Eaton Rapids: Michigan couple says house tied to major history -Evidence of Underground Railroad connection is sketchy

By Matthew Miller Lansing State Journal EATON RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) -- When schoolchildren came to the Calvin Hale house back a dozen years ago when schoolchildren still came, Pat Albaugh used to promise them lunch at the McDonald's restaurant just up the road. Then she would take a closer look and revise her promise. "I'd walk up and say, 'You have blue eyes. You change those blue eyes and you can come, too,'" she said. "They would say, 'That's not fair.'" "Well, it is unfair," she said with a hard note of conviction. She wanted the students to understand the injustice of slavery and why the men and women who made up the informal network called the underground railroad risked so much to fight against it. "That, to me, was a story that I don't understand why it isn't screamed from the mountain top," she said, and she believes the house on the outskirts of Eaton Rapids was part of it. Albaugh is a cosmetologist by profession, but a cosmetologist who inherited a crumbling old house and the stories that went with it. Those stories called her in a way she can't explain. "I don't consider myself bleeding heart," she said, "but I believe that people have rights." Clayton Naylor, the elderly friend and neighbor who willed the house to Albaugh and her husband 21 years ago, used to tell her it was special, that it had been a hiding place for those escaping slavery. The house's odd architecture made her believe it: the tiny room in the basement that can be accessed only by prying up a section of the kitchen's floorboards, the second set of basement stairs that run from the back of a bedroom closet. The story got its hooks into her after Naylor's death, and she spent years running down dead ends, trying to prove that it was true. In the end, "We had a wheel with lots of spokes, but we couldn't nail it down," she said. "I think I just kind of ran out of energy." For thousands of men and women escaping slavery, Michigan was the final crossing point to freedom in Canada. Abolitionist sentiment was strong here. In a few notable cases, slave catchers met determined resistance from the courts and average citizens alike. But the documented routes on underground railroad ran south of Lansing, through Jackson, Battle Creek, Ann Arbor, and Detroit. What the Lansing region has are clues, suspicions, stories passed down that some people would very much like to believe. "The problem with the underground railroad is that little magic word 'underground,' " said Edwina Morgan, a librarian at the Library of Michigan and a member of the state's Freedom Trail Commission. Helping former slaves escape to freedom was illegal. Those who did so, whites and free blacks alike, took pains to hide their activities, and, Morgan said, "They really did a pretty good job." There is no doubt in her mind that routes went through Lansing, she said, but "the biggest way to cause yourself trouble and to get debunked by professionals is to make things up." Behind the cracked plaster and broken lath of a wall in the basement of the Turner-Dodge House, there is a small room, sealed off but for a human-sized opening a few feet off the floor. Over the years, that room has inspired speculation as to whether the north Lansing house was a stop on the underground railroad, a theory supported circumstantially by the fact that the Turner family had ties to the abolitionist cause. "After really getting in there, studying and looking at the construction in the room, you figured it just got blocked off when the house was remodeled in 1900," said Liz Homer, curator of the house from 1997 to 2008. In her research, Homer found "many connections to the abolitionist movement. There is no evidence that they harbored slaves." The broader question, perhaps, is what it would change if we knew they did. The history of the fight against slavery "shows what our values are, what we're made of, what we stand for," Homer said. It still matters to a lot of people. In 1999, the Turner-Dodge House hosted an exhibit on the antebellum period. "I thought we would have a lot of African Americans come, and we did have some," Homer said, "but, to my great surprise, what we had was descendants of abolitionists." The founders of Second Baptist Church in Detroit were abolitionists of a different sort. They were former slaves, and the connection of the church they started to the underground railroad is indisputable. The mantra of the late Nathaniel Leach, the church's historian for decades, was that Second Baptist "must be recognized," said Bobbie Fowlkes-Davis, past president of the church's historical committee. It has been. But that recognition only means so much, particularly for a congregation whose activism neither began nor ended with the underground railroad. "History happened to us," Fowlkes-Davis said. "That's where we get our greatness from people who look at our history and say, 'Oh, wow, they hid slaves.' "Well that was just a short time. We're still in the business of ministry. We're not a museum." Tunnels and secret rooms are rare in the history of the underground railroad, said Carol Mull. Freedom seekers were more likely to be hidden in barns where children and visitors were less likely to find them. As for codes stitched into quilts, no one has ever produced solid evidence that they existed. Mull, the author of "The Underground Railroad in Michigan," believes the mythologies of the way the underground railroad operated can distract from compelling stories. "We're talking about the story of somebody who makes a decision after being enslaved to leave their entire family for the rest of their lives to make their way to freedom," she said, and about people who took on great risks to help them. The desire to find connections to that history makes sense to her. "This involved sacrifice and heroism, and people want to be associated with that." She knows the research can be difficult. She doesn't doubt that much of the story remains untold. The Calvin Hale house is falling down. Termites have gnawed rough-edged furrows through the support beams. Part of an exterior wall has crumbled away. Pat Albaugh has searched the house over, hoping it would give up something that would bring the strands of the story together, the clue that would make everything fall into place. As snow blew in through the walls and windows, she began to cry. "If only the walls could talk." Published: Thu, Mar 17, 2011