Burkle Estate

Jacob Burkle was a German immigrant who built this one-story clapboard house in 1849 and worked publicly as a livestock trader and baker. Whether he also hid people escaping slavery is unproven: the claim rests on newspaper features from 2005, and a 2018 account notes that Memphis library historians argue the missing physical evidence is itself consistent with a secret role. Since 1997 the house has been the Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum, with period furnishings and documents on slavery in the Memphis area.

What the plaque says

Burkle Estate In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, Jacob Burkle operated the Memphis Stockyards on this site. Herdsmen seeking shelter and respite at Chelsea House found the stockyards a convenient custody station for their livestock. Folklore persists, however, that the estate was also a haven for slaves escaping to freedom on the underground railroad.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 1.8 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• Sun Studio — 1.8 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 2.2 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 2.3 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Fort Adams / Fort Pike — 0.6 mi
• Navy Yard — 0.7 mi
• Humes High School Alma Mater of Elvis Presley — 0.7 mi
• Isaac Hayes — 0.8 mi