By Richard G. Biever/Indiana Connection dot org-Posted on Jan 28 2017 in Features General

For Eileen Baker-Wall, the Levi and Catharine Coffin house is more than just a state historic site and national landmark. It’s also something as deeply personal and cherished as her family’s rarest heirloom.

Her great-great grandfather William Bush perhaps owed his life to the Coffins, their home and the Wayne County community of Newport. Perhaps Baker-Wall herself would not be here if not for the freedom Bush found there 175 years ago.

As a fugitive slave on the run from a North Carolina plantation, Bush had himself shipped in a wooden box to: “Newport, Wayne County, Indiana; Care of Levi Coffin.” That’s how one of several stories of his escape from bondage goes.

But one way or another, Bush came to Newport (now called Fountain City) sometime in the 1840s. He found freedom and safety there. So much so that Bush decided to stay in Newport, unlike the thousands of other freedom-seeking slaves who struggled on to Canada. Across the border in what became Ontario, they would be free of federal fugitive slave laws and not have to be looking over their shoulders.

“The U.S. 27 corridor — there are so many pieces of evidence of people following that corridor up to Fort Wayne, farther on into Michigan and into Canada,” said Baker-Wall. “As long as he felt safe, where he was protected by the people and useful to the people, he was welcomed to the community.”

Even then, the Coffins’ home was known as the “Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad.” The “Railroad” was a secretive, loose network of whites and free blacks who aided, hid and helped ferry runaway slaves to freedom in the North before the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the United States.

Bush made a new life for himself in Indiana. He became a successful blacksmith and also a lay veterinarian, two skills needed for any community back then. He married, began a family, was widowed, remarried and had more children.

In spite of frequent slave hunters passing through town and federal fugitive slave laws that required folks even in the North to turn in suspected runaways, Bush helped other freedom seekers on their journeys. “He must have felt a great deal of comfort there,” Baker-Wall added. “He was a good citizen.”

Baker-Wall said that from what she’s been able to piece together from written records and family history whispered from one generation to the next, she believes Bush’s first wife may have died giving birth to Baker-Wall’s great grandmother around 1864.

As a volunteer tour guide at the Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historic Site, the 73-year-old retired educator from Richmond said she loves to tell school kids of her bond to the Coffins and one of the slaves they helped.

“Some will gasp. One asked for an autograph. There is awe because there’s a connection,” she said. “It’s been a remarkable experience to give them that connection because that makes it real.”

She says she tells the groups, “You’re standing on the same floor the Coffins stood on, the same floor slaves walked on. Here we are, … all these years later.”

While Baker-Wall’s connections to the home and its past are as real and as close as the last breath she’s taken, so much of the history of Bush and the Coffin house are just as untouchable. By its secretive and loose nature, so much of the Underground Railroad has been lost to time. In the black communities, especially, stories were passed by oral tradition. Little was written and saved.

Baker-Wall noted that even within her own family, little was said of slavery and the past. Her father, Bush’s great grandson, was a bit more open than her mother. But she said she didn’t learn of Bush and the family’s connection to the Coffin house until she started asking questions in high school — even though she was the fifth generation of Bush’s family growing up right there in Fountain City.

The Coffin house is perhaps the country’s best known “station” on the Underground Railroad. Yet, there’s still so much to know about it, too. Though Levi Coffin published his memoir in 1876, a year before his death, he purposely kept some details vague and wrote little about the house that became the historic site. He kept diaries of his days in Indiana, but those volumes have never been found.

“If these walls could talk … we could have all those pieces of history we don’t have,” said Baker-Wall. She’s on a mission to uncover and document as much as she can about her family and the Coffin house.

“It’s something that I didn’t know as a child,” she said. “That my people helped our people get to freedom … it feels very, very good.”

She said the positive lessons the historic site exemplifies of interracial cooperation and equality are still just as important today. “Whenever we can come and say this is how we lived together in the course of history — despite things like the Ku Klux Klan.…

“Human beings should be treated according to God’s law. This is how people work together and live together.”
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Photo collage description: Left to Right- First top left- In the dining room of the Levi and Catharine Coffin house, Eileen Baker-Wall holds wooden shoes that belonged to her great-great grandfather William Bush, a slave who found freedom with the help of the Coffins on the Underground Railroad. Baker-Wall, a retired educator, volunteers as a tour guide for the historic site.

Second top- wooden shoes that belonged to William Bush that he was wearing when he self emancipated from a NC plantation, and found freedom with the help of the Coffins on the Underground Railroad.

Right top-William Bush is buried at Fountain City’s Willow Grove Cemetery. Bush, who escaped slavery in the South with the assistance of Levi and Catharine Coffin and others along the Underground Railroad, found safety and a permanent home in the town in the 1840s. He then assisted others fleeing bondage on the Underground Railroad. He died in 1898. Five generations of his direct descendants lived in Fountain City.
Photo by Richard G. Biever

Second Row left - In 1839, the Coffins built the home that, purposefully or not, was ideal for hiding runaway slaves. “Guests” entered through the kitchen or a cellar door. Unusual for Indiana homes at the time, the cellar had a fireplace and a brick floor (above).

Second row right - The Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historic Site, right on U.S. 27 in Fountain City, now includes the original Coffin house, on the right, and the new Interpretive Center, left.

Third row left- A spring-fed well in the cellar was another unusual feature. It allowed the Coffins to conceal the amount of water the household used, which kept from tipping off the number of people inside, in case slave hunters were surveilling the house.

Third row right- An upstairs bedroom had a sloping long, narrow closet that could hide a dozen people, but access was through a small door which could be easily hidden by a bed’s headboard.

Source: https://www.indianaconnection.org/footsteps-to-freedom/