Levi Coffin House State Historic Site

The Levi Coffin House State Historic Site is where the 'President of the Underground Railroad' kept office. The eight-room Federal-style house in Fountain City — built 1839, facing the old National Road — was the Coffin family's home for twenty years and a documented station that sheltered, by Coffin's own count, roughly two thousand freedom seekers. The site preserves the working details: the false-bottomed wagon in the outbuilding, the garret rooms where fugitives slept, the unusual indoor well in the basement kitchen — a design choice that let the household serve large numbers of hidden guests without drawing water at a public pump where watchers might count.

Levi Coffin was a Quaker merchant from North Carolina who'd been opening schools for enslaved children and running the road out of bondage since he was young; in Indiana he ran the Newport depot of the routes converging from the Ohio River. His wife Catherine ran the house — the cooking, clothing, and nursing for the arrivals that made a station function — and the house earned its name: three major routes converged on Fountain City, and the Coffin house sat where all three met, 'the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad.'

The state took the house over in the 1960s — restored to its 1840s condition, opened as a museum in 1970, and expanded in 2016 with an interpretive center. It is one of the most documented Underground Railroad sites in the country: the house where the fugitive Eliza Harris — fictionalized in Uncle Tom's Cabin — was among the real travelers sheltered.

The Coffin State Historic Site is the archive's preserved-station file — the Fountain City house with the indoor well and the false-bottomed wagon, restored as the museum of the man called the Underground Railroad's president.