Chasing the Mystery of U.S.’s Secret Trail

Gus West bought some land, built a mansion and paid an artist to sketch the place for posterity. When his first wife died, he marked her grave with a marble monument that towered over the other tombstones. On the surface, he seemed like a prosperous man.

Dig deeper and more elusive archives show that West grew up in Virginia, where he had to register regularly as a free black man living in a slave state. Census rolls show that he turned up in 1837 here in southern Ohio, a region known for its anti-slavery sentiment. Evidently, he did well. Eventually, he vanished.

What the records don’t say is that West was a con man. That he and a white sidekick, Alex Beatty, made a bundle by slipping into the South to pose as slave and slave peddler, sometimes scamming up to $1,700 in a single sale and then high-tailing it back to Ohio. That they used the money to finance freedom for real slaves. And that West built a settlement for some on his farm just outside this little town.

No official document declares that Augustus West was among the many African Americans who helped run the Underground Railroad, the vast, shadowy and often misunderstood network of trails and safe houses set up to spirit slaves from the South as the United States staggered toward civil war.

This kind of history--the history of a secret--requires much more. It takes somebody willing to gather tiny bits of evidence to build a convincing body of proof, to match old memories with threadbare facts. And maybe make a little leap of faith.

In the case of Gus West, it takes a high school history teacher to sic his seniors on a local legend. It demands digging for clues on a bitterly cold day in the countryside, where the land is finally reclaiming the home of a larger-than-life man who made hard-to-find history.

“One more bad winter and it’ll be gone,” says Paul LaRue, looking up at the skeletal remains of a vanishing house. The pear and cedar trees that West himself planted now wrap around and reach through the framework of rooms with only remnants of walls.

Off in a harvested cornfield a few hundred yards away, LaRue’s bundled-up students are sinking shovels and trowels into the hard dirt, hunting for an old button, square-headed nail or piece of porcelain that may help prove that West sheltered a village of runaway slaves on his secluded farm.

Without proof, after all, a good story is just a good story. “So much of this Underground Railroad stuff is written on the wind,” LaRue says.

Or buried in the ground. LaRue spots a young woman running furiously from the modest excavation site, along a dirt road, up the hill where the ruins of the West house are falling down. She’s excited. She’s shouting.

Proof?

“I found something! I found something!”

Maybe.

Linking Stories of the Railroad

From Canada to Cape Verde to California, from the green fields around Greenfield to the New England whaling ports from which sailors smuggled slaves as far as Alaska, stories like the one about Augustus West are being dug up, dusted off and linked together like manacle loops. They are part of a belated dash to catch the Railroad before it disappears, to preserve places designed to be undiscovered and memorialize people determined to avoid detection.

“It’s a challenging project,” says Dwight Pitcaithley the National Park Service’s chief historian. “Everything else the Park Service is responsible for is based on a site. This is based on an idea. And the whole idea was not to get caught.”

Though much has been written about the Railroad, plenty is unclear. Its size, effectiveness, level of organization, means of communication and the precise location of its many routes remain clouded with conjecture. In the seismic decades that led to the Civil War, perhaps a thousand slaves a year managed to elude the bloodhounds and bounty hunters who sometimes chased runaways into Canada. Many took their tales to the grave.

In 1998, Congress gave the Park Service $500,000 a year to form a network of regional experts who would link the often overlooked sources of local lore. With no clear timetable and not much cash, a handful of Park Service historians has been figuring which people, places and things should be considered part of the network. Ultimately, they will devise a logo and a sign and etch a rough sketch of the Railroad on this nation’s historical landscape.

A very rough sketch. “The history of the Underground Railroad will never be known with great clarity,” says Pitcaithley. “But I think there is a lot more evidence out there.”

Out there, buried beneath the decades, are lost tales of courage and adventure. Contemporary historians say the Underground Railroad has long been portrayed as the work of white abolitionists, often at the expense of the deadlier deeds carried out by free blacks and former slaves, and common folk in general.

