Chapter Twenty-six

Steamboat: The first steamboat on the Tennessee River was in the early 1820’s, with regular traffic from Knoxville, Tennessee, 650 miles to the east by river, in the 1830’s. Of course the fishing boat would have had no lights, and a steamboat would have barreled right through on a windy night in 1850.

Paying the fisherman: Although anyone who helped a slave to escape was breaking the law and risking their own life and freedom, many people were reimbursed for their trouble, for train tickets, or for their lost labor. Anti-slavery societies collected money to help pay for the transportation and housing of escapees.

Ferry: Early ferries probably had ropes strung across the river for the boats to haul against, but with the coming of steamboats, ferry operators had to develop new technologies. I’m presuming that in 1850, both Clark’s Ferry and Haddock Ferry further east used horse powered team boats. There were several different designs in which horses walked on a treadmill to turn the paddlewheel.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Smithland House and Hotel: The little city of Smithland, Kentucky sits on the Ohio River at its confluence with the Cumberland River. The Massey house, widely believed to be a part of the UGRR, was under renovation there when it was burned by vandals in 2007. Apparently there was an old hotel that fell into the river in 1937, as well as the brick Gower Hotel, which was built in the 1790’s and is still standing.

In the Livingston County Historical Society, I found an old document about the Gower House which says, “Another feature of the Gower house discovered a few years ago is a tunnel that connects to a house considered to be the oldest in Smithland, the Massey house. This tunnel opens into a tunnel at the Massey house, and the closet can only be latched from the inside” (Cothran).

David Boswell of Paducah spoke with me by phone about the house, which was owned by his mother. “I remember a closet that latched from the inside. It had a trap door in the floor. It was in the oldest part of the house, which was built of notched logs in the late 1700’s. . . . My mother said it was part of the Underground Railroad. She lived 99 ½ years. She was born in 1912. A wealthy family lived up on the hill. The Connats. They were strong unionists.

Boswell’s brother-in-law, Bill O’Brien, who now owns the Massey property, met me there and pointed out the area where he says he found the tunnel. He said there was an old cellar under the cookhouse, about mid-point in back of the house, and from there, a tunnel to the river. He said the tunnel was at one point caved in, and he could see it was about three feet deep and two and a half feet wide, timbered, and also wall-papered.

O’Brien said he worked on restoring the house for about two years and was visited by people interested in documenting the UGRR. I haven’t yet found the records of that visit. After the fire, O’Brien had the remains of the house bulldozed in 2016 and a load of dirt brought in to fill the cellar area because he was worried about children playing around the damaged and abandoned property and someone getting hurt if they got into the remains of the tunnel. But he says that when it rains, you can still see the water swirling down into the tunnel and draining into the river. (Documenting this seems like a perfect project for a nearby college to undertake in an archeology class.)

Violence in Smithland: We know that Smithland was involved in the Underground Railroad, in part from an account recorded by William Still, an abolitionist who recorded the names and details of every escape he was involved in. Still collected his correspondence and daily news updates of Seth Conklin’s attempts to rescue Peter Still’s family from slavery in Alabama. The escape party was north of Vincennes, Indiana when they were retaken and put on a boat south. Though Conklin was reported to have gotten off the boat near Smithland, Kentucky, his body was later found in the water, “his hands and feet in chains and his skull fractured” (Still).

Old Man: Another favorite Smithland UGRR tale describes on old man who ferried people across the Ohio River. Laura Edwards Poole, who grew up in Ledbetter, between Paducah and Smithland, is now a historian and librarian for the Hickman County Library. She told me that a man, thought by the locals to be crazy, rowed out to the island at night. There, he would bury the bodies of people who mysteriously died at the hotel. He also carried slaves from the tunnel out to the island on his trips. He is, of course, the model for old Orvil in my story.

 Light on the hill: The idea of a lantern signaling from a house on a hill across the river comes from the accounts of abolitionist John Rankin’s home on a hill above the Ohio River in Ripley. Rankin would hang a lantern in the window or on a flagpole to guide slaves across the river from Kentucky. A woman who crossed the frozen Ohio River to Rankin’s house in 1838 with an infant in her arms is thought to be the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character of Eliza in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

 Chapter Twenty-eight

Rewards for captured slaves and abolitionists:

(John Parker, free Black in Ripley, and Rankin.)

“I’d rather be a corpse than a coward:” I have taken Orvil’s sentence from the story of former slave and abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant or Pleasants, a supporter of John Brown’s revolutionary tactics and later a civil rights activist in San Francisco. I first read it at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinatti, Ohio.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Dycusburg Postal Contract: According to The  US Postal Service historian, beginning in 1815, steamboats were required to deliver letters and packets within three hours of docking in daylight. In 1823, the United States Congress declared that waterways were  postal roads,  making it illegal for private  express companies to compete with steamboats. In 1838, all railroads were declared postal routes as well.

