Slave pen preserved

Even now, slowed by a stroke and 70 years past his boyhood toiling in the fields as a tenant farmer, Isaac Lang Jr. can still recall the terrible secrets hidden inside the old tobacco barn.

"Dad told us never to go in there," Mr. Lang, 84, recalled, sitting up in his bed in a nursing home here. "He said, `Boys, I'm going to tell you the truth. It's all right to play around that barn, but don't go inside.' He said it just wasn't right. That it was pitiful. He never did tell us why."

The building resembled the hundreds of long, low tobacco barns with rusting roofs that mark these winsome rolling hills along the Ohio River, except for a log structure concealed inside. Its windows were fitted with thick, crisscrossed wrought-iron bars ordered by Capt. John W. Anderson, a Kentucky slave trader.

In the forced westward migration of slaves in the years after 1790, historians say, Captain Anderson held an unknown number of African-Americans in the log house, which has recently been identified as the only known surviving rural slave jail.

Posted by David on May 6, 2003 9:38 AM