Nishnabotna Ferry House

The Nishnabotna Ferry House stood at a crossing everything used. The road across the East Nishnabotna River at Lewis, Iowa, began as an Indian trail and became, in the 1850s, a stagecoach and mail route, an emigrant road, a leg of the Mormon Trail with its handcart companies — and the Underground Railroad. Samuel Harlow Tefft ran the cable ferry from 1857 to 1859 from the 1½-story Greek Revival house on the bank, the ferryman living where the routes met the water.

Cass County was the busiest spur of Iowa's Underground Railroad — the county's own 1906 history records the stations: Oliver Mills's farm south of Lewis, Rev. George Hitchcock's house on the hill (a National Historic Landmark today), and the Grove City House where John Brown himself stopped in the winter of 1857 with eighteen armed fugitives, and again in February 1859 with twelve Missouri freedom seekers on the three-month trek toward Canada. Every one of those routes needed the river crossings — and the ferry house stood at the crossing.

Tefft's ferry served it all in the same years — emigrant wagons and mail coaches westbound, handcart Mormons, and the secret traffic moving east toward the Mississippi. The house survived the ferry, the toll bridge that replaced it, and a century of subsequent owners to reach the National Register in 2001 — the ferryman's house at the crossing where the era's whole human traffic passed through.

The Nishnabotna Ferry House is the archive's crossing file — the Greek Revival house where the ferryman served every route at once: emigrants, Mormons, mail, and the fugitives coming through the busiest UGRR county in Iowa, at the river they all had to cross.