewis, Des Moines, Grinnell, and Springdale. Courtesy Iowa State HIstorical Society | RIGHT West Des Moines’ Jordan House, a notable Iowa Underground Railroad site, hosted John Brown. Courtesy John Zeller
|
Pinpointing the number of UGRR stations in Iowa is no easier. Research conducted by Soike’s office for the Iowa Freedom Trail Program (see “The National Underg round Railroad Network to Freedom”) indicates 176 Iowans were connected to antislavery activities and places associated with the UGRR. But little documented evidence supporting a direct connection exists, so the program concentrates on perhaps 50 persons.
Harboring runaways and shepherding them to the next station was illegal and dangerous. Slave owners and armed bounty hunters came up from Missouri to get their property back. So there was little written down to begin with, and precious little documentation has survived. Indeed, the NPS has designated just eight Iowa sites; only one is now in the arduous process of seeking designation.
Says John Zeller, a historian with the Iowa Freedom Trail Program, “ I’ve looked at every newspaper of the period, read county histories and manuscripts, trying to locate some [Iowa stations] — where they have been or may have been. I run into a lot of dead ends. Even after the Civil War ended, abolitionists said little about their past. No one ever ran a political campaign on the platform that he was an abolitionist. Black people were not very popular in Iowa. They didn’t garner a lot of votes. And all this was too worldly for the Quakers to talk about, anyway.”
So, Zeller says, “You look for the believable. Like we found a tintype album of photos from the 1860 to the 1870s, and in the center was a photo raph of two black women. You could interpret it broadly that the location had been a station.”
Lack of information may slow him and others down, but it won’t stop them. “I think the Underground Railroad is the cornerstone of what has come to be the civil rights movement,” says Hill. “It’s illustrative of that basic founding principle that all human beings embrace the right to freedom from oppression. Iowans may not have seen freedom seekers as equals, but they were well aware of their humanity and were following their consciences according to a higher law.”
Hill says the UGRR also “ presents a powerful lesson about trust. Freedom seekers almost never knew their conductors, except maybe at the very beginning of their journey. They were literally placing their lives in the hands of strangers.” §
 |
 |
 |
| LEFT The Pearson House, located in Keosauqua, was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Inside, a trapdoor leads to a secret hiding place. | CENTER AND RIGHT The Pearson family album carefully preserved the memory of two unidentified women. Historians assume they were runaway slaves. Courtesy John Zeller |
Iowa’s Designated Sites
Passion for the past is nowhere more evident than with those volunteers who first salvaged Iowa’s designated stations and, today, do everything from archive, lead tours, and paint walls to continue their mission.
 |
|
|
Lewelling House and Quaker Museum
401 South Main Street in Salem
Historical Significance: One of the few buildings remaining from this period, this house is noted for its association with the case of Daggs v. Elihu Frazier, et alia.
Open: May-September, 1–4 p.m. Sunday and weekdays by appointment
More Information: 319-385-2460
When Henderson Lewelling built his two-story stone house in 1840, the nurseryman and Quaker abolitionist from Indiana deliberately included hiding places. Indeed, Faye Heartsill, president of the Lewelling Quaker Museum Board, shows visitors two trapdoors leading to a crawl space under three rooms. “The slaves would hide during the day and be moved out at night via false bottoms in wagons or covered with straw, hay, or fruit,” she says.
The house and town boast a history rich in abolition activity. In 1848 — a year after Lewelling moved to Oregon — Missouri farmer Ruel Daggs sent two slave catchers up to Salem to return his runaway slaves. Soon after they caught up with the slaves, local Quakers showed up, insisting the Justice of the Peace Nelson Gibbs — whose office was in what had been Lewelling’s house — decide whether the runaways were legally bound to return to Missouri. When the slave catchers could neither personally identify the runaways nor produce documentation, the runaways were freed. Two years later, Mr. Daggs won a $10,000 lawsuit in District Court against 19 Salem Quakers for their part in the flight of his “chattels.”
