Burkle Estate, Slave Haven

This modest white cottage on North Second Street is known as the Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum, and it may be Memphis's most quietly important building. Jacob Burkle, a German immigrant livestock trader and baker, built the house in eighteen forty-nine. Local tradition holds that he used it as a way station, though no documents prove it, on the Underground Railroad, hiding freedom seekers in a cellar and a hidden staircase before they could cross the Mississippi River into free territory.

The trapdoor in the floor and the cramped underground passages still survive. Since nineteen ninety-seven the estate has operated as a museum telling the story of the people who risked everything for that crossing, and of the network that helped them get there.