Underground Railroad
May 12th, 2008 - 06:53 AM
Underground Railroad
I have always loved history, especially the history of the Early American West. Perhaps it’s because I was born on the edge of the West, or perhaps that my own great-grand father was an early settler in Iowa after the civil war. I am absolutely positive the spate of westerns on TV and the movies that were popular in the 1950s and 60s fueled my imagination.
Way back before the Civil War was fought the Mason/Dixon line divided the nation. This imaginary, and seemingly serendipitous line meant that states north of the line were free, those south were slave. Missouri, twenty-five miles south of Lenox, Iowa, though technically free was in actuality a slave holding state. It was also an outlaw state spawning, among others, the greatest outlaws of the west, the James brothers. It was rumored that when they made their infamous bank raids into Iowa they rode up our road. Lenox was so rural that over the years many natives developed what amounts to a soft southern accent in their speech. We have a slight but noticeable drawl.
One morning on a bright summer day I was riding down a dusty gravel road with my father. We were bumping along in his old Dodge pickup when he turned to me and inquired if I knew about the Underground Railroad. I must have been about 10 years old at the time and I had been introduced to the concept in school so I allowed as I did know about it.
“Want to see it?” queried Dad. “I can show you.”
“Uh… sure. I guess.”
In truth I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Dad headed straight up the road until it intersected with the paved road that ran into our town. At that time Lenox had two paved roads that dissected the town. The main highway ran north and south. South was Missouri and seven miles north of town the road ended at highway 34. State 34 ran east and west and roughly followed the old Mormon Trail coming out of Illinois crossing the Mississippi river running across the lower third of Iowa and crossing the Missouri river into Nebraska a few miles south of Omaha/Council Bluffs. Back in 1868 my great-grand father had homesteaded just south of this intersection and a couple of miles to the west.
The paved road we turned onto ran east and west. Two miles west was Lenox and going east the highway Teed into another paved road 7 miles from town. The rest of the roads were a warren of gravel and dirt roads as they are yet today. The gravel crunched as Dad stopped the truck at the paved highway and turned east away from town. He drove less than one-half mile and turned left into a driveway. An old grove of trees stood testament to the fact that there had once been a farmstead here. The trees and the humped grassy swell of an abandoned root cellar were the only visible evidence that a family once called this home.
I was eager and excited as I jumped out of the truck. I was ready to see a railroad. In my mind I could readily imagine the whipped and cowering slaves making their way from the “South” to the “North” to freedom. A freedom that began here in Iowa. I felt a kind of pride thinking about that.
Dad walked over to the large door that was flush with the ground and lifted. He flopped it back on the grass and we gingerly made our way down the half dozen decrepit wooden steps to the dirt floor below. The morning light filled the old cave and I peered into the soft shadows in the back at a black wall of dirt. Puzzled I turned to Dad.
“Where are the railroad tracks?”
You see I’d expected to see a railroad running underground from “down south” up to Canada. My dad roared with laughter, and then patiently explained how the real Underground Railroad worked. Boy I felt like a knucklehead. But I still thought it was cool about the Underground Railroad and that it had run through my town. That was pretty neat.
It wasn’t until years later when I was grown that I realized maybe I should have probed a bit more. You see the closest town to Lenox was Bedford, twenty miles south of Lenox. Bedford was founded in 1856, five years before the Civil War began. Bedford was located a mere fives miles from the Missouri border. My great-grand father came to our area in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. And the actual town of Lenox? Founded in 1872, seven years after the hostilities over slavery had ended. So, you may ask: how could this have been a stop on the Underground? Darned if I know.
I still remember the excitement I felt and the naive question, “Where are the railroad tracks?”
Blog: #7 of 30 by Kevin Callahan
Comments
05/14/2008
01:13 PM
Dundas, ON
Great story, Kevin. One of the last stops for the U Railroad was right near my home town in Ontario, and some of the descendants still live and farm there. It's called Uncle Tom's Cabin. I learned a lot about the Black struggle for freedom from "The Book of Negroes" by Lawrence Hill - I was absolutely shaken by it, all the way through.