Such stories hooked Mary Savage, Museum Board historian, to the point where she decided to visit the Daggs farm and is now searching for living descendants of one of Daggs’ slaves. “Doing the research,” she says simply, “is addictive.”
It is an “addiction” shared by literally every Underground Railroad volunteer you meet.
 |
|
|
James C. Jordan House
2001 Fuller Road in West Des Moines
Historical Significance: Mr. Jordan often assisted John Brown, including Brown’s last trip from Kansas before the raid at Harpers Ferry.
Open: May-September, 1–4 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday, and 2–5 p.m. Sundays
More Information: 515-225-1286, jordanhouse@dwx.com, or www.thejordanhouse.org
James C. Jordan’s resume is impressive — chief conductor of the UGRR in Polk County, a state senator who helped move the capital from Iowa City to Des Moines, a driving force behind construction of the first school in Valley Junction. Little wonder his 16-room home is a museum for both the UGRR and early-Iowa history. That duality is true for three other designated Iowa sites.
Members of the West Des Moines Historical Society say achieving designation wasn’t easy. To be sure, they had family stories, still shared today by Bob Jordan, a great-great grandson who lived in the house as a child and is still a West Des Moines resident. There is the rifle over the hearth, said to have belonged to John Brown. There are stories about Brown being at the house a number of times, especially in the months before Harpers Ferry. “But we had to produce documentation,” says President Judy Morgan, “and that was a very long process. When we first found out what work was involved, it was horrendous.”
Adds Penny Schiltz, secretary, “You know [we were a station] but how do you prove it? Lots of diaries and letters didn’t survive. After all, the system was more secretive than the Masons or the P.E.O.s.”
Eventually, it was James Hill of the National Park Service who ran across a diary kept by two “gang members” who rode with John Brown. One entry mentions that on February 17, 1859, Brown and some slaves spent the night at James Jordan’s house. “If it weren’t for that diary, the Jordan House would still not be documented,” says Ed Wilson, vice president. “But this information was also printed in an old textbook and that cinched it for us.”
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
Hitchcock House
63788 567th Lane west of Lewis
Historical Significance: Served primarily as a station for fugitives escaping from the Kansas Territory during the “bleeding Kansas” period.
Open: 1–5 p.m. Tuesday–Sunday from May to September. Closed Mondays. Special tours arranged anytime.
More information: 712-769-2323 and www.hitchcockhouse.org
When Congregational minister George B. Hitchcock established his church in 1853 in what was to become Lewis, southwest Iowa was still sparsely populated. Eventually, he built a twostory home overlooking the Nishnabotna River. From that vantage point, he could see people coming from both the east and the west, which was important to this ardent abolitionist. In fact, his red sandstone house includes what guides call a secret room in the basement, disguised behind a fruit cellar cupboard, where the runaway slaves would hide.
The house was barely standing when a few good Lewis residents decided in 1978 it was worth saving. Today, the Hitchcock House Board actively markets the beautifully restored home, and tourism is up. Samantha Butler, 13, visited the site with classmates from King Science Center in Omaha and remembers the tiny room in the basement where slaves hid when the slave catchers were around. “My mom says her grandma’s grandma had to stay in a house like that when she was running away,” Butler says. That, of course, makes Butler a descendant of slaves which, she says, after some thought, “is an honor.”
Board Chair Floyd Pearce of Cumberland says, “I remember Sundays when not a single person would show up to tour the house. Now we have about 4,000 people a year. I always explain how the house functions in terms of the Underground Railroad and how southwest Iowa functions in terms of the National Underground Railroad.”
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
Nishnabotna Ferry House
710 Minnesota Street west of Lewis
Historical Significance: The ferry was the only place for freedom seekers to cross the East Nishnabotna River between Des Moines and Kanesville (Council Bluffs) for many miles in both directions; the ferry keeper’s house is the only remaining structure from the period. Currently under preservation.
