This isn't quilt related, but I lived in Leavenworth, KS for several years. Leavenworth is just across the river from Weston, MO which did have a slave trading landing. Since Kansas was a free state, many people did their best to escape across the river to freedom. Friends of mine bought an old (1850's) house. It had false walls with a vertical space wide/tall enough for about seven adults to stand fairly comfortably. This was in the upstairs, with access through a nursery room just off a bedroom. It would have been easy to hide the access behind a chest or bookshelf. The story was that this home was a known part of the Underground Railroad and had been built by a Quaker family who sheltered runaways during the initial search for them. Leavenworth did become a fairly safe slave refuge, with a black Catholic orphanage, a black Catholic school and hospital system, and so forth from about the mid-1850's. No one made much of the history anymore, though. It seems to be a chapter best forgotten amid today's tensions.