A centuries-old house on Fairchild Avenue has a secret.

Inside, a rickety, wooden staircase leads to a basement. Splintering beams hold up the low ceiling. The walls are white-washed stone. The air is stale.

In a small room adjacent to the stairs, the walls are the same white-washed stone, but there is a gap between the top of the wall and the ceiling.

The gap is about a foot-and-a-half high. It’s a crawl space, littered with pebbles and crumbled mortar.

Hardly big enough for two people to squeeze through, this space was once a secret hiding place for slaves when the home was part of the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s.

The Woodard house, at the intersection of Fairchild Avenue and Woodard Street, was one of several houses in Kent, then known as Franklin Mills, that provided a safe haven for fugitive slaves making their journey to freedom.

Kent attorney Elizabeth Sheard bought the Woodard house two years ago and has been working to restore it to the way it was when the Woodard family built it. She has been looking through old documents with a local architect and examining the house’s structure to determine what it would have been like back then.

“It’s the oldest Underground Railroad house (in the area) that is still a residence,” Sheard says. “It’s also an unusual architectural style. Although it’s a Greek Revival, it’s not really. It looks more like a Southern house.”

While the only differences between the house now and a picture of it taken in the mid- to late-19th century are a few added dormer windows and a missing chimney, Sheard is working to undo other modernizations previous owners made to the house.

The secret compartments also will receive a bit of work because Sheard would like to share her home’s history with area students.

Although no one knows exactly how old the Woodard house is, the Woodard family moved to Franklin Mills in 1818. According to “The History of Kent,” written by Karl Grismer in 1932, Joshua Woodard built a wool factory and dye house on the east side of the Cuyahoga River near the Crain Avenue bridge with his partner Frederick Haymaker.

Woodard also owned a tavern at Fairchild Avenue and Mantua Street, while his house sat up the hill on Fairchild in what used to be deep woods. The family welcomed fleeing slaves into their tavern, and after dark, the family sneaked the slaves through the trees and into the crawl spaces under their home.

When it was safe, the slaves, covered and hidden, would ride in a wagon to Cleveland. They would then travel across Lake Erie to freedom in Canada.

The abolitionist movement in Kent was strong because Kent has always been a liberal city, says Guy Pernetti, board member for the Portage County Historical Society.

“I believe that when people first came here, they came from Connecticut, and they had Connecticut or New England sensibilities,” he says.

People who settled in northern Ohio came from New England and wanted slavery abolished, Pernetti says, but the people who settled in southern Ohio came from Virginia and were pro-slavery.

After the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which continued to enslave an African-American man who had lived in the North for an extended period of time and declared blacks could never become citizens of the United States, Pernetti says the abolitionist movement in Ohio grew.

“The people around here became very active,” he says.

Anti-slavery meetings were held in private homes, and 38 people from Portage, Stark and Summit counties signed a secession petition in 1848 stating they did not want to live in a country that allowed slavery.

But even though these people were open abolitionists, Pernetti says it did not mean they were harboring slaves, and if they were, they were not open about doing it.

“You can’t create dissension with your neighbors,” Pernetti says. Not everyone in Kent was an abolitionist, and they didn’t want to seem as if they were going against the law by keeping runaway slaves.

“The issue was so veiled in secrecy, that even when it was over, people still didn’t talk about it with their neighbors,” Pernetti says. “It only takes one generation for it to disappear.”

Mary Kathleen Lilley, a descendant of the Woodard family, says she didn’t discover her ancestors were part of the Underground Railroad until about 10 years ago.

“I thought, ‘how neat!’” she says. “They must have been really special people. There are people who do things, and there are people who don’t do things, and I think the Woodards were probably doers.”

Today, most of the Underground Railroad stations in Kent have been burned or destroyed, but the Woodard house and one of its more famous escape stories still remains. “The History of Kent” dates the tale back to 1825.

Lilley says one night a slave family with a baby came to the Woodard tavern.

The family escaped from Georgia and was almost at the end of their journey.

They were taken to the Woodard home, but a problem arose when it was time for the family to leave for Cleveland.

“They were afraid to take the child because they thought it might cry,” Lilley says. “And they didn’t want to take the chance of the baby giving them away if they were searched.

The Woodards kept the child so the family could go into Canada.

And it turned out to be a good decision.

“If the baby were with them, they probably would have been discovered,” Sheard says.

The baby remained in Kent.

“They kept the child for some time — it grew up in the Woodard household,” Lilley says. “Some years later, they (the fugitive family) were reunited.”

Some local records say the child left for Canada with his parents, but “The History of Kent” says the child didn’t recognize his parents and stayed to be raised by the Woodards, causing some speculation about where the child came from. Because it was illegal to keep runaway slaves, the Woodards may have said the baby came from a free black family.

“It was not an easy thing to do,” Sheard says. “Their business was in jeopardy. Their family was in jeopardy.”

Sheard and her mother are now doing their best to preserve history and the Woodards’ memory.

The house also came with a reputation.

“This house is known as the ghost house,” says Barbara Woljevach, Sheard’s mother who lives in a side annex of the house.

She says there were times when the house became overgrown and times when it was abandoned, encouraging children to speculate about what was inside.

“It was very scary looking at one time,” she says.

Sheard has cleared away all the vines and weeds from the house, but the backyard is still covered in dense brush, hiding something that looks like a family cemetery.

Sheard and the previous owners found many artifacts the Woodard family, and possibly the fugitive slaves, left behind, including bottles, pottery, jacks and a ball. Sheard also says residents of the Woodard house have felt something spiritual present, and she attributes this to the home’s role in the Underground Railroad.

“People died along the way,” she says. “They were so goodhearted and helped so many people. There were probably attachments.”

Allison Remcheck is a senior magazine journalism major. This is her first story for The Burr.

The ghosts of the Woodard house

Elizabeth Sheard has rented a section of her home to three different people in the past two years, and all of them say they have felt something a little haunted.

One of the tenants says she heard a slave telling her, “Do not disturb mistress’ garden; Do not disturb mistress’ garden,” when Sheard was working on the land outside of the house.

On a couple of occasions, Sheard says what might have been a ghost came to the aid of her diabetic mother.

“She’d fallen asleep and (her blood sugar) was really low,” Sheard says.

Then some bottles of laundry detergent inexplainably toppled over.

“The things fell at that moment, and she got up and checked her blood sugar,” she says.

Two other tenants of the house had far more scary encounters, but only after they broke Sheard’s house rules. One woman reported a rocking horse that rocked on its own and would move itself to a different part of the room during the night.

Another tenant had some unwanted company. He heard a pounding on his door, and when he went to answer it, no one was there.

“The one guy was literally scared out of his wits,” Sheard says.

But if there are ghosts, they haven’t revealed themselves to Sheard.

“I’ve never caught a glance. I’ve never got a chill,” she says. “Nothing negative has ever happened to my mother, and nothing has ever happened to me but good feelings.”

—Allison Remcheck