In the small Indiana town of Fountain City, between Indianapolis and Dayton, Ohio, an unassuming brick house once helped change the course of hundreds of lives, providing an escape to freedom for those risking everything to find it.
The house, now designated the Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historic Site, is known as the “Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad,” highlighting its pivotal role in guiding enslaved people to freedom in the north during the early 1800s. Indiana has its share of sites related to key figures leading up to the Civil War (Lincoln City, Indiana, is one of the must-visit locations for Abraham Lincoln fans, being his boyhood home), but the Levi and Catharine Coffin house tells a particularly fascinating part of the story — ordinary people who made liberation possible for those fleeing slavery.
Levi Coffin moved to Indiana in 1826, according to his biography page on the Indiana state website. He met and later married Catharine, and together they built the brick home that would become a shelter for freedom seekers. The home was constructed with hidden rooms and an inner water well to discreetly supply those in hiding. You can still see these features of the original home today. “It is almost completely original. All of the floors, all of the windows, all of the woodwork,” said tour guide Aaron Martin in WRTV. Three different Underground Railroad routes intersected at the Coffins’ home, and during the near-decade that they lived there, over 1,000 enslaved people passed through it — all of whom, per WRTV, successfully reached freedom.
Planning a visit to the Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historic Site
At the preserved Coffins’ house itself, visitors book a scheduled, guided tour on its website. With the tour, you see where freedom seekers were hidden and learn about how they were transited along the Underground Railroad by the Coffins and beyond. One of the best incentives to book the tour that reviewers frequently praise is the expertise and storytelling of the guides. “We had the most informative guide that led our tour. She made the stories about the Coffin Family and their heroic deeds come to life,” a Google reviewer shared. Besides the house, the historic site also includes an Interpretive Center that you walk through on your own. It has some more exhibitions about the Underground Railroad, plus a gift shop where you can get Levi Coffin’s memoir…