WELCOME to
LEVI and CATHARINE COFFIN

Being a Quaker home, the Coffin house would not have had many of the era’s decorative features such as narrow columns, delicate beading or dentil trim. During the 20 years they lived in Newport (now Fountain City), the Coffins worked to provide transportation, shelter, food and clothing to more than 1,000 freedom-seekers. Many of their stories are told in Levi Coffin’s 1876 memoir, Reminiscences.

For their journeys north, freedom-seekers often used three main routes to cross from slavery to freedom—through Madison or Jeffersonville in Indiana, or Cincinnati, Ohio. From these points, slaves traveled to Newport through the Underground Railroad. The Coffins’ “station” was so successful that every person who passed through eventually reached freedom.

Eileen Baker-Wall grew up in Fountain City and has been a longtime volunteer at the site. The shoe she is holding belonged to her great-great grandfather William Bush. Stories of her grandfather were passed down in her family, ones that tell of William’s escape from slavery in North Carolina, sometime in the 1840s. According to family stories, part of William’s escape included hiding inside a wooden crate that was supposedly shipped to Levi Coffin in Newport (now Fountain City).