More information: 712-243-1931, or visit www.lewisiowa.com/ferry.html
In the beginning, the road that still runs past the Nishnabotna Ferry House was used by buffalo and Indians. During the late 1850s, Harlow Tefft’s ferry carried passengers, including freedom seekers and conductors like John Brown who were entering Iowa from Nebraska City. Stagecoaches, free-soilers heading for Topeka, the Mormon Handcart Companies of 1856 and 1857, Gold Rush enthusiasts, and general westward migration increased traffic. In 1859, the ferry was replaced by a bridge on the State Road or White Pole Road.
“The trails through here reflect the travel history of the time,” says Valda Kennedy of Atlantic, treasurer of the Cass County Mormon Trails Association that owns the Ferry House. “It was the I-80 of the 1850s.”
In the 1920s, the Army Corps of Engineers re-channeled the river to the west, but the tiny Ferry House remains. The last owners, in the 1970s, stored so much wood in the house that the floor fell in. Finally, in 1994, the property was purchased and the association went after grants to repair and preserve. “Outdoor interpretation of the many historical trails is in the planning stages,” says Kennedy. “Then, visitors can stop any time of day to learn more about the trails. And some day, we’ll have something for tourists inside the house.”
 |
|
|
Todd House
705 Park Street in Tabor
Historical Significance: Served as a meeting place for many of the leading abolitionists in the United States during the 1850s, including John Brown, James Lane, and Samuel Gridley Howe; was also a stop on the Jim Lane Trail.
Open: By appointment
More information: 712-629-2675 or 712-624-1065
A call to action was heard back in 1969, when neighbors started talking about replacing a vacant house, which had once been a UGRR station, with a garage. Residents f o rmed the Tabor Historical Society and not only saved, but also pres e rved, the Reverend John Todd’s 1853 home.
During the 1850s, Tabor was a hotbed meeting place for abolitionists, including John Brown. “This town was 100 percent abolitionist,” says Wanda Ewalt, society president. “Every house was a station, so there was no need to hide a runaway unless a slave hunter was coming through. A lot of abolitionists thought slavery should be done away with, but it never occurred to them to invite them to the table. In Tabor, runaways were treated like other people, just like in Oberlin [Ohio] where Reverend Todd came from.”
Indeed, at the time, Oberlin College was admitting women and people of color, and Todd helped found Tabor College, which espoused those beliefs.
In 1999, society volunteers began indexing and compiling Reverend Todd’s papers for publication and display. Plus there’s always something in the 148-year-old house that needs fixing. “We just hung those bedroom curtains last summer, and that was a job, I tell you,” says Verne Wilkins, society treasurer. “This house isn’t plumb!”
Most society members are in their 70s and 80s, although Ewalt says, “We have support from all ages all over the country. Many local people stand ready to move heavy furniture or bake pies for a fund-raiser or whatever.”
Still, society members here and at the other designated sites share one fervent hope: that down the road, more young people will volunteer. The need for new blood could, in fact, become the next challenge faced by Iowa’s Underground Railroad.
New Designations
Three sites received designation in 2004.
The Ira Blanchard Home Site and Cemetery in what is now Percival. Blanchard, a conductor, served as a bondsman for the Garners, a black family, enabling them to set up residence in the Civil Bend settlement. The cemetery is by a gravel road west of I-29; signs mark locations of settlers’ homes and schools.
The J.H.B. Armstrong House Site at 105 West Pleasant Street in Cincinnati. Armstrong, who had been active in the UGRR in Cincinnati, Ohio, was the chief conductor in the area. Today, a private residence is on the property. For more information, contact Linda Howard at 641-437-4359.
The Denmark Congregational United Church of Christ at 401 Academy Avenue in Denmark. The Reverend Asa Turner and church members worked against slavery, primarily by providing stations. The church is still in use. For more information, visit www.barbjscott.freeservers.com/Shedd/DenmarkCongregationalChurch.htm.
