Columbusites have interpreted the remnants of 19th-century drainage systems in the context of their histories of race. The hole must connect to the sewer system, which is linked to the river.ĭrainage is the culprit. He pulled back the manhole cover and said, “There was a fish down there!” This confirmed my suspicions even further. “I heard something from down in this tunnel one day,” he told me eerily. This same director of security brought me to an old sump pump with a tunnel plunging deep into the ground. One of the old enslavers used to live just a couple of blocks away from the church, so it seemed plausible that a tunnel connected to his house might still exist under the church. I hadn’t been thinking of the tunnels in such humanitarian terms. The director of security for Saint Luke Church in downtown Columbus assumed that since the labyrinth was underground, I must have been looking for evidence of the Underground Railroad. The few who thought past the allure of the underground labyrinth often spun a story of heroism rather than one of inhumanity. The passageways rumored to be under the Lion House-and under much of Columbus-are a macabre form of folklore that Columbusites willingly entertain. 4 This history, much like the place of slavery and Indigenous displacement, was buried underground and even floated across the river to Phenix City, where mob rule became so bad that Alabama leaders had to use martial law to “clean up” the streets in 1954. Records aren’t available for these activities, but a close examination of those that exist reveals a history of sex and alcohol on Georgia’s frontiers. One imagines all sorts of illegally distilled spirits moving along the dark corridors from the house to the hotel. The supposed passageway was rumored to connect the house to the Racine Hotel. Prohibition activists started their work early in the city, even before the dawn of the 20th century. Columbus, like Phenix City across the river in Alabama, had its run of pimps, prostitutes, and underground gambling dens-a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah on the Chattahoochee. The Lion House has long been associated with illegal activity, and so, too, has the region. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Perspective map of Columbus, GA, county seat of Muscogee County (1886). Secrets brought me to the house in the first place. He made his intentions clear: Secrets are more valuable than the truth. After a full tour of the home, he refused to let me into the basement. He invited me to his house, knowing full well that I wanted to see the passageway. In our email exchange leading up to our rendezvous, he never dispelled them. I had heard most of these stories before I visited Luedtke’s house. The current owner of the Lion House, Brian Luedtke, is happy to let rumors about his property’s basement passageway simmer. Still another imagines the house’s passageway as an entrance to a subterranean world of slave tunnels, used to connect slave-transport ships arriving on the Chattahoochee River to auction houses and holding pens. Another insists bootleggers and booze smugglers supplied the nearby Racine Hotel with illicit substances during the Prohibition era. One story imagines a subterranean escape route designed to spirit away white settlers when the Creek tribes attacked early in the 19th century. A mystery surrounds the historic Lion House and its basement passageway, in Columbus, Georgia.
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