BY ANDREA TORTORA
The Cincinnati Enquirer
MAYSVILLE, Ky. - Formerly one of the largest slave trade centers in Kentucky, this Mason County city now hosts thousands of visitors a year on tours of the Underground Railroad.
Documenting the history of buildings and the role white and black conductors played in ushering slaves across the Ohio River and into Ripley, Ohio, hasn't been easy.
But Maysville has been successful in verifying what many residents knew - this city was also a major stop on the path to freedom.
At its height, slavery forced 3,500 blacks to labor in Maysville. Today, there are 1,200 black residents living in the city of 9,400.
The story of many of the slaves is told in the National Underground Railroad Museum, started with the help of the National Park Service in 1995.
The center is small, housed in one room of the Mason County Welcome Center. The message emanating from the history within is strong. Most powerful are the shackles. Their black iron rings hang heavy on the wrist.
If slaves were lucky enough to find themselves outside the confines of shackles and ropes, they might have gone to Phillip's Folly, a two-story home well-known for housing refugees.
Slaves made their way to Old Washington, where lawyer and abolitionist James Paxton could tuck as many as 14 slaves in a hidden staircase at the Paxton Inn.
The hiding place wasn't discovered until the 1950s, when renovations were being made to the house. Now the stairway is open and visitors are invited to squeeze themselves into the space, no more than 18 inches wide.
Colonial architecture provided the coverup for the stairway. Fireplaces in colonial homes were equipped with long, thin closets on either side of them, said Bobbie Tucker, a tour guide at Old Washington. James Paxton put a false wall behind the closet wall on the first floor of his house and built a staircase up to the closet next to a second-floor fireplace. There he placed a false floor.
Just a few hundred feet from the Paxton Inn is the site of the old Washington Courthouse, where Harriet Beecher Stowe watched slave auctions and got the inspiration for her famous Uncle Tom's Cabin. The courthouse has since burned down, replaced by a residential home. But the limestone steps slaves were sold from still remain - stark and unemotional in their grayness.
It's where families were ripped apart.
Two blocks behind the courthouse site is Federal Hill, an estate built in 1800 by Capt. Thomas Marshall, brother of John Marshall, former chief justice of the United States.
The residence included a small, two-story brick house for the family's 18 to 20 slaves.
Mrs. Tucker, the tour guide, doesn't like to mention the slaves' quarters. When asked why, she says the Marshall family, whichstill owns the house, are private people.
But slavery and escapes to freedom were widespread in Maysville. Slaves could slip away from the courthouse auction blocks and wait out the daylight inside the walls of the Paxton Inn.
Under cover of darkness, they could head to the Ohio River.
The Simon Kenton Bridge makes the crossing easier today, but in the 1800s, the river was about 15 feet deep, cold. A crossing meant slaves were closer to freedom, but the journey wasn't done until those on the railroad eluded slave hunters and reached more northern states and Canada.
FREEDOM ROAD STORIES SOUGHT FOR HISTORY
N.KY. TRIES TO DIG UP LEGACY OF UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
