Monday, June 24, 2002

Slave 'Railroad' Buffs Question Museum Site
"There was a fake grave over there where the abolitionists had the runaways climb down into the tunnel," Ms. Laveck explained. She was delving deep into the historic past, where the cramped tunnel, barely wide enough for a slave's shoulders, snaked darkly below what is now a paved road.

Right here in Ashtabula County was the nation's hotbed of abolition, the place that produced 13 of John Brown's 21 anarchist raiders," Ms. Laveck said. She belongs to a legion of history buffs in Ohio and beyond who are busy dusting off the tales, relics and heroism of the surreptitious paths to freedom called the Underground Railroad, which drew thousands of runaway slaves north.

"The slave catchers were hot on the trail of two of them," Ms. Laveck said, continuing a beguiling narrative of how the Ashtabula sheriff made a show of arresting the two slaves but then quietly released them to resume their night flight.

Such was the antislavery spirit in Ashtabula County before the Civil War. Such is the enthusiasm now to revive the Underground Railroad in a $110 million National Underground Railroad Freedom Center scheduled to open in two years — on the riverfront in Cincinnati, in the southwest corner of Ohio across the state from Ashtabula, in the northeast corner.

But not all history buffs envision Cincinnati as the ideal site in what was a constellation of transit points and safe houses for fugitive slaves that are flung across several states.

"I think the Underground Railroad is just a surface premise in a project whose real goal is to save Cincinnati's waterfront," said Ms. Laveck, who fears the center will be more a tourist theme park than an authentic place of history. She is a member of Friends of Freedom Society Ohio Underground Railroad Association, a dedicated group of Ohio residents who have been researching far-flung historic points for years.

"It's contrived," Ms. Laveck said of the Cincinnati project, complaining that one exhibit, a holding pen for recaptured slaves, would lose its authenticity in being transported to Ohio from Kentucky. "The money could be better spent preserving and protecting the real sites of history," she said. Hundreds of safe houses and hiding places were used by the runaways.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/24/national/24SLAV.html

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