Door latch from the house of Levi and Catharine Coffin
From their Fountain City, Indiana, home, Levi Coffin and his wife, Catharine, helped so many slaves escape north to freedom as part of the Underground Railroad that their 1830s home has been referred to as “Grand Central Station.”
This wrought-iron latch was used on the door to the Coffin family home—imagine the hands that held and opened it! Only seven years after the museum started, the latch was given to the museum by a descendent of Levi and Catharine.
Storyteller and historian Portia Jackson says, “Catharine and Levi Coffin were very humble, courageous. They risked their lives to help enslaved fugitives to freedom. One of the things I love about Levi and Catharine, in thinking about that latch, [it] represents to me that they were opening up a new world to people.”