The effort to elevate the Underground Railroad, in fact, is part of a movement--from the smallest museum to the Smithsonian Institution--to tell a physical history that goes beyond the statues of generals and plaques of battles, to include the simple acts of regular people and the social fabric of an era. “Not that we replace the stories of great individuals with the stories of common folk,” says Pitcaithley, “but to layer them in with the stories we already tell to make them more complex, more understandable.”

The Park Service has been expanding the militaristic memorial at Gettysburg to more deeply explain the social schism that split the country. It also recently asked Congress to restore the crumbling immigration station where thousands of Asians were processed from 1910 to 1940 on San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island--to make it the Pacific Rim’s answer to Ellis Island.

If this smacks of excess political correctness, Pitcaithley points out that the Park Service failed to grasp the historic heft of Ellis Island in the 1950s and turned down its first chance to rescue the abandoned complex. And it wasn’t until 1974 that a single national historic site was devoted to a woman, Civil War nurse Clara Barton.

Telling Story of Migration

Historians today are skittish about how their versions of history will be judged by history. Many embrace the idea that history is perpetually skewed by the era in which it is written. They are more willing to bare their inherent cultural biases in the prefaces to their books and insist that they are only interpreting events that time has transformed into tea leaves.

The urge to atone for the lies etched in limestone is motivated in part by the fact that there are so many of them. Monuments to men who were, in fact, Ku Klux Klan leaders still stand from Oregon to the nation’s capital. Slave breeders are praised with plaques throughout the South. Thousands make the pilgrimage to Lincoln’s Kentucky log cabin even though it’s been clear for years that Honest Abe hung his stovepipe elsewhere.

Though the Underground Railroad seems ripe with ways to use the little guy to tell a big story, the most gripping tales are often the toughest to prove and most tempting to believe. “There is a danger of trying to make a story so appealing that it loses its scientific value,” says Guy Washington, the Park Service’s Underground Railroad coordinator for the Southwest.

Yet the sheer mystique of this noble conspiracy is part of its allure for many people, who seem to have the same tremble of awe in their voices when they recount tales of a man or woman stumbling through a Georgia swamp, bullets flying by, to find a beckoning lantern burning in a welcoming window.

Washington has been looking at the lineage of Californians who fled Southern plantations via the secret routes to New England. Evidence suggests that sailors from the West African nation of Cape Verde were among the Massachusetts whalers who stowed away fugitive blacks and dropped them in California, perhaps even Alaska.

In fact, the Underground Railroad might as well be called the Secret Submarine, considering the number of fugitives who fled via vessel to the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe. Surveys show that many Americans find their historic sites to be irrelevant, not clear portals to a past that set the stage for the present--to be, in fact, pretty boring. This is one reason why Washington says the Underground Railroad’s history has the potential to captivate any American.

“Out here, we’re using the Underground Railroad to tell the broader story of migration, which is the story of America,” Washington says. “Whose family has not been touched by that story?”

A Family’s History

One family with deep roots in Ohio holds a reunion every year, and each gathering makes Joyce Dennis take stock of the ethnic expanse her ancestry encompasses. It’s clear her roots are not only black, but white and red. One uncle was so light he insisted he was German, much to everyone’s amusement.

About 1957, when she was 9, a local writer and a photographer showed up at a reunion to chronicle the five generations of black history gathered there. One story in particular stood out.

“They started talking about our connection to Augustus West,” says Dennis, a technical support analyst for Lucent Technologies. “I just listened. And I never lost interest.”

Her great-grandfather, Augustus West Cannon, was the son of one of West’s two daughters. As Dennis grew older, she took responsibility for tracking the family history.

Gus West loomed largest, the giant trunk of the family tree. A great-uncle had more details about the man’s exploits with the Railroad and the piles of money he and Alex Beatty supposedly bamboozled at slave auctions. An Ohio historian later wrote a book about the small towns in southern Ohio and told the same story. How Beatty helped West flee after selling him into slavery. How West settled maybe 16 families on his land.

