[Reader-list] ** In a barn, slavery's past is laid bare **

[Sarang Shidore]

In a Barn, a Piece of Slavery's Hidden Past

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN, New York Times

GERMANTOWN, Ky. - Even now, slowed by a stroke and 70 years past his 
boyhood toiling in the fields as a tenant farmer, Isaac Lang Jr. can 
still recall the terrible secrets hidden inside the old tobacco barn.

"Dad told us never to go in there," Mr. Lang, 84, recalled, sitting 
up in his bed in a nursing home here. "He said, `Boys, I'm going to 
tell you the truth. It's all right to play around that barn, but 
don't go inside.' He said it just wasn't right. That it was pitiful. 
He never did tell us why."

The building resembled the hundreds of long, low tobacco barns with 
rusting roofs that mark these winsome rolling hills along the Ohio 
River, except for a log structure concealed inside. Its windows were 
fitted with thick, crisscrossed wrought-iron bars ordered by Capt. 
John W. Anderson, a Kentucky slave trader.

In the forced westward migration of slaves in the years after 1790, 
historians say, Captain Anderson held an unknown number of 
African-Americans in the log house, which has recently been 
identified as the only known surviving rural slave jail.

For years, the slave jail, or holding pen, was encased and largely 
concealed within the tobacco barn, a later addition that screened it 
from the elements and ensured its survival. It was the stuff of lore, 
a public secret. Now in storage, its logs awaiting reconstruction, 
this environment of confinement will take its place in a museum 
dedicated to freedom, as the centerpiece of the $110 million National 
Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.

With artifacts from the slave era difficult to find and authenticate, 
and counterfeit shackles and slave identification tags swirling 
through eBay, the survival of the holding pen and its subsequent 
identification by historians and curators is a landmark in the 
material culture of slavery.

The insidious byways traveled by the traders and their slaves - 
rivers, oceans and roads - were served by a transcontinental network 
of holding pens, jails and yards built to warehouse and secure human 
cargo in transit. Among the few slave jails that have survived is one 
in the basement of 1315 Duke St. in Alexandria, Va., once the 
headquarters of Franklin & Armfield, among the country's largest 
slave trading companies. It is now a National Historic Landmark.

"That the slave pen still exists is miraculous," said John Michael 
Vlach, a professor of American studies and anthropology at George 
Washington University and the author of "Back of the Big House: The 
Architecture of Plantation Slavery". "Slavery used up artifacts the 
way it used up people."

The movement to preserve vestiges of the internal slave trade is 
relatively recent. For example, with a $200,000 grant from the state 
Department of Archives and History, the city of Natchez, Miss., is 
trying to buy a quarter-acre section of the Forks of the Road, the 
second-largest market in the South, where roughly 1,000 slaves were 
sold a year, and transfer it to the National Park Service. An empty 
tavern and a parking lot are now at the site.

In a historic part of Lexington, Ky., known as Cheapside, once home 
to the state's leading slave market, markers honor Kentucky's vice 
presidents and Confederate heroes but do not mention the area's slave 
roots. Doris Wilkinson, a professor of sociology at the University of 
Kentucky, calls such omission "psychological concealment."

The Underground Railroad museum in Cincinnati is spending about $1 
million on the slave jail, including disassembly and reconstruction. 
Next summer, when the museum opens, its 450,000 or so expected 
visitors will be able to walk through the holding pen and touch its 
walls.

"We're just beginning to remember," said Carl B. Westmoreland, a 
senior adviser and curator at the museum who has spent the past three 
and a half years uncovering the story of the slave jail. "There is a 
hidden history right below the surface, part of the unspoken 
vocabulary of the American historic landscape.

"It's nothing but a pile of logs," Mr. Westmoreland said. "Yet it is 
everything."

The jail languished for years as the barn around it slowly collapsed. 
In its dark attic lay a row of wrought-iron rings - five have 
survived - through which a central chain ran. Men were tethered on 
either side of the chain.

"It was a slave ship turned upside down," said Mr. Westmoreland, a 
trustee emeritus of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and 
himself the great-grandson of slaves.

The jail's original chimney faced the Ohio River, the boundary 
between slavery and freedom and the same fickle water to which 
Captain Anderson, who is buried 100 yards from where the jail stood, 
marched his slave coffles. It was an eight-mile trek down the Walton 
Pike to the landing at Dover, Ky., where they would board flatboats 
for a perilous 1,150-mile journey: Dover to Covington, Covington to 
Louisville, Louisville to Henderson, Henderson to Smithland, 
Smithland to Memphis, Memphis to Vicksburg, Miss., and on to the 
infamous Natchez slave market.

The vague outline of the barn's foundation is still imprinted in the 
alfalfa fields owned by Raymond Evers, 72, a retired Cincinnati steel 
contractor, and his wife, Mary, 75. They purchased the 280-acre farm 
and what they heard referred to as a "jail cell" in 1976. Mr. Evers 
spends weekends on the farm, growing alfalfa, corn and soybeans. He 
used the barn to store machinery and would occasionally unearth 
chains while plowing.

