Day 34: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

We added another President to our "bag" this morning: William Howard Taft, our 27th President, was raised in Cincinnati, and his childhood home is now a national park site. An accomplished attorney, he also served as a judge in the Ohio Superior Court, U.S. Attorney General, U.S. Circuit Court judge, First Governor of the Phillipines, U.S. Secretary of War, Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale University and, for the last 10 years of his life, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He's the only man to have held the two most powerful positions in the U.S. government: President and Chief Justice. As one biographer put it, "Taft worshipped the law; no understanding of him is possible without appreciation of the fact." Unfortunately, I think most people remember him for his enormous size and the story about the bathtub installed for him in the White House in which four men could sit simultaneously. His many years of service to our country attest to the fact that he was so much more than his physical stature.

In addition to his professional credits, Taft was quite an accomplished athlete, especially in his younger years, and was pursued by at least one professional baseball team. He was the first President to throw the opening pitch for baseball season. And a sign of the times, his was the last family to have a cow in residence at the White House!

That was the last funny thing we encountered today, as we spent the afternoon at the Freedom Center and Underground Railroad Museum. It sits on the edge of the Ohio River (Ohio was a free state while Kentucky, on the opposite bank, was a slave state) in the heart of downtown Cincinnati, which was called the Underground Railroad's Grand Central Station due to the high number of escaping slaves who passed through the city. The museum opened in 2004 and is one of the most progressive and interactive places we've yet seen. An itouch (an iphone minus the calling capability) audio tour is included with the admission, and it guided us in and around the many exhibits depicting the history of slavery. A central piece in the three-level facility is a 20-foot tall "slave pen," recovered in 1998 from a farm in Kentucky; it had been incorporated into the larger structure of a tobacco barn, preserving it and its artifacts which date back to the 1700s. Also called a slave jail, such buildings were used to hold slaves who were rounded up prior to their delivery to Natchez, Mississippi, where they were "retraded." Upwards of 75 people at a time were crowded into this particular building, men on the upper floor where they were chained to the beams, and women and children on the ground floor where they performed duties to support the farm until their departure. Their journey south was a barefooted, 750-mile march through horrible conditions with little food or water. Seeing this piece of brutal history reinforced to us the reason so many slaves risked everything--their lives as well as those of loved ones left behind--to try and reach freedom. It's believed that upwards of 30,000 slaves passed through Cincinnati in that effort.

Our four hours in the Freedom Center flew by, and we wished for another day to fully explore all it has to offer. We were lucky to get there when we did; our parking space cost us $2.50 at 1 pm, and when we left at 5, the price had gone up to $17...the Reds are hosting the Cardinals tonight at Great American Ballpark, which is right across the street from the museum. :-)

Taft's childhood home...no longer a neighborhood of homes, it's across the street from a large hospital, and a juvenile court building is directly behind it.

New Taft fans

In the Freedom Center with the itouch audio tour

2-story "slave pen" structure