Dennis says West turns up three times in the old Virginia race registries. He’s described as a “well-made” man, big and strong, which Dennis figures would explain the high bids he attracted.

He certainly had money. His first wife, Harriet, died young and was buried in the Greenfield Cemetery. Dennis went looking for the grave. “I was looking for a little headstone. But there was a great big monument over 6 feet tall!” The marker was etched with the words “Let me die the death of the righteous,” along with an odd symbol of a pointing hand.

Then, out of the blue, she was contacted in 1998 by a history teacher from Washington Court House, just up the road from where West lived.

Paul LaRue, a relative newcomer to the area, had been intrigued by southern Ohio’s historic role in the Railroad. LaRue made tracking the local angle the first project of his new historical research class, an elective for seniors. It wasn’t long before his students stumbled across the saga of the swashbuckling swindlers, the black-and-white buddy team that seemed too cool for school. They locked in on the legend and would not let go.

LaRue is as much cheerleader as teacher, a garrulous man with unlimited enthusiasm. But he realized Gus West was one topic that needed more specialized scholarship.

LaRue called Cathy Nelson, the head of the Ohio Underground Railroad Assn., a grass-roots group trying to preserve the remnants of Railroad history. Nelson, a curriculum coordinator for the Columbus school system, hadn’t heard of Gus West. But she told LaRue and his students how to look.

The class combed local tax and census records and tracked down descendants like Dennis, who felt like the cavalry had come to her aid. “Before, I was a lone ranger,” she says.

The students interviewed the woman who now owns the West property, and she turned out to be the granddaughter of Marvin King, the man who bought the land from the West family at the turn of the century. She knew West’s story.

Discovering the Facts

Two families, one black and one white, had kept separate but equal accounts of the same local legend. At Nelson’s urging, LaRue visited the state historical society and scoured the Railroad research conducted in the 1890s by an Ohio history professor, who relied mainly on the recollections of white abolitionists.

LaRue burrowed through boxes of letters, scanning the dry text, and felt the first dizzying jolts of discovery. There were references to a man identified as an “agent” for the Railroad, a “station keeper.” His name was Alexander Beatty.

The skeleton of a story was taking on a certain musculature. The class, sifting through decades of property records, found a document that showed that Augustus West bought 177 acres outside Greenfield for the princely sum of $6,195. The seller? Alexander Beatty, who lived next door.

Even the husk of a home hidden in the woods exposed its stately old soul. West had a remarkably detailed drawing commissioned to accompany the property’s entry into the Fayette County atlas, a status symbol back then. The picture depicts a handsome manor house built of black walnut on a beautifully landscaped estate. Split-rail fencing surrounds a perfect yard. A horseman gallops down a lane that runs parallel to the porch, followed by another horse pulling an elegant buggy.

Fact and folklore kept converging. Records showed that West built his home so deep in the forest that he had to buy an easement to make a lane to the main road. That drive is dead in the path of what local historians still call Abolition Lane. Census tracts showed that people began living in cabins on the edge of West’s property. The oral tradition holds that those folks were runaway slaves.

LaRue’s class subsequently published a 35-page book about the county’s role in the Railroad. LaRue told Nelson that his class planned a presentation to the school, but she told him: Think bigger. So he invited the whole town and had the gathering taped for local public-access television.

“When he was done, people stood up and just started talking about their stories, things they heard as a child,” says Nelson. “It all just came pouring out.”

Gus West not only seemed real but relevant. Nelson knew, grimly enough, that there were others out there, drifting away.

Riding the Ghost of the Railroad

Congress first assigned the Park Service to honor the Railroad a decade ago, but Cathy Nelson marks the time by the number of historical sites that it failed to save. During the same period, Nelson says her group identified 600 in Ohio alone. When the Park Service made its first pass at counting them up, it found five.

Nelson was so skeptical about the Park Service’s level of commitment that when the agency asked for a peek at her database, she refused. “I said, ‘You come down here and see for yourself,’ ” she says.

Down, indeed, came Diane Miller, a Park Service historian and Africa specialist who had recently been assigned to run the Railroad program. Nelson took Miller on a tour of the state, and eventually they wound up on the side of the old road that dead-ends on a hilltop, where a clump of trees hides a vanishing house.

Miller had an immediate visceral reaction to this secluded spot smack in the proven path of a runaway trail. It fit the profile of a place where some people kept an eye out for those who had just clandestinely crossed the Ohio River. A place where a refugee could get a ride under a blanket in the back of a wagon, maybe a safe spot to sleep in a cellar.

Or maybe a nap in a room like the one on the second floor of the West house. It had no doorway, inside or out. The only way to get in, it seemed, was to crawl along the roof and through the window.

In an era when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 empowered slave catchers to bang on doors and barge into homes even in states where slavery was outlawed, an invisible room was a wise bit of architecture for an anti-slavery activist.

Miller’s whole job these days is to ride the ghost of the Railroad, and the sheer inconspicuousness of its landmarks is one reason why they are vanishing. Yet here, the lore, the locale and the look of the land converged to blow her away.

‘It’s Probably Not Savable’

“It struck me deeply,” Miller says. “There are certain places where you definitely get that feeling: This is where it happened.”

The old mansion now looks as stable as a sandcastle in a tsunami. The house, just weeks into its third century, has lost the will to defy gravity. Whatever impulse compels a culture to turn a log cabin, bloody shroud or unknown soldier into a sacred shrine managed to miss this place.

“It’s probably not savable,” Miller says. “And that breaks my heart.”

As she tromps through fields and thumbs through old records, Miller is lifting rocks on the way local history is recorded, ignored, denied or manipulated in this country. It isn’t always pretty.

Some places, with their eye on tourist dollars, try to pass off an old root cellar or house built after the Civil War as Railroad stations worthy of admission to the national network, not to mention the price of admission. An estate in Memphis that has been marketed as a Railroad “depot” turned out to have been built decades after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Sometimes people in places known for their hate groups are afraid to be singled out for historic status. “There was a church that wanted to [be] in the National Register but was concerned about retaliation,” Miller says. “We kind of think we’re past that, but we’re not.”

How Best to Record History

Even people who dedicate their lives to the Railroad’s legacy are jealously guarding their turf against newcomers they consider carpetbaggers to the cause. Indeed, feuds have erupted over the best way to memorialize the Railroad.

One of the biggest undertakings is the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center planned for Cincinnati, a pet project of the Procter & Gamble Co. and other local corporations. The organizers say they’ve already raised more than a third of the $90 million budgeted for the museum, which is to be part of a $1-billion riverfront development that will include a baseball park and football stadium.

The museum will be an interactive, multimedia mother lode of Railroad history, a research center and educational resource as well as an engrossing place to spend an afternoon, the organizers say. It’s primary mission is to present a compelling and chilling past as an object lesson in racial harmony.

Already, the museum has an agreement with the Park Service to build a database that would allow anyone to log on and connect all the known local stops on the station and book a regional tour anywhere in the country. It will have sections devoted to Railroad legends, including the convincing abolitionist attempts to make the Railroad seem more pervasive than it really was. The image of slaves vanishing into an invisible pipeline scared the South and quickened the pace toward civil war.

On top of that, the Freedom Center’s advisory councils are packed with big names, from Rosa Parks to Elie Wiesel to the Most Rev. Desmond Tutu. It’s scheduled to open in 2003, but Cathy Nelson hates the place already. She finds it galling that the museum is rolling in cash while actual landmarks in the field die of neglect.

Grass Roots vs. Big Money

Nelson, an activist quick to unleash her righteous anger, has little patience for other priorities. Last year, her group sponsored and won a bid for the Railroad to be declared a “Millennium Trail,” one of 16 such historic routes designated by President Clinton. American Express promised to pony up $500,000 to help mark those trails, and Nelson is counting the days until payday in her usual way. “We still haven’t seen that money. We’ve lost seven sites in the past eight months.”

The credit card company’s donation is on the way, says Millennium Trails coordinator Jeff Olson. Nelson’s group should be getting a $20,000 check by springtime. If that seems like a pittance compared to the museum’s budget, that’s because it is.

“It’s very controversial for the grass-roots groups,” Miller says of the museum. “They have been struggling without a lot of funds, but the Freedom Center is getting a lot of money.”

Railroad preservationists were outraged last year when the Freedom Center acquired a barn that had been used as a “holding pen” for slaves in the Kentucky town of Maysville. Maysville, on the shores of the Ohio River, was both a big slave-trading town and a key point on the Railroad.

Freedom Center President Ed Rigaud says the slave pen was part of an old barn that the farmer wanted to raze. Though the museum will spend $31,000 to build the farmer a new barn, he says there aren’t any other such acquisitions planned. “We’re not in the business of moving things from historic locations.”

State and local officials are trying to block the dismantling of the building but don’t have much of a case. Like a lot of long-neglected Railroad sites, Miller says, the pen isn’t protected by any state or federal historic designation.

Rigaud expresses bewilderment with Nelson’s criticism. “The one message that we’re trying to get through, which Cathy Nelson doesn’t want to understand, is how we want to apply this history to society today.”

Pitcaithley says the Park Service’s policy is to discourage moving things “unless absolutely necessary,” and was surprised by the slave pen acquisition. Moving structures is a particularly touchy subject in Underground Railroad circles because the network is very much a product of its geography, especially in Ohio, which bordered the slave strongholds of Kentucky and Virginia.

In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark anti-slavery novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the runaway slave Eliza, clutching her baby, stumbles, swims and claws her way across the half-frozen Ohio River while slave hunters on the Kentucky side shoot at her. She makes it to the other side and is given shelter.

The story is based on the escape of Elizabeth Harris, who fled through Maysville and dragged herself ashore at the Ohio town of Ripley. “Ma’am, you’ve earned your freedom,” a police officer told her. He pointed her toward the home of the Rev. John Rankin, a white abolitionist who told Beecher Stowe the story while she was living in Cincinnati.

Rankin’s home has been carefully preserved and long open to the public. Yet the nearby house of John Parker, a former slave from Kentucky who personally hustled hundreds of slaves to freedom, fell into disrepair. Only last year, with the Railroad experiencing its renaissance, were preservationists able to get some money to restore it.

Money, in fact, continues to be a driving force in the slave trade. In Missouri, descendants of plantation owners are flinging open their doors to busloads of black tourists, says Angela DaSilva, who heads a St. Louis-based company that runs heritage tours.

Why the warm welcome? “They get between $5-$8 a head for [tour] buses that carry 40 people,” she laughs. “You do the math.”

In Missouri’s Miller County, DaSilva says she phones a local Klan contact to get clearance to visit a place where slave hunters caught and murdered 15 fugitives. Business is booming, and she intends to expand her tours nationally this year.

As interest in the Railroad has grown, Nelson says her group has been inundated with requests from people who want the government to spruce up their 19th century homes, figuring a fugitive must have hidden in the cellar at some point.

“Everybody is jumping on the bandwagon,” she says with disdain.

Is this a bad thing? After her seminal tour of Ohio, Miller managed to free some money from her budget to borrow a couple of federal archeologists and set them loose on Augustus West.

They went out with LaRue and his second group of seniors last spring. They scoured the empty field where the former slave settlement supposedly stood. The most obvious evidence was an old well that looks just like the one near the West house.

But the group also found a chunk of fine china, the kind that people pass down, that was made roughly two centuries ago. They found a scrap of Rockingham ceramic manufactured about 40 years later, usually for things like chamber pots. They found a bit of brown-glazed crockery that could only have come from a Zanesville factory circa 1870.

“The artifacts allowed us to pin the time period down a little more,” says Tori Saneda, a Park Service archeological technician. “We know from the census records that the West family was there in 1870.”

The Class of ’99 was elated. Pieces of porcelain formed an arc of time that lined up with the rough reckonings of oral tradition and the spare facts in the written record.

Proof? Not yet. The archeologists have only skimmed the surface of the land. The best clues are buried much deeper.

Summer passes, school reconvenes and a third year of seniors are brought up to speed on slavery, the Civil War and the local legend of Augustus West.

Now, the Class of 2000 is ready to take up the shovels, get on the school bus and carry on with the quest. The archeologists are already out in the field, planting red flags into the targeted turf.

They all meet on a wintry day along an old road at the turn of a century. No budget, no agenda, no marketing campaign is riding on their work. Nothing is at stake but the memory of a man who might have been remarkable.

Students Work the Field

“Leaf.

“Rock.

“Rock.”

Brandy Duncan is holding a shallow square box with a chicken-wire bottom while Harry Atkinson drops a shovel full of soil that crumbles into little beige clods. Rhett Butler (“My Mom just loved that movie”) is picking through chunks of stuff that doesn’t sift, checking off what could be something but isn’t.

“Rock.

“Twig.

“Rock.

“Volcanic rock.”

LaRue’s class is extremely popular, and not just because of the field trips. Today, the students are facing six hours of working in a wind chill that, like them, is in the teens. Even with the toe-deadening cold, there is a meticulous work ethic and an air of intense, almost edgy concentration.

“Just watching something little become part of something big is exciting,” says Scott Ashely, a hulking 18-year-old with a blond brush cut. “Like pieces of a puzzle.”

The mission this time is to dig below the plow line, where old artifacts are likely to have stayed put for a while.

The archeologists are similarly psyched. Jan Pederson is assigned to Ohio’s huge Hopewell park, where a rich legacy of artwork and conical burial grounds was left by a 2,200-year-old Native American culture. “This is totally different from prehistoric archeology. You have people you can actually talk to,” Pederson says.

Not long afterward, an elderly man materializes on the edge of Abolition Lane. He is wearing a ConAgra cap and the leathery face of a born farmer. He is watching the stooped young bodies trying to scrape the truth from the hard ground.

“Weird, isn’t it?” asks James Beatty, the 83-year-old great-grandson of Alexander Beatty.

The Beattys still live next door, and the latest patriarch shows up whenever the students come by. He’s curious too. Beatty remembers vague talk in his family about the Underground Railroad but little about his own ancestral link to those days.

He’s not sure why the freed slaves left the West property, pretty much the whole area. But he has a hunch.

“These people escaped from slavery and had no means of support. They survived as cheap labor,” Beatty says. “I think their cheap labor competed with the white cheap labor, and that developed into racial prejudice.”

Though southern Ohio was once an abolitionist hotbed, a pickup truck with a Confederate license plate is not an uncommon sight here. Ohio is sixth in the nation in hate groups, according to one watchdog organization, including half a dozen Klan factions and the biggest chapter of the National Alliance, the nation’s No. 1 neo-Nazi group.

The 20th century brought segregation to Greenfield. Some of the few older African Americans around here remember being denied entry to the local Penney’s. Few blacks even live in these parts anymore.

The story of Gus West fades as the century ends. He simply drops off the tax rolls in 1892. The community broke up and scattered during the next decade or so, letting the land go for the price of back property taxes.

Nobody knows how or when West died, or even where he’s buried. His first wife died in 1872, the second in 1914, and both are buried at the Greenfield cemetery. The West clan believes the man’s remains are unmarked in the large family plot, while the King family is sure he’s still on the farm somewhere, truly underground.

More relevant than his death, though, is his life. For all the volunteer work that has been done on his behalf, no written record gives proof to the legend. No solid object shows that Beatty and West were some dynamic duo who carried out Robin Hood crime with Butch-and-Sundance elan.

With unlimited resources, Saneda says somebody could scour old plantation registries, auction documents and records of rewards posted for runaways. Enough dates and descriptions might match up to reveal a clear pattern. “But it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Yet even without a laminated certificate of an elaborate anti-slavery scam, West has a few things in his favor as his legacy is judged for inclusion in this nation’s most confoundingly ethereal new memorial.

Take location. “The house is right smack dab in the middle of other stations that are totally well-documented,” says Saneda.

Take two parallel lines of lore handed down by two families. Take the written records that show that Alex Beatty was an anti-slavery secret agent who lived next door to a well-off black man. Take the tiny scraps of ceramics that only hint at the evidence yet to be unearthed.

Take the archeologists, who plan to reconnoiter this May at the West estate. They intend to scan the ground with a magnetic imaging device that can detect century-old soil disturbances. They hope to find the remains of a school, a church and a cemetery. “We’re just beginning,” says Saneda.

Take the federal historian who’s in charge of the effort to memorialize the Railroad in a way Americans can see it, understand it. “It’s one of my favorites,” Miller says. “The census records and the tax records, that’s all good stuff.”

Perhaps most significantly, take the seriously intense black woman from the city who gave Underground Railroad research lessons to an excited white guy in the sticks. This would allow him to flesh out an amazing cautionary tale about vanishing history.

“Cathy Nelson recognized the value. She advised me,” says LaRue. “I’m just a high school history teacher. The students do the work.”

OK. Take the students. The seniors from the classes of ‘98, ’99 and now ’00 who managed to squeeze into LaRue’s coveted course and pull a remarkable life from the brink of oblivion. Teens who get goose bumps every time they glimpse the ghost of Gus West, who lose their cool on this chilly day when they unearth another piece of porcelain and a 19th century nail from a hole they dug in a field.

Take Beth Hellenthal, later in the day, studying the sifting dirt and then jubilantly plucking out a piece of something black, no bigger than a blouse button, and bolting the length of two football fields toward her teacher.

Artifacts From the Land

“I found something! I found something!” she shouts as she runs in from the field up the hill along Abolition Lane, toward the West house, where LaRue and Nelson are poking around rickety ruins.

“Charcoal! I found charcoal!”

LaRue is exultant. “You get an A-plus! Charcoal can be dated!”

Flushed and panting with exhaustion and exuberance, Hellenthal holds a molar-sized piece of charcoal now safely sealed in a sandwich bag. It could have easily passed itself off as a Rhett Butler rock. “Good eye!” LaRue marvels.

Everybody is buzzed, but . . . a puny piece of charcoal? This is proof?

Hey. Maybe. Maybe it’s a time capsule that will put a carbon-dated date on a place in the dirt. Maybe it’s proof that somebody cooked something down there maybe a century and a half ago, maybe ate it off the fine china found nearby. Maybe washed the meal down with water from the well that was central to some cabins built with square-headed nails.

It’s proof, in any case, of the vigilant intensity of a 21st century teenager.

The kids here could have been culled from the caste system of any high school. The saucer-eyed Hellenthal could pass for a pert prom queen who’d just found the perfect Prada after hours of riffling the racks.

Yet here on Abolition Lane, priorities are different for a young white woman who plans to study pediatric nursing at Ohio State this fall. And whose roots in this hilly bit of Ohio reach back to abolitionist days, a time of unsung heroes who keep drifting away from a world they helped create.

“It was really, really exciting to think I found a piece of charcoal!” she says, breathless and grinning and giddy. “I just think it’s awesome to find out your own ancestry.”