The Adventure Cycling Association is researching a new bicycle tour route that's as much about our history and culture as it's about travelling the backroads of America.
Founded as Bikecentennial back in the '70s, most of the association's routes had geographic designations — TransAmerica, Northern Tier, Southern Tier, Atlantic Coast — until they mapped the Lewis & Clark Trail in time for the Corps of Discovery's bicentennial.
Now the cartographers are charting another theme, the Underground Railroad Bicycle Route.
The name comes from the network of secret routes used by escaped slaves to travel to freedom in the North before the Civil War. It's been estimated that 30,000 to 100,000 people escaped the southern plantations along these routes before the Civil War, although official census data accounts for only 6,000.
The mappers are using as their guide a song, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” which gave slaves coded directions on how to follow the Big Dipper to get out of Mississippi and Alabama up to and across the Ohio River.
The bicycle route will begin in the Mobile, Alabama, area and proceed north along the Tombigbee and Tennessee rivers to the Ohio River. It continues through Louisville and Cincinnati and goes through several underground railroad sites in Ohio, around Lake Erie and all the way to Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada.
The mappers started in the south last summer and have working their way north. The association last expected the southern portion maps to be published by summer 2006, with the complete route finished by spring 2007.
The project is being handled in conjunction with The Center for Minority Health in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh.
More info about the Underground Railroad is available at the National Geographic website.
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