Network to Freedom
The National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, authorized in 1998, creates a system of sites, programs, and facilities that identify, document, interpret, and protect Underground Railroad resources. “The network really has blossomed, even compared with what the federal government wanted to do in the beginning,” says James Hill, midwest regional coordinator in Omaha, Nebraska. You can hear the pride in his voice. Like others working to preserve and promote the Underground Railroad, Hill is passionate.
For a site to be listed on the network, representatives from a site, program, or facility must approach the National Park Service (NPS) with scholarly identification via a process similar to obtaining designation on the National Register of Historic Places. The NPS has approved documentation from 137 sites, 33 programs, and 29 facilities in 26 states and the District of Columbia.
The Network to Freedom focuses more on the freedom seekers than those assisting them. “If it weren’t for the freedom seekers, we wouldn’t have had an Underground Railroad,” Hill says. “For years, history in this country was written from top down and from a European-American point of view. But freedom seekers had to be willing to travel long distances through the South, in hostile territory where there was no assistance from whites. The toughest part of their journey was usually closest to home. It’s about 550 miles from Helena, Arkansas, to Cincinnati, Ohio, for instance.”
For more information on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, visit www.cr.nps.gov/ugrr.
To download a PDF of the map of Iowa Underground Railroad Routes, CLICK HERE
Tunnels
Kathy Meyer, treasurer of the West Des Moines Historical Society, says, “If you open the cellar door [of the Jordan House] from the outside and look down into the basement, the stairway and entry made of stone almost look like a tunnel, especially to a child.”
And that, John Zeller says, would be one reason those tunnel stories won’t go away. Zeller, a historian working on the Iowa Freedom Trail Program, says claims of secret rooms and tunnels often turn out to be local lore. “I’m always encountering people who know about the tunnels,” he says. “They say, ‘My grandmother used to play in the tunnel when she was a little girl.’ But I think those grandmothers had been told that about the Underground Railroad and imagine they played in tunnels as children. In not one place has any archeologist found a tunnel.”
James Hill, midwest regional coordinator with the National Underground Network to Freedom, says the National Park Service is skeptical about tunnels. “A study of reputed tunnels in 17 UGRR sites in Ohio found no tunnels — no underground hiding places,” he reports. “Documented hiding places include attics, bedrooms, kitchens, or barns, not tunnels.”
Still, says Ed Wilson, vice president of the society, “We get little innuendoes every once in a while. We had a funeral in the Jordan family in the late ‘70s, and two stepdaughters came to visit the house. They walked down into the basement, saying, ‘Oh, we used to play in the tunnels.’ I think maybe it was a fruit cellar people were remembering.”
For Further Reading
G. Galin Berrier, Outside In: African-American History in Iowa, 1838-2000 (Des Moines: State Historical Society of Iowa, 2001).
Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961).
Robert R. Dykstra, “Chapter Five: The Salem Nineteen,” Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 88-105.
D. A. Garretson, “Traveling on the Underground Railroad in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics. 22 (July 1924), pp. 418-453.
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, includes a slave pen (a two-story structure rescued and preserved as the defining artifact of the center), exhibits, interactive theater, histories, films, performances, attention to modern- day freedom issues, and Reflect, Respond, Resolve (a place to engage in one-toone or group dialogues about the experiences and issues visitors have encountered as they toured the center).
The museum is on the riverfront in recognition of the Ohio River’s place in this American epic. Most scholars agree that as many as 40 percent of all fugitives crossed the river, making Cincinnati the gateway to Ohio’s more than 500 Underground Railroad routes — one of the most well-traveled states in the nation. Walter Blackburn, the center’s lead architect, was the grandson of slaves.
For more information, call 877-648-4838 or visit www.freedomcenter.org.
READ MORE FROM THE IOWAN subscribe now
ORDER PAST ISSUES OR BULK QUANTITIES OF THE IOWAN 800-352-8039
BECOME A FAN OF THE IOWAN 
All content © 2010 The Iowan/Pioneer Communications, Inc., and may not be used, reproduced, or altered in any way without prior written permission.
|
