Homeschool AP US History: A Family Field Trip to the Levi and Catharine Coffin House

 

Can I still call it a homeschool field trip if there's only one homeschooler in attendance?

Sadder question: will I still be able to call it a homeschool field trip when there are NO more homeschoolers in attendance? SOB!

For the moment, though, it's eyes forward, because I have one homeschooler in attendance, and that homeschooler is taking a deep dive into the Underground Railroad.

The worst thing about the AP history courses is they absolutely FLY through the material. The older kid's AP European History study crammed information into her so quickly that we had very little time to build context and make real-world connections, and to be honest, it shows in her middling retention of the material five years later.

I've addressed that problem with my younger kid by, in the case of her World History course, abandoning AP altogether and instead creating our own study, laser-focused on Ancient History, from the recommended college textbooks, and in the case of this AP US History course, focusing very little on exam prep and using that extra time to enjoy more immersive studies of select topics.

Such as the Underground Railroad! The kid has long been interested in the experiences of the freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad (thank you, Addy Walker!), and thankfully, located as we are in southern Indiana, we're within driving distance of several locations important to freedom seekers and relevant to the history of enslavement on American soil. 

But somehow, until Winter Break, we'd never been to the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad itself, the Levi and Catharine Coffin House!

Possibly because it's low-key in the middle of nowhere, but oh, well--that's why we bought a car with excellent fuel efficiency!

Catharine and Levi Coffin were Quakers, who moved to the Quaker community of Newport (it's now called Fountain City, but I didn't get around to asking why) in 1826. From then until they moved to Cincinnati in 1847, their work assisting freedom seekers on the journey north was an open secret. They evaded bounty hunters who knew there was something going on but could never catch them, and just in case they were caught, they never knew more than one other connection of the Underground Railroad in either direction.

The museum next to the house is just one gallery, but it has some really thoughtful exhibits. I really liked this recreation of the box that Henry Brown shipped himself within:

And we have a pair of shoes from William Bush, handed down through generations of descendants. I LOVE personal artifacts like these, and I think this is an example of why these smaller museums are so important. The bigger museums of the world, the Smithsonians and the American Museums of Natural History and the British Museums, have millions more objects than they know what to do with, so the only stuff that gets displayed is the canonical stuff, the stuff most vital to the understanding of the most people.

But smaller museums can show items that are not so much exemplars of the type, but are more personal, intimate, and meaningful to the local community that the museum serves. I might not give this pair of shoes a second glance if I was looking at them in a Smithsonian museum, nor would they probably be placed on display there, competing, as they would be, with thousands of other similar artifacts in better condition or belonging to better-known people. But knowing that these shoes came from a person involved in the history of this exact place, who worked here, was buried here, and whose descendants still partly live here, is always just the absolute most awesome feeling.

One thing that I didn't love about this museum was the noise level. While I was trying to read the sign below, there were at least two--maybe even three?--other audio things going on in the same gallery, all talking over each other. It might not even be noticeable if the gallery was full of people, but it was just the four of us rattling around in there, and I found the noise level nearly unbearable, yikes!

This map is interesting, though, because these paths to freedom look like they make a point of dodging around that entire south-central area where I live:

It would have been all forests and caves and small towns and pioneer settlements, so I don't get it. Must do more research!

Here's another cool map, this one of the town of Newport. I thought it was interesting that Levi Coffin actually owns a few pieces of property on this map. One is a store that sold only goods manufactured using free labor, but I forgot to ask what that really big piece of property on the far left of the map was. Dang it!

Our guided tour of the actual house was super interesting, and I didn't take more than a couple of photos only because I was too busy stumbling all over myself to pepper the tour guide with question after question. She wasn't prepared to speak about the artifacts in the house, all of which were of the correct era and had been donated by locals (inspiring SO MANY QUESTIONS in my heart!), or really much about the building and architecture of the house itself, but she was very game to answer all of my other questions about local law enforcement, the professions and later lives of the Coffin children and further descendants, the chain of ownership of the home after the Coffins and how it became a museum site, the possible education/literacy level of Catharine Coffin, speculation about what it would look like to make this historic house ADA compliant, what the neighbors might have known about what the Coffins were doing, the general information structure of an Underground Railroad chain, where the kitchen garden might have been located, the actual division of labor regarding caring for freedom seekers (mostly relating to my theory that Catharine did far more hands-on work than Levi did), etc.

This awesome little door, below, looks like it would lead to a little closet, and could easily be hidden by just stacking a couple of boxes or a bed against it, but it leads to a storage area that extends the entire length of that room. People could hide in it if the Coffins thought they were about to be raided. All four of us got a turn to crawl inside and look around:

I also really love this spring-fed cistern. There was no reference to it in any of Coffin's papers, and no physical evidence of it when the house came into the custody of the Indiana State Museum. Excavations uncovered it by surprise. 

It's theorized that the Coffins could use this cistern to collect part of the household water, in addition to the creek that they also used just a few yards from the house. That way, no matter how many people were inside the house, anyone spying on them from the outside would only see people going to the creek to fetch a perfectly normal amount of water perfectly suited to the number of official residents inside the Coffin house:

This was a really great museum and house tour, really interesting and really accessible to a wide range of interests and abilities. We were all completely engaged and fascinated, and afterwards, we spent a very late lunch at the Big Boy and a very dull two-hour car ride back home gossiping about it. I've not also got the Reminiscences of Levi Coffin on my bookshelf, and you know I cannot keep what I'm reading to myself AT ALL so I'm sure we'll all spend even more time gossiping about it in the next few weeks!

Here are a few other things that my teenager and I have done in support of her Underground Railroad study:

• audiobook and discussion of 12 Years a Slave
• trip to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!