Now, the daunting task begins in earnest: Plundering the archives and attics of some of the world's most prestigious institutions and humble homes to bring the best slave-trade artifacts to Cincinnati.

        As ground is broken Monday for the $65 million National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a city's detective skills and powers of persuasion are on the line.

Details of Monday's groundbreaking

        Over the next two years, workers will search at least a dozen states for hundreds of Freedom Center contents. They'll poke through museums, historic homes, private collections and state archives.

A pre-Civil War slave pen found in Mason County, Ky., is expected to be the most prominent — and emotional — exhibit. Inside is Carl Westmoreland, a senior adviser for the Freedom Center. (Patrick Reddy photo) | ZOOM |

        They're seeking African artifacts, old maps, diaries, paintings, bills of slave sales and run-away slave ads. They'll collect baskets, quilts, pottery, musical instruments and stories of slaves' escapes.

        And in a find already conquered, they'll move a pre-Civil War slave pen from Mason County, Ky. It's expected to be the most prominent — and emotional — exhibit when the nation's largest museum devoted to the Underground Railroad opens on the riverfront in July 2004.

        Such a feat to bring together so many holdings from one of the darkest chapters in American history has never been attempted before.

        “We're trying to look at it on a national scale,” says Dr. Spencer R. Crew, the Freedom Center's executive director and CEO. “We are unique in that we want to look at (history) through the prism of the Underground Railroad, the lessons that it teaches, and how we can apply those lessons to the present day.”

        Facing competition

        Because so few artifacts exist, the competition for treasures from the Underground Railroad is fierce.

FREEDOM CENTER FACTS

• Location: Along the northern bank of the Ohio River between Paul Brown Stadium and the Great American Ball Park at the end of the Roebling Suspension Bridge.   • Size: 158,000 square feet.   • Facility: Three connected pavilions span 4 acres with a variety of indoor and outdoor meeting spaces. There will be a gift shop and cafe.   • Planned exhibits: An orientation film, five exhibits including one for children, a live theater, and a concluding experience.   • Annual budget: Still to be determined.   • Funding: Capital campaign raised: $76 million ($43 million from private sources and $33 million from government funds); public fund-raising program kicks off Monday.   • Staff: 35.   • Information: 412-6900, www.undergroundrailroad.org

        Charleston, S.C., is opening a small museum in a historic downtown district where slaves were bought and sold. New museums exploring slavery or African-American history are planned for the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and Fredericksburg, Va.

        The Association of African American Museums counted 19 new projects last year and dozens more this year in cities across the country.

        Cincinnati's Freedom Center will be the largest museum dedicated to the Underground Railroad, a loose escape route to freedom followed by more than 100,000 slaves up the Mississippi and Ohio valleys in the early 1800s through the Civil War.

        But established museums may need to keep the artifacts they already exhibit, and even loans may be hard to arrange, Dr. Crew says.

        “And with private individuals, it will be a matter of whether they are willing to give them up,” he says. “That's where the persuasion will come in. Some of these things have been in families for a very long time, and some people may be unwilling to let them go.”

        Rita C. Organ, the Freedom Center's director of exhibits and collections, is working with Fath Davis Ruffins, a historian with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to assemble a collection here.

        “We have to wait in line,” Ms. Organ says. “We've surveyed the collections of the Library of Congress, the National Archives and the Smithsonian. We are concentrating on institutions east of the Mississippi, but we'll need items to represent the entire country.”

        The slave pen

        The prize artifact — the 170-year-old slave pen — will stand at the Freedom Center's hub, surrounded by 30,000 square feet of exhibit space on two floors.

        Powerfully humble, the pen is a two-story log building where men and women waiting to be taken south into slavery were shackled to the floor behind barred windows.

        “Anybody who has ever visited (the slave pen) feels the power,” Ms. Organ says. “The first time I entered it, I cried. It's almost like the walls were talking. Once you know what it is, and how it was used, you can't not feel that emotion.”

        But because of the very nature of the Underground Railroad — a secret pathway where evidence was destroyed and communication took place in code — finding other items to display will be difficult.

        “There are very few items related to the Underground Railroad, specifically,” Ms. Organ says. “The items are more related to people who were involved in it.”

        She and Ms. Ruffins hope to borrow about 200 authentic artifacts, on two- to 10-year loans, from other institutions. What they can't find — possibly as many as 100 major artifacts — will be reproduced.

        Among the prize objects on their wishlist are those related to Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as contemporary items relating to the American Civil Rights movement and freedom movements in South Africa and Poland.

        Goal: Show true picture

        As the curators begin to put the collection together, they know they must be sensitive to displays that might be deemed offensive, such as chains, shackles and other graphic items related to slavery.

        “There will be some things that will be difficult (to view),” Ms. Organ says. “We'll be sensitive about how we display those items, so children aren't confronted with a photo of a lynching without having a forewarning, or presenting it in such a way so that a parent has to figure out if they want them to see that image.”

        Hordes of people recently visited an exhibition of lynching photographs at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta.

        The pictures of people hanged or shot or burned in the streets or in fields were disturbing, yet they served an important purpose, some visitors said.

        “I wish more people would come out and see it,” John Crawford, 70, whose grandfather was lynched in Abbeville, S.C., in 1916, told USA Today. “It would help them better understand that this really did happen.”

        Organizers here say that while being sensitive, they want to make sure the exhibits give visitors a true picture of what took place.

        “We're not going to preach at people,” Dr. Crew says. “We're going to begin to provide a sense of understanding.”

        Stories and issues

        A series of exhibits covering a broad timespan will tell the story of the Underground Railroad. Personal experiences will be intertwined with issues of freedom and the importance of individuals standing up for the right things, Dr. Crew says.

        “The heart of our approach is to highlight individual personal stories as a vehicle for bringing history alive, and creating connections between the visitors and what they're learning,” he says.

        The center has been collecting hundreds of individual stories. As the stories unfold, artifacts found by the curators will provide color and detail.

        Stories include those of the Rev. John Rankin, a Presbyterian minister who lived in Ripley, Ohio. From his home overlooking the Ohio River, he would light a candle in his window as a sign to fugitives on the Kentucky side that his house was a safe place to stop. He, his wife and 13 children helped an estimated 2,000 people on the Underground Railroad.

        Deciding what objects to display will depend on whether they adhere to the story line that visitors will experience as they venture through the center.

        “You try to find artifacts that connect to that,” says Dr. Crew, who in 1987 put together “Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration 1915-1940,” an exhibit that broke new ground at the Smithsonian Institution, where he was head of the National Museum of American History.

        For that exhibit, too, Dr. Crew was limited by the relatively few historical African-American objects that exist. Instead, he found other ways to tell the story, such as oral histories, videos, photographs and a re-created train station with separate entrances for “white” and “colored.”

        Three historical sections

        Freedom Center curators will have to be similarly creative. They are planning to divide the exhibit into three historical sections, starting with “The Encounter.” This will encompass civilizations that existed during the early years of the slave trade — as early as 1400.

        “Most people think the slave trade began with agriculture, with cotton,” Ms. Ruffins says. “But in fact it began much earlier.

        “When the Spanish discovered gold, they needed a labor force. It was the search for gold and other precious metals that began the slave trade.”

        The second part, “From Slavery to Freedom” (roughly 1776-1865), will provide context to understand how slavery could coexist in the land of the Declaration of Independence, and how it gave rise to the Underground Railroad.

        For this, the largest exhibit, curators are seeking petitions for freedom sent to the Ohio legislature by slaves during the Civil War, as well as early plantation slave diaries.

        “There's a real variety of objects we're interested in: The Ohio Historical Society has copies of the Constitution and Declaration and early copies of the Northwest Territories map, which includes Ohio and Illinois,” Ms. Ruffins says.

        She and her colleagues also will look for documents illustrating the business of the slave trade: images of slave auctions, bills of sale, runaway slave ads, newspaper accounts and early Currier & Ives illustrations.

        “We have to talk about why people wanted to escape, the implications of slavery and the negativity around it,” Ms. Organ says. “But there's also the positive side of it. Because out of this, came African-American culture.”

        So, they will seek out quilts, musical instruments, examples of colonoware — low-fired pottery not made by slave labor — and sweet grass and coiled baskets from the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

        “The Free Cotton movement was a boycott of products made from cotton picked by slaves,” Ms. Ruffins says. “It shows an understanding of the financial rationale for slavery. Abolitionist groups began making bedding, clothing and linens from free cotton and we'd like to show examples of these.”

        The exhibit will end with “The Struggle Continues,” dealing with 20th-century freedom movements around the globe.

        Dr. Crew hopes it will be a positive experience.

        “While slavery is an important foundation for the discussion, it's really a focus on the Underground Railroad, which is a more positive way of dealing with that time in the history of the country,” he says.

        “It's about individuals who decided that slavery was wrong, that freedom was important, and their willingness to step forward to make that happen.”

Details of Monday's groundbreaking
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