Mrs. Evers grew up in nearby Minerva and Maysville. In 1998, when the 
couple learned of plans for an Underground Railroad museum in 
Cincinnati, they asked museum officials to look inside their barn.

"It was something I'd read about - past tense," Mr. Westmoreland 
said. "It was something that used to exist - past tense."
The Everses gave the structure to the museum in exchange for a new 
barn. Then Mr. Westmoreland and historians, curators and 
archaeologists set about to determine whether the stories of a slave 
jail were merely folklore.

What they knew was that Mason County, and nearby Maysville in 
particular, had been a hemp and tobacco center and a mecca for 
slaveholders from Virginia and Maryland wanting to sell slaves into 
the deep South. In the last decade of the 18th century, the geography 
of slavery, which was largely confined to the Eastern seaboard and 
the Appalachians, shifted profoundly, crossing the easternmost Blue 
Ridge mountains and expanding into the Shenandoah Valley, Kentucky 
and Tennessee. Surplus slave labor in Virginia, the result of 
depleted soil and crop failure, made it relatively easy for Kentucky 
pioneers to purchase black slaves at favorable prices.

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and cotton planters' insatiable thirst 
for labor set in motion the forced westward deportation of slaves, 
most of them on foot. It was an event, the historian Ira Berlin wrote 
in his recent book, "Generations of Captivity: A History of 
African-American Slaves," that would tear families apart and displace 
more than a million people, "dwarfing the transatlantic slave trade 
that had carried Africans to the mainland."

There is as yet no known photograph or obituary of Captain Anderson, 
who died in July 1834 at age 41, according to his tombstone. In 
contrast to the antebellum stereotypes of slave traders as coarse and 
ill-bred characters "with a whiskey-tinctured nose, cold hard-looking 
eyes, a dirty tobacco-stained mouth and shabby dress," as one writer 
put it, they were often respected members of society. In Kentucky, 
they included Stephen Chenoweth, tax commissioner in Jefferson 
County, and Littleberry P. Crenshaw, a minister in Louisville.

Captain Anderson left an extensive paper trail of business dealings 
and legal disputes that described his slave trading. By piecing 
together information from estate inventories, court records, tax 
receipts and newspaper advertisements, historians have begun to 
assemble the story of Captain Anderson and his slave jail.

The first breakthrough was a Mason County probate document referring 
to a "jailhouse" on the property. Pen Bogert, a historical researcher 
in Louisville, discovered in the Adams County, Miss., courthouse 
copies of 1832-1833 tax receipts signed by a John W. Anderson for the 
sale of blacks. And in 1833, Captain Anderson offered a reward in a 
Maysville newspaper for the capture of four runaway slaves. Among 
them was "Carter, aged 25 years, about five feet four inches high, 
very bright mulatto, bush head; very stout, heavy made, and stammers 
when interrogated; full round face; he professes to be a shoemaker 
and rough carpenter."

At the time of his death, researchers say, Captain Anderson had 
become wealthy enough to invest in a silver-trimmed saddle and 42 
thoroughbreds. He owned 37 slaves, far more than he typically claimed 
at tax time.

Research indicated that Captain Anderson converted a plain log 
building into a slave jail. Over the past few years, archaeologists 
have unearthed about 6,000 artifacts, including crockery, tools and 
kitchen utensils. As the building was being dismantled last fall, 
they discovered a log on the second floor, beside the rings, bearing 
the stamp of J. W. Anderson.
But the decision to move the holding pen from Kentucky to Ohio was 
controversial locally.

"By the time the public found out about it it was a done deal," said 
Alicestyne Adams, an assistant professor at Georgetown College in 
Kentucky and the director of the Kentucky Underground Railroad 
Research Institute. But the priority was preservation, she said.

"African-Americans have become used to having other people tell our 
stories," Professor Adams said. "Having an artifact that speaks to 
the magnitude of what occurred, and where it occurred, is extremely 
important."

In and around Mason County, some people wanted it to stay.

"It's part of the history of the area, but not the pretty part," said 
Caroline R. Miller, an English teacher in Germantown who has done 
extensive research on local court documents pertaining to slavery.

But many residents, Ms. Miller said, would prefer to be identified 
with the heroes of the underground railroad like Arnold Gragston, who 
was born a slave on Walton Pike and began rowing slaves to freedom in 
Ripley, Ohio, in 1859.
"There is a fear of being stigmatized," she said of the ambivalence. 
"It's not easy to learn that the history of where you live is more 
than unpleasant."

The green hills in and around the Everses' farm are dotted with white 
porticoed homes, but the original cookhouses and slave quarters out 
back remain hidden from public view and await historical reckoning.

"They bring up very painful memories," said James Oliver Horton, a 
professor of American studies and history at George Washington 
University who has been an adviser to historic sites like Monticello. 
"So even though they're out there, we don't want to find them."

Nonetheless, landscapes have memories. Carol Yates Bennett, 66, who 
grew up in Maysville, remembers her great-grandmother's story of a 
slave mother so bereft at her forced separation from her daughter, 
who was being sold downriver, that she cut off her hand in despair.

Ms. Bennett went to visit the jail on the Everses' farm before it was 
dismantled. "You just sensed the presence all around you," she said. 
"It felt like hallowed ground."