CINCINNATI -- A pre-Civil War slave pen, made of roughhewn logs on a farm in Kentucky and reassembled here at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, was dedicated Tuesday night as the focal point of the $110 million museum.
Executive director Spencer Crew called the pen the museum's most important object - "a central icon in telling the story of slavery."
About 200 guests attended the dedication of the 20-by-30-foot, two-story structure. The Freedom Center is set to open to the public in August.
"The slave pen provides the context for everything else one experiences in the Freedom Center," president Ed Rigaud said. "It will touch you to the very soul."
Researchers say the pen, which looks like a small house, was built by a slave merchant in Maysville, Ky., in 1833. It was used in the so-called internal slave trade, which mostly comprised children of slaves taken from eastern plantations who were held until they could be sent to the South and West, officials said.
The structure was donated to the Freedom Center by a man who bought the Kentucky farm and found the pen inside a tobacco barn. Freedom Center officials say it is one of only a handful in existence.
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center was designed to commemorate the secret network that helped slaves escape north to freedom in the 1800s. Private donations account for about 80 percent of its funding, with the remaining 20 percent from federal, state and local grants.
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