In 1848, a postal contract was granted to Dycusburg. (The 1947 stamps I’ve pictured are from my own father’s stamp collection.)

Postal stations collected and charged for outgoing  mail, and also received mail for people who came to the station to pick it up. There was an extra charge for delivery to individual locations. Postage in 1850 was about five cents, later reduced to encourage wider use of the system. The Dycusburg Ferry stopped operations in 1951.

Stoneware Pottery: The combination of Kentucky clay, and abundant oak forests, and slave labor made the area a top producer of stoneware pitchers, mugs, chamber pots, and large crocks for storing milk, sweetmeats, and pickles .

Two-pound capacity stoneware crock and my great-grandmother’s Nineteenth-century wooden potato masher.

Pig Iron and Totin’ Pigs: In the 1850’s, the iron industry thrived in Kentucky and Tennessee, with ore dug from the limestone cliffs, ample hardwood for the furnaces, slave labor, and access to river transportation. “Pig iron” is crude iron, melted out of the ore and cooled in bricks poured from a central line, arranged like piglets lined up on two sides of the mother pig.

Chapter Thirty-one

Snagboats: The US Army Corps of Engineers began removing obstructions from navigable rivers in 1824. It was an ongoing process, as rains and rushing water undermined banks and shorelines, washing trees into the water, their roots sinking down, and their tips pointing downstream at an angle.  Snagboats, popularly called Uncle Sam’s Tooth Pullers, rammed the trees to dislodge them, then lifted them on board with a windlass and cut them up for fuel.

Mammoth Furnace: The Mammoth furnace, one of eight built along the Cumberland River between 1840 and 1860, was five miles south of Old Eddyville. It now lies below Lake Barkley, created in 1960 by the damming of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers in the creation of Land between the Lakes National Recreation Area.

Only the Great Western Furnace is still in good condition in the Town of Model, further south in the Recreation Area, and the ruins of the Center Furnace are visible in the Woodlands nature Center.

Kittawa and Eddyville: The original towns of Kittawa (or Kutawa or Cuttawa) and Eddyville were relocated when the rivers were dammed and the land was flooded to form Lake Barkley. When the water is low, ruins and foundations of the old cities appear along the shoreline.

Chapter Thirty-two

Birmingham: The city of Birmingham was established on land owned by Thomas A. Grubbs in 1849. Its name reflects the dream that it would become an industrial center similar to Birmingham England. A grist mill actually preceded the lumber mill, which was thriving in the 1860s. The city was submerged by the creation of Kentucky Lake in the 1940s. Ruins of the city, pools that were iron ore surface mines, and limestone cliffs with abandoned mines are still evident in the area. (Some of the Birmingham residents had to relocate a second time with the creation of Lake Barkley in 1960.)

Slave labor: In 1850, the industrial revolution was transforming America. The mass production of stoneware and iron ore, represented by the factories in these chapters, was made possible by both the creation of new technologies and the pooling of financial resources to build furnaces, machines, and transportation systems. Just as the cotton gin demanded slaves to produce cotton, these factories were operated by slave labor. A slave insurrection in about 1855 contributed to the closing of the Great Western furnace.

Chloroform as medicine: Beginning in 1848, chloroform was widely used as an anesthetic, inhaled during surgery, dental procedures, and childbirth. It also has euphoric and sedative properties. Although an overdose was soon shown to cause respiratory disturbances and cardiac arrhythmia, its availability and recreational use were not legally limited in the 1850s, when Kimball White Pine and Tar Cough Syrup contained 4% chloroform. But the  USDA did not prohibit chloroform as a product for human consumption in toothpaste and cough syrup until 1976 (Schmeck).

American Refugees in Canada:  Several Underground Railway routes converged on Detroit, Michigan, and “historians estimate that as many as 45,000 run-away slaves passed through Detroit on their way to freedom in Canada (Gateway). Even though  Michigan was a free state, the “Fugitive Slave Act” of 1850 made it possible for African Americans to be apprehended and taken into slavery without the opportunity for any defense, causing both free and enslaved persons to take refuge in Canada.

Escape: The United States Census for 1850 showed over 3, 200,000 enslaved people living in the country with the total population of over 23, 191, 000 persons.  J. Blaine Hudson estimated that each year, only about 800 slaves (640  from Kentucky) escaped.  Obviously escape from the border states was easier that escape across long distances, and free people living in the borderlands were more likely to be abolitionist or at least more inclined to help fugitives than people living in the deep south. Still, that is fewer than one of  every 4,000 enslaved people who escaped each year!