Levi Coffin House

Fountain City, Indiana

“The Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad.”

This eight-room home was a safe haven for hundreds of fugitive slaves on their journey to Canada.  Most rooms in the home have at least two ways out and large attic and storage garrets on the side of the rear room made for convenient hiding places.  The location of the house, on Highway 27 at the center of an abolitionist Quaker community, allowed the residents to serve as lookouts for the Coffins and give them plenty of warning when bounty hunters came into town. The “station” was so successful that every slave who passed through made it to freedom.

The southern part of Indiana is rich in African-American history.  By being “a stone’s throw” away from Kentucky, its neighbor across the Ohio River, Southern Indiana was a strategic location for persons escaping enslavement and looking for safe passage to the North.  To learn more about Indiana’s rich Black history, click here.

Cross section of the Levi Coffin House showing the hiding places.