Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing

John Berry Meachum bought his own freedom in Kentucky, came to St. Louis in 1815 to buy his wife Mary's, and became a cooper, a Baptist minister and the founder of the First African Baptist Church. When an 1847 Missouri law outlawed teaching Black people to read, free or enslaved, he moved his school onto a steamboat anchored in the Mississippi, in federal water. The Meachums bought the freedom of about twenty people, put them to work in the cooperage until they had paid the price back, and helped others escape across the river to Illinois.

John died in his pulpit in February 1854. Mary went on. On May 21, 1855, she, a free Black man named Isaac and nine freedom seekers set out by boat to cross to Illinois, an attempt this spot commemorates. They were caught, and Mary was jailed and charged with slave theft. The Missouri Republican reported that July that a jury acquitted her of at least one charge and the others were dropped. During the Civil War she led the Colored Ladies Soldiers' Aid Society, which won the right to ride the streetcars one day a week to nurse Black soldiers at Benton Barracks.

The site was dedicated on November 1, 2001, as the first in Missouri in the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. It is on the Riverfront Trail just north of the Merchants Bridge, and an annual celebration there reenacts the crossing and the arrest.