‘The Road within the Road’

The Road from Limestone to Lexington has had many identities. Formed over 480 million years ago, it is a fault line of shale cutting through the rolling hills of Bluegrass limestone, running 65 miles from the Ohio River to central Kentucky. This unique corridor has served as an ancient mammal migration route, a laboratory for primordial landscape interventions, a shared Native American game preserve and hunting ground, a wilderness war zone between Native American and Euramerican settlers, a door to the American West, a political and administrative problem, an inland port connection, a commercial conduit to the Atlantic, a microcosm of the Union and Confederacy, a religious network, a public-works obligation, a scenic byway, and a World Monuments Fund cultural landscape. As Limestone became Maysville, the old Maysville Road––known today as the Paris Pike and US Route 68––was one of the nation's first infrastructures into the American West. Before the National Road and the Erie Canal, the Maysville Road brought white settlers from the Ohio River to the American interior, setting forth a nascent urban corridor characterized by infrastructure, settlement, agriculture, and ‘a stage upon which people wrestled with issues of power, identities, and worldviews.’¹ George Henri Victor Collot's 1796 mapping of this space (Fig. 1) reinforces these social and cultural qualities. The linear corridor is mapped as an intersection of landscape and settlement, infrastructure and topography, cutting through a lush, dynamic landscape of vegetation, rolling hills, bluffs, and streams. South-oriented, Collot's strip map conceptualizes the turnpike as a through-way from water to land, an inland ‘coast’ connecting the old world to the new, where one moves from the water's edge into a protected promised land. Historically, culturally, and graphically, the road is conceptualized as a conduit of many connections, intersections, and exchanges. But one identity has not yet been assigned by its many nomenclatures and histories: the old Maysville Road was also part of the Underground Railroad.

Fig. 1. George Henri Victor Collot and P. F. Tardieu, ‘Road from Limestone to Frankfort in the state of Kentucky,’ Paris, 1796. 38 x 37 cm. Image courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection.

To understand this narrative, two institutions located at either end of the corridor frame this discussion: the Maysville port on the Kentucky edge of the Ohio River, where the inland buffalo trace connects to the river, and Cheapside Market, the urban plaza located next to the courthouse in downtown Lexington. The port and the market establish complementary entrepôts for people, products, and information arriving into Lexington from the river and exports traveling from the central bluegrass region to New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, and Europe. By the mid-nineteenth century, Lexington had developed from a ‘stockaded outpost to preeminent mercantile center, dominated by a small elite of bankers, lawyers, and politicians.’² Lexington society enjoyed the latest fashions, finest homewares, and global news from cosmopolitan urban centers, producing a culture of refinement that characterized Lexington as the ‘Athens of the West.’ At the same time, exports of hemp, tobacco, and wheat brought the bounty of the Kentucky Bluegrass into the global economy. The wealth generated from the productive farmland ‘sustained [Kentucky's] preeminence for several decades … Lexington emerged as the seat of influential families, a place of culture and prestige, the “capital” of New Virginia.’³ The urban plaza next to the stone courthouse, aspirationally named Cheapside Market after its cousin in London, facilitated a unique public stage for commercial trade and gathering. Auctions and trading were held daily, with monthly ‘court days’ producing an especially bustling event. While county justices of the peace met to transact the peoples' business, a crowd thronged to Cheapside from dawn to dusk, ‘By the custom of years, this was a time when the rural folk of Fayette and neighboring counties took a day off and came to town to shop and trade, drink with their friends, swap horses, see the sights, and enjoy themselves, each according to his own fancy.’⁴

And yet. Within the colorful parade of commerce and sociability at Cheapside Market, between old-world refinements flowing into the shops facing the courthouse plaza, a darker system aligned within the movement of products and commodities. Cheapside Market was the site of the largest slave auction in Kentucky, and the Maysville Port was the point of departure for those sold south. Early African American migrants to Kentucky had little choice in moving to the West, as nearly all arrived as enslaved labor from the tobacco-producing regions of Virginia and Maryland, ‘Spurred on by [enslavers] eager to secure a prime tract of real estate, the earliest Black pioneers lived in the forts and stations, laboring for land surveys and clearing a wilderness where a slave's life was considered far more expendable than that of a Euramerican.’⁵ Most slaves before the 1840s remained in the region where they were born, with an increasing number of husbands, wives, and children living on separate farms.⁶ By 1790, over forty-eight hundred slaves and thirty-two free African Americans lived along the Limestone Road, creating an invisible network of familial Black Americans between the seams of residential, commercial, and agricultural landscape.⁷

This network of African American neighbors along the Maysville Road would prove essential in the years leading up to the Civil War. As slavery intensified within the Southern cotton and sugar plantations, the sale and shipment of slaves from Cheapside Market to Port Maysville increased. James H. Dickey, a white minister, describes a caravan he met trudging between Paris and Lexington in 1822. Lucas explains:

Hearing music in the distance and observing a flag bobbing ever skyward beyond a knoll, Dickey hurried his carriage to the top of the rise, where he pulled aside, expecting to see a military parade. To his shock, a slave coffle appeared. Two violin-playing bondsmen led the way, followed by two slaves with cockades decorating their hats. In the midst of the caravan of about forty male bondsmen, a pair of chained hands waved the American flag. The slaves, securely handcuffed, were joined together by short chains connected to a forty-foot-long chain that ran between them. About thirty women, tied together at one hand, followed the caravan. All marched in ‘solemn sadness,’ the minister wrote.⁸

The Maysville Road became a stage for slavery's brutality.

But hidden within this conduit of brutality was an additional system, an invisible infrastructure of emancipation available to those who knew how to read its form. The Maysville Road was also used to escape slavery and was considered part of the Underground Railroad. We often imagine the Underground Railroad as a series of safe houses owned and operated by well-meaning white abolitionists but escape from slavery was a far more complex operation. There were no secret trails extending from enslavement to the free North and very few prearranged hiding spots. More often than not, the Underground Railroad was created by Black men and women enacting their own escapes. It required risk and ingenuity, requiring men and women to adapt to an ever-changing set of circumstances, threats, and opportunities. The population of enslaved and free Blacks along the Maysville Road formed a Black community to this advantage. As historian Rebecca Ginsburg describes, ‘The secret paths that fugitives ran along, roads that patrols traveled regularly looking for runaways, spots where fugitives took cover, and systems for spreading news of rewards for captured slaves––these are only a few examples of the many nodes and networks that composed the layered environments inhabited by slaveholders, enslaved workers, and others.’⁹ As white and Black Kentuckians traveled the road, it was not uncommon to encounter Black men or women walking unaccompanied, heading to work on a neighbor's farm, visiting nearby family, or dispatching an errand.

Recognizing these layered circulation systems, Lewis Hayden created his escape from slavery by leveraging the spatial, infrastructural, and residential presumptions of the Maysville Road. Born into slavery in Lexington, Kentucky, around 1811, Hayden's personal narratives describe a cruel life filled with family separations, ‘My mother … married my father when he was working in a bagging factory nearby. After a while, my father's owner moved off and took my father with him, which broke up the marriage.’¹⁰ Severe beatings broke Hayden's mother's mental well-being, and she was subsequently committed to an asylum. Hayden's family was torn apart again when his enslaver, Adam Rankin, departed Lexington for Pennsylvania, selling Hayden's brothers and sisters at the Cheapside Market, ‘I stood by and saw them sold. When I was just going up on the block, he swapped me off for a pair of carriage horses.’¹¹ Hayden lost his first wife and child when they were sold by Henry Clay to a plantation in the Deep South. He remarried, folding Harriet Bell and her 10-year-old son, Joseph, into a family. Determined to never allow slavery to break his family again, Hayden devised a plan to enact his family's freedom. He colluded with two white abolitionists: Calvin Fairbanks, a young seminary student at Oberlin College, and Delia Webster, founder of the Lexington Female Academy and an Oberlin graduate. Fairbanks and Webster hired a carriage to drive the Haydens from Lexington to Maysville, where they could cross the Ohio River into the free North and Canada.¹² With Joseph hidden under the seat, the Haydens posed as servants, or ‘passed as white lady and gentleman, veiled and cloaked.’¹³ They arrived in Maysville, crossed to Ripley, Ohio, and were conducted to Canada. Fairbanks and Webster were arrested on their return to Lexington. The Haydens eventually settled in Boston's Beacon Hill, where they continued to serve the abolitionist movement, advocate for civil rights, and hold public office.

Lewis Hayden transformed the Maysville Road from a space of brutal capitalism into an alternative system of escape and liberation. Working within the turnpike's places and rhythms, he enacted what Ginsburg calls a Black Landscape, ‘The term “Black landscape,” then, is an expression of geographical intelligence. It refers to ways that enslaved people knew the land, to the modes by which they made sense of and imagined their surroundings.’¹⁴ Examining Collot's map again through Hayden's eyes, the detailed representation suggests another layer to the world of farms, towns, bridges, and tolls. The over-scaled trees and topographic detail offer another reading of the space, another landscape scale within the established road—the possibility of a secret line disguised within the main thoroughfare, another road available, if only we have the skill and imagination to see it.

As an architect witnessing, mapping, and transforming information found in archival maps, historic narratives, and the contemporary landscape, the drawings I produce represent these invisible structures. Using dashed lines, ghosted images, silhouettes, even animations, these maps affirm the voice of the narrator, rather than the cartographer. In this way, the map visualizes voices of those who enacted the map and creates a drawing that both documents and imagines the hidden journey (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Karen Lewis, ‘Roads out of Enslavement to Liberation by way of one’s own Agency and Innovation sometimes also known as the Underground Railroad. 1850s Kentucky,’ 2023. Image courtesy of the author.

Notes

1 Craig Thompson Friend, Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 4.

2 D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History: Volume 2: Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 277.

3 Meinig, The Shaping of America, 359.

4 William H. Townsend, Lincoln in the Bluegrass: Slavery and Civil War in Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1955), 130-31.

5 Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 34–5.

6 Marion B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky: Volume 1, From Slavery to Segregation, 1760–1891. (Louisville: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992), 100.

7 Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 36.

8 Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, 96.

9 Rebecca Ginsburg, ‘Escaping through a Black Landscape,’ in Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery, eds. Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 52.

10 ‘Lewis Hayden and the Underground Railroad,’ accessed 4 September 2023, https://www.sec.state.ma.us/mus/pdfs/Lewis-Hayden.pdf .

11 ‘Lewis Hayden and the Underground Railroad.’

12 ‘Lewis Hayden,’ National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, accessed 4 September 2023, https://freedomcenter.org/heroes/lewis-hayden/ .

13 ‘Lewis Hayden and the Underground Railroad.’

14 Ginsburg, ‘Escaping through a Black Landscape,’ 56.