Nearly 150 years ago, women dressed in tight-fitted corsets, bell-shaped skirts and heavy petticoats stepped out of carriages onto a large rock and made their way up the grand, 100-foot path to a Clay County mansion’s front porch.
There, they would join a crowd of party-goers sipping cocktails or sit on the sweeping lawn for a mid-afternoon picnic as enslaved men, women and children tended to the grounds of the Multnomah Plantation.
It’s here, on land formerly owned by John Dougherty of Liberty, that a towering mansion once stood set behind a circle drive. Where Civil War veterans were buried and enslaved people likely lived in small cabins dug out along the creekside…