The 2,006.5-mile Underground Railroad Bicycle Route, created by the nonprofit Adventure Cycling Association, runs from Mobile, Alabama, to Owen Sound, Ontario, memorializing the Underground Railroad, a network of clandