0:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Before we jump back into the story of Levi and Catherine Coffin, the so-called president and first lady of the Underground Railroad, I thought it'd be helpful to review some of the code words common to the movement. 0:14 [SPEAKER_01]: Most of these will be intuitive once you get the hang of the railroad theme. 0:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Tracks were simply the root abolitionist used to move the slave north. 0:24 [SPEAKER_01]: Stations or depots were hiding places, or homes where runaways might stay. 0:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Conductors were guides and hosts, like the coffins. 0:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Agents were sympathizers of any kind who helped slaves on their way north. 0:38 [SPEAKER_01]: The words, passengers, cargo, fleece, or freight were all used to describe 0:46 [SPEAKER_01]: Stockholders were abolitionists, sympathizers, who helped fund the railroad, paying for food, clothing, and medical supplies. 0:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Canada and the free states of the north were referred to as the terminal, heaven, or the promised land. 1:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Over the course of their 20 years in Fountain City, the coffins helped conduct more than 2,000 passengers to the promised land. 1:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Joanna Han, Central Regional Director of the Indian Estate Museum System, is with us again today to tell us more about how they did it. 1:18 [SPEAKER_02]: So for the coffins, their goal is to keep anyone as safe and as comfortable as they can for however long they're going to be there, most may have only stayed for a couple of days. 1:30 [SPEAKER_02]: As long as there was no intense threat against the lives of these individuals, they could stay longer. 1:35 [SPEAKER_02]: And what that shows us is the coffins are willing to go as far as needed when it came to that care. 1:40 [SPEAKER_02]: And that really falls on the shoulders of his wife, Catherine, for the most part. 1:44 [SPEAKER_02]: That would have been her job anyway, as the wife and the mother of the household, she's doing that for her children, Levi's mother, moves in with the family in the 1835-ish period, because that's when Levi's father will pass away, so she's helping to take care of her. 1:58 [SPEAKER_02]: So Levi's very clear that Catherine from the get-go is very important to this working. 2:07 [SPEAKER_01]: There's an old adage that, behind every great man, is a greater woman, but when it came to the actual domestic work of the railroad, Catherine was front and center. 2:18 [SPEAKER_01]: She was the one responsible for feeding and clothing that dozens of unexpected dinner guests Levi brought home. 2:24 [SPEAKER_01]: Levi was a facilitator, a conductor who made sure runaways reached and departed his house safely, but it was Katherine who did much of the heavy lifting, dealing on a daily basis with hurting strangers who came to them traumatized, hungry, and tired. 2:42 [SPEAKER_02]: He has businesses, he has a life outside the home. 2:44 [SPEAKER_02]: He has to make sure that he's giving attention to that because the income he's making off of that is really allowing them to feed, to clothes, to shoe, to provide whatever resources they can for these individuals that are being helped by the house. 3:01 [SPEAKER_01]: One thing Joey and I mentioned Katherine doing to make her guest feel more comfortable is that whenever they arrived, no matter the time, she would make them something to eat. 3:10 [SPEAKER_02]: I like to say that it's really handy Catherine's married to the man who owns the grocery store in town because how can you really be sure who's coming, when they're coming, what are they going to need? 3:21 [SPEAKER_02]: And the drag good store was a great resource to be able to have that, to be able to do that. 3:26 [SPEAKER_02]: When it could be 17 people that walked through the door, which he claimed was the largest group they helped out in time. 3:31 [SPEAKER_02]: Now when it comes to how did you manage a household in the midst of these people, this constant movement of people coming in and out? 3:38 [SPEAKER_02]: Leave us not very clear. 3:40 [SPEAKER_02]: Levi is a very private individual in his writings. 3:42 [SPEAKER_02]: We have nothing, so no way of reflecting there. 3:46 [SPEAKER_02]: So I joke if only Catherine had written her version of events, we would have a lot of these holes, I think, filled in of the story. 3:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Coming into this conversation, I would have thought telling lies of one kind or another would have been central, even unavoidable, doing the work of the Underground Railroad. 4:02 [SPEAKER_01]: But in the case of Levi and Catherine, this was not the case. 4:06 [SPEAKER_02]: Levi was very clear on his writings that he never wanted to lie in this process, that at any time he was questioned he would tell the truth. 4:15 [SPEAKER_02]: And regardless of that truth, at least while he's in Indiana, and even later in Cincinnati, he never, he can close the couple times, but he never was officially accused or charged in the effort of helping run away slaves. 4:31 [SPEAKER_01]: If you step down a narrow staircase behind a small door at the center of the house, you find yourself in a 175-year-old underground kitchen. 4:40 [SPEAKER_01]: A fitting location for the work of the underground railroad, it was here that Katherine prepared meals and drew water for her family and guests. 4:48 [SPEAKER_01]: In a small white-wash stone room, a half-floor down from the kitchen is a round spring fed well. 4:54 [SPEAKER_01]: It looks like a traditional well that you'd see in a backyard, only it's set right in the middle of a red brick floor. 5:00 [SPEAKER_01]: With water coming almost at the top. 5:03 [SPEAKER_01]: According to Joanna, we could have actually drunk from it. 5:06 [SPEAKER_01]: This well allowed Katherine to draw virtually unlimited amounts of water for runaway guests, without making all the additional trips to the yard that might have aroused the suspicions of neighbors. 5:18 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked Joanne to describe the house for our listeners. 5:21 [SPEAKER_02]: So when we do our tourism, we tell our stories. 5:25 [SPEAKER_02]: There's no behind the scenes to this house. 5:26 [SPEAKER_02]: You basically see every available space. 5:29 [SPEAKER_02]: One of the last spaces we'll take you into is actually the basement. 5:32 [SPEAKER_02]: Typically, people don't build the kind of basements that Levi has in his home. 5:37 [SPEAKER_02]: I call it the finished basement for 1839. 5:39 [SPEAKER_02]: People just didn't do that. 5:40 [SPEAKER_02]: It was expensive, it's hard to build them. 5:43 [SPEAKER_02]: You might have a little root seller dug out under your house for food storage. 5:46 [SPEAKER_02]: Now, there's some grander houses that may need larger basements, but this is on a grand house. 5:51 [SPEAKER_02]: This was a nice house for 1839, but it's not like the linear mansion in Madison or Colbert's in a new Albany, which is in our system. 6:00 [SPEAKER_02]: When you go down there, you see this beautiful original brick floor. 6:04 [SPEAKER_02]: You see a space that's almost verbatim and square footage to the kitchen that's above it. 6:08 [SPEAKER_02]: So it's a really good size space that can actually hold a fair number of people. 6:13 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a fireplace that we can tell with the ironwork and bed in it was used for cooking purposes. 6:18 [SPEAKER_02]: But everything about that space is still public. 6:20 [SPEAKER_02]: meaning I'm not lifting up a trap door to get down there and there's a nice public door to get down from the inside and then on the outside you can see that there's doors that lead down to a cellar space. 6:33 [SPEAKER_02]: So what were the coffins trying to accomplish with something like that? 6:37 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, the easiest explanation is just a summer kitchen, which is not an unusual thing, but in the Midwest people don't do that. 6:44 [SPEAKER_02]: There's summer kitchens for typically outdoors. 6:47 [SPEAKER_02]: It's just a lot of money to spend, to do. 6:50 [SPEAKER_02]: When nobody else here in this region really does that, 6:53 [SPEAKER_02]: So it's easy to put some facts together from this book to what you see and think, well, he had to have had a mission. 7:01 [SPEAKER_02]: So if you can imagine 17 people who arrived and they were arrived, Levi says in the pre-don hour, so it's still dark. 7:08 [SPEAKER_02]: One of the first things Catherine always did to make them feel welcomed and to make them feel this is the safe place. 7:14 [SPEAKER_02]: She cooked something or just got what she could like I'd explained to how you can't always be prepared I don't know how you can prepare for 17 for breakfast, but that's what she got busy doing because he says When I woke up a little later in the morning came downstairs She was feeding 17 people so she cooked something she had done something but doing that in the main floors of the house Looks a little odd for that time of day, right and slave catchers are watching this house He's very clear because I know I'm under surveillance from time and time I know that these slave catchers are trying to catch me red handed 7:44 [SPEAKER_02]: But what if they actually were in the downstairs kitchen, where it may have been less noticeable? 7:50 [SPEAKER_02]: So, but that's a theory. 7:52 [SPEAKER_02]: We can't, I can't prove it. 7:55 [SPEAKER_02]: And so, I don't think I'll ever be able to prove it. 7:57 [SPEAKER_02]: Unless there's some random document in some random archive that some random person discovers that had been forgotten about for the last 150 years, be great to find something like that. 8:07 [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a chance. 8:08 [SPEAKER_02]: The other thing, though, to add to that downstairs, which kind of kicks us closer to believability, is in that space, there's an any room that we call the root seller that has an indoor well. 8:20 [SPEAKER_02]: So when we, again, think about what was you trying to accomplish by putting his well inside the house, when people typically have their wells out or the house? 8:30 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, the nice thing about that is you control as much water as you want all day long and nobody ever saw that. 8:35 [SPEAKER_02]: Now, I get questions sometimes as, well, did they have an outdoor well? 8:39 [SPEAKER_02]: To pull a ruse over anybody who, I said, we don't know. 8:43 [SPEAKER_02]: Archaeologically we've never seen evidence of one. 8:45 [SPEAKER_02]: There is the creek right behind the house. 8:47 [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe they just sent the kids out with buckets of water from time to get the water out of the creek or were called fountain city because it's in reference to the fountains or the springs that are on this edge of town along the creek. 8:59 [SPEAKER_02]: So from those very first years those Quakers for settled here. 9:01 [SPEAKER_02]: One of the things I liked about this area is you didn't have to dig very far in the ground to get really nice fresh water and leave I would have known that. 9:09 [SPEAKER_02]: So how did he know he could do it on this property? 9:12 [SPEAKER_02]: How did he know when the other breast he's taking is the basement flooding? 9:17 [SPEAKER_02]: When it rains, it never does. 9:19 [SPEAKER_02]: But my understanding is there's houses in town that basement's do flood because our ground is so saturated with the spring water that it doesn't have anywhere to go in the ground. 9:28 [SPEAKER_02]: So the basement's flood as a result, ours doesn't. 9:31 [SPEAKER_02]: The well is far enough below ground to where it never freezes. 9:36 [SPEAKER_02]: We don't have issues of worrying about it flooding. 9:38 [SPEAKER_02]: It's done it only once to my understanding, since we've been a historic site, and we don't know what it was about that one time that it happens, but it's never been a problem. 9:50 [SPEAKER_02]: going to this point of pre-planning and thought, it gives us this feeling of, gosh, he must have been trying to accomplish something here, but we just don't have the evidence. 9:59 [SPEAKER_02]: We have the physical evidence so we can show you that, but I have nothing in writing that I can offer you that says. 10:04 [SPEAKER_02]: Even the people that knew them well and Greek count some of these stories, like the nephew I mentioned before, they never talk about it. 10:11 [SPEAKER_02]: These are all possibilities, but I won't be able to prove it. 10:15 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think in my lifetime. 10:16 [SPEAKER_02]: But like I said, they didn't really mean for a lot of this to be known and it makes really tough to do it. 10:24 [SPEAKER_01]: There are multiple bedrooms in the house, but not near enough to accommodate passengers on the Underground Railroad in a safe or responsible way. 10:33 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked Joanna where everyone would have slept when the house was full. 10:37 [SPEAKER_02]: There are three bedrooms in the house, but it's Levi and Catherine and Grandma and the kids that are already in a servant girl from time to time that are occupying those beds. 10:47 [SPEAKER_02]: And I would imagine to a certain set, those are sort of private spaces in a way. 10:51 [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, you think about what the public areas of the house are, and you've got that many people, you probably can't have them being insight too often. 11:00 [SPEAKER_02]: How do you explain why you have 17 of these individuals in your home as someone came and asked those questions? 11:08 [SPEAKER_02]: They did have a large third floor attic that may be from time to time. 11:12 [SPEAKER_02]: That's where some groups of people had to stay. 11:14 [SPEAKER_02]: So it's possible that during day hours when things are more active in the community, these are individuals that are sleeping upstairs in the attic, versus being in a bed necessarily. 11:24 [SPEAKER_02]: But they would do their best to make sure these individuals were comfortable while they were here. 11:28 [SPEAKER_02]: Levi uses the word Garrett a lot in his book which is not a word we use when we describe a space in our household. 11:34 [SPEAKER_02]: That can describe an attic space or it can describe like a space under the eaves that's been turned into a closet which is what we have in the servant girls room. 11:42 [SPEAKER_02]: So that story is told where he he says he concealed 14 individuals that have been hotly pursued from their escape out of Kentucky and the Garrett and he just says they were they are long enough so that when their pursuers pass through town they weren't seen and heard 11:58 [SPEAKER_02]: He's not very specific, but the story was confirmed, he had a nephew who lived here in New Port named John Wright, Johnson, and he's confirmed not only that, yes, that story happened, he's the one that's confirmed that was the specific space where he hit those 14, and he went further to say, which Levi does not say in the book, that he would push a piece of furniture against the door so that if someone was to search the house, they would not realize, oh, there's a door there for a space like that. 12:23 [SPEAKER_02]: So we assume if that's being as a bedroom it probably was a bed. 12:26 [SPEAKER_02]: It's a very short wall and people sometimes question why do you have the bed? 12:31 [SPEAKER_02]: You wouldn't sleep there because if you get up you're going to hit the ceiling because the ceiling is really tight in that room. 12:36 [SPEAKER_02]: But I say yeah but if you want to push your bed in front of the door really quickly that's the best way to stage the room. 12:42 [SPEAKER_02]: So all of that is we're basing that off of what Levi says in the book, we're basing that off what his nephew says, and then just trying to logically think of like how would a person react in that situation, but what the coffins are doing is they're trying to keep slave catchers from getting into any indication of who they have and when they're there. 13:03 [SPEAKER_01]: The main responsibility that Coffins accepted as conductors in the Underground Railroad was to house and protect slaves on their long trip north. 13:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Another part of Levi's responsibility, in particular, was to help them get there. 13:17 [SPEAKER_01]: It was on him to connect with the next conductor north and move his house guests all to the next dependable ally. 13:24 [SPEAKER_01]: Often times, he transports them in his wagon, and only someone who had been in it would know that the floor on the inside didn't quite line up with the bottom on the outside. 13:34 [SPEAKER_02]: He would stack things like bags of grain or boxes on the top and in the back of the wagon and then people would think that's just what the wagon's full of if you drove by. 13:42 [SPEAKER_02]: When actually you may have had somebody hidden underneath in some capacity. 13:47 [SPEAKER_02]: So that group of 17 that I mentioned, that's how they arrived to the coffin home in two of those wagons. 13:52 [SPEAKER_02]: That's like eight or nine people crammed into one of those wagons, and then Levi typically would use the same method to move them on. 13:59 [SPEAKER_02]: Although he wasn't always the person that were people here in town that would volunteer to do so, but that seems to be a very common means of accomplishing being able to leave town without being noticed. 14:10 [SPEAKER_01]: You have to figure that at the time options for transportation were so limited that it was pretty much a wagon or walking, unless you are moving along a body of water. 14:20 [SPEAKER_01]: But rivers could be problematic too, as you were basically using the public interstate of that day. 14:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Really not an ideal setting for secrecy. 14:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Horseback riding was also conspicuous, as it's hard to miss someone riding nearby. 14:34 [SPEAKER_01]: In the color of a rider's skin could easily give them away. 14:37 [SPEAKER_01]: As you might imagine, silence was key, both in hiding and in transportation, because of this, toddlers and small children were a liability on the tracks, and sometimes parents were forced to leave them behind. 14:51 [SPEAKER_01]: Joana spoke of one case in particular, involving a man named Burrell, who will hear more of later in the episode. 14:59 [SPEAKER_02]: For some individuals, like for Mr. Barrell, his children may have been too young, and he may have decided, I'm gonna escape, and I'm gonna try to make a life in the north, and then the kids will be older, and then maybe I can purchase their freedom, but some will leave their children behind, because it's just too risky to take them. 15:16 [SPEAKER_02]: which is a really hard decision. 15:18 [SPEAKER_02]: Situations are always different from person to person when it comes to looking at these histories. 15:23 [SPEAKER_02]: It's really hard to generalize experiences when there's so many details around the decision. 15:28 [SPEAKER_02]: On why you stay, why you go, who goes with you, those kinds of things. 15:35 [SPEAKER_01]: For Levi, a big part of avoiding detection was just about knowing his limitations. 15:40 [SPEAKER_01]: If he tried to do too much, or gather too many runaways, in one place, his chances of getting caught might go up exponentially. 15:48 [SPEAKER_01]: As much as he may have wanted to, he couldn't really go down into slave states to bring slaves north. 15:54 [SPEAKER_01]: But once they crossed the Mason Dixon line, he would do what he could. 15:58 [SPEAKER_01]: The longest known stopover was for six months. 16:02 [SPEAKER_02]: Another story he speaks of a woman named Aunt Rachel, who may have spent the longest with the coffins while they lived here in Fountain City. 16:12 [SPEAKER_02]: She, if I remember the details, she and her family, she had children. 16:16 [SPEAKER_02]: She was married in the sense of how you could be married as a slave. 16:20 [SPEAKER_02]: And again, that was an issue where the family was sold. 16:24 [SPEAKER_02]: And the children and the parents were separated. 16:26 [SPEAKER_02]: And if I remember right, she was sold and was supposed to be sent to Mississippi. 16:30 [SPEAKER_02]: which for those who were enslaved and what was called the upper south, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, if you were being sent further south, they knew that meant you were going to the confields and your chances of survival. 16:44 [SPEAKER_02]: deeply decreased versus the type of labor that most enslaved individuals had in the upper south. 16:49 [SPEAKER_02]: But she's not thinking necessarily, oh I've got to go all the way to Mississippi and I'm going to be sent working in cotton fields. 16:56 [SPEAKER_02]: She's been separated from her children. 16:58 [SPEAKER_02]: So she's able to somehow escape. 17:00 [SPEAKER_02]: I think I don't remember she made it all the way to Mississippi or she escaped at some point on the way to Mississippi to get back to Kentucky to try to trace where her children went. 17:08 [SPEAKER_02]: that's her goal and my memory is that she was not able to reunite with her children in a situation became so tense that she decided to go north instead and eventually found herself here in in Fountain City with the coffins and Levi mentions that she lived with the family for up to six months and during that time they called her the servant of the family. 17:31 [SPEAKER_02]: So I think the situation may be allowing her possibly a chance to hide out for a while until things die off and the heat is off of her basically and maybe she can go back to Kentucky and possibly try again, which I think is what happened eventually, but I don't believe she ever reunited with her. 17:50 [SPEAKER_02]: And that's really difficult. 17:51 [SPEAKER_02]: If you don't have enough details, you do not know potentially what 18:00 [SPEAKER_02]: the roadblocks that she would be dealing with and trying to figure that all out. 18:03 [SPEAKER_02]: So I can imagine that experience of being in this home for six months of living with this family. 18:09 [SPEAKER_02]: Levi was not a proponent. 18:11 [SPEAKER_02]: He would not have said, Rachel, I'm going to take you to Kentucky, and I'm going to help you try to figure this out. 18:16 [SPEAKER_02]: He was not a person who felt going himself into the slave states would be a good idea. 18:22 [SPEAKER_02]: He knew how the laws worked in southern states being, he would call himself a southerner, being a southerner himself, growing up in North Carolina, and he knew some people that did, but it was never a guarantee you would be successful. 18:34 [SPEAKER_02]: So he's more of that individual is if these people can make it to me, then that's when I will step in and I will help them further north. 18:42 [SPEAKER_02]: So, I'd like to say with Eliza Casey maybe just saying let's wait it out for a while. 18:47 [SPEAKER_02]: You're welcome to stay here as long as you need to. 18:50 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not saying they treated her as a servant that may have just been the story they gave individuals if they said, well, who is this? 18:56 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, that's just Aunt Rachel. 18:57 [SPEAKER_02]: She's our servant. 18:58 [SPEAKER_02]: She's our hired girl. 19:02 [SPEAKER_01]: But there were also times when Levi did hire slaves to work for him as a way of keeping them busy and also of putting money in their pockets for the rest of their travels. 19:12 [SPEAKER_02]: Levi, as I mentioned, had several businesses and he was known to hire some freedom seekers for periods of time to provide work. 19:21 [SPEAKER_02]: He would help if they were interested in education. 19:23 [SPEAKER_02]: He would try to find a resource for them so that they could do that. 19:26 [SPEAKER_01]: one man, known only as Burrell. 19:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Travel to Wayne County alone, all the way from Tennessee, because he had not used any conductors. 19:36 [SPEAKER_01]: Burrell arrived in Fountain City, without knowing Levi coffin, and without knowing this man's story, Levi hired him at his store. 19:44 [SPEAKER_02]: But during his time here working for Levi, he comes to understand this man's reputation. 19:49 [SPEAKER_02]: Levi was very public if who he was and what he supported. 19:52 [SPEAKER_02]: And so he decides to trust Levi with his secret. 19:57 [SPEAKER_02]: And upon telling Levi, he says, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to work to raise money because my goal is to purchase their freedom and reunite with them and get them north. 20:06 [SPEAKER_02]: Which can have all kinds of issues there, depending on, again, 20:12 [SPEAKER_02]: do they get sold and you've lost contact with him, does and slavers would drive up prices to try to keep the sale from happening or to try to cheat these individuals out of being able to accomplish this. 20:24 [SPEAKER_02]: So, those are the type of possibilities that he was dealing with. 20:27 [SPEAKER_02]: As Levi says, he feels compelled to try to help the family, but like I said, he's not going to travel to Tennessee and track them down. 20:34 [SPEAKER_02]: He's not going to do that work, but he knows somebody who does. 20:38 [SPEAKER_02]: So Eliza was helped when she crossed the Ohio River and Ripley, Ohio by a family named Rankin. 20:43 [SPEAKER_02]: Levi writes to John Rankin, the head of the family. 20:46 [SPEAKER_02]: He's a Presbyterian minister. 20:47 [SPEAKER_02]: He's like the Levi coffin there. 20:49 [SPEAKER_02]: He'll people know what he's doing and what he supports. 20:52 [SPEAKER_02]: And he had a lot of sons, the Rankins do. 20:56 [SPEAKER_02]: They don't like kids. 20:57 [SPEAKER_02]: And he tells Levi Burrell's situation. 21:01 [SPEAKER_02]: And Rankin writes back and says, you know what, my sons are going to that area of Tennessee where he reports the family is and we'll see what we can do. 21:07 [SPEAKER_02]: The Rankins were okay with going somewhere and helping someone escape from time to time. 21:11 [SPEAKER_02]: They were known for doing that. 21:12 [SPEAKER_02]: From what I've read. 21:14 [SPEAKER_02]: Levi says, Burrell had a reunion with his family here in the house. 21:18 [SPEAKER_02]: That knows how long they've been separated, not knowing the conditions each one was in. 21:23 [SPEAKER_02]: They stayed here and lived in Fountain City. 21:28 [SPEAKER_02]: And he's in the 1850 census, he and his family. 21:31 [SPEAKER_02]: He became a barber. 21:32 [SPEAKER_02]: His wife supposedly opened a bakery here in town. 21:35 [SPEAKER_02]: And so I've been researching to try to say, gosh, there's got to be some other stories of his family. 21:39 [SPEAKER_02]: So they may have only lived here for a couple years if that. 21:42 [SPEAKER_02]: Levi says he purchased a home for them to start this life. 21:45 [SPEAKER_02]: So it's like, okay, where's the house? 21:48 [SPEAKER_02]: That would be great to know. 21:49 [SPEAKER_02]: Is that house still standing? 21:51 [SPEAKER_02]: Is there a family now living in that house for the girls living? 21:53 [SPEAKER_02]: And those are the kind of questions I want to be able to answer. 21:55 [SPEAKER_02]: But I just haven't found all the pieces yet. 21:57 [SPEAKER_02]: But I did find a reference to a story and one of the early histories of the town that slave catchers had done a search of his barber shop, which means, are they picking on Burrell because he's a black man? 22:08 [SPEAKER_02]: Or was Burrell involved in that? 22:10 [SPEAKER_02]: Was he perhaps helping? 22:12 [SPEAKER_02]: So we may never have a clear answer, but it points in that direction. 22:17 [SPEAKER_02]: Levi says though when the future of the slave act was updated in 1850, the boroughs will decide we're not going to stay. 22:24 [SPEAKER_02]: We're just going to go to Canada. 22:25 [SPEAKER_02]: The situation is with the law. 22:27 [SPEAKER_02]: Even amongst the people here that he seems to have trusted to stay something either happened or he just doesn't feel it's safe anymore and it's better to take my family to Canada. 22:38 [SPEAKER_02]: So I have an opportunity to maybe learn more about this family that was here at least for a period of time. 22:44 [SPEAKER_02]: The census, he's in the 1850 census, which was done and completed the month before the 1850 law changed, so they must still left towards the end of the year if not long after in the fall. 22:57 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1876, Levi Kauffin finally opened up about his and Katherine's work with the Underground Railroad, titled, Reminiscence of Levi Kauffin, the reputed president of the Underground Railroad. 23:11 [SPEAKER_01]: In that book, he recalls those who tried to discourage him. 23:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Telling me that such a course of action would injure my business, and perhaps ruin me. 23:23 [SPEAKER_00]: That I ought to consider the welfare of my family, and warning me that my life was in danger. 23:31 [SPEAKER_00]: And there were many threats made against me by the slave hunters, and those who sympathized with them. 23:39 [SPEAKER_00]: After listening quietly to these counselors, I told them that I feel no condemnation for anything that I had ever done for the fugitive slaves, if by doing my duty and endeavoring to fulfill the injunctions of the Bible, I injured my business. 24:01 [SPEAKER_00]: Then let my business go, as to my safety. 24:06 [SPEAKER_00]: My life was in the hands of my Divine Master, and I felt that I had his approval. 24:14 [SPEAKER_00]: I had no fear of the danger that seemed to threaten my life or my business. 24:21 [SPEAKER_00]: It was faithful to duty and honest and industrious. 24:26 [SPEAKER_00]: I felt that I would be preserved, and that I could make enough to support my family. 24:33 [SPEAKER_01]: If you haven't been to the Levi-Coffent House of Museum, I highly encourage it. 24:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Not only are you able to walk through the actual residents, that so many passengers pass through, but there is also an interpretive center next door, where you can learn more about the coffins' role and helping thousands find their way to freedom. 24:51 [SPEAKER_01]: It's in Fountain City, Indiana, and was once ranked as one of the nation's top 25 historical sites in America by the history channel.
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