Epps House (Solomon Northup's Gateway To Freedom)

The rescue of Solomon Northup ran through the mail. In 1852 a Canadian carpenter named Samuel Bass, working for Epps, heard Northup's abolitionist views, and Northup told him who he was. Bass mailed letters to Northup's contacts in Saratoga Springs, giving the general location but not his own name. They reached Judge James Marvin and storekeepers Cephas Parker and William Perry, who told Northup's wife, Anne. Her attorney, Henry B. Northup, won Governor Washington Hunt's help, gathered proof of Northup's free status and traced Bass through the postmark. Epps gave way after being told a court challenge would fail.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 0.3 mi
  The Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 9.5 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 10.0 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 11 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.

More markers nearby

• Epps House — steps away
• Headquarters 1st Calvary Division, Army of West La., May 8, 1864 — 0.3 mi
• Town of Lecompte — 6.1 mi
• Little Walter — 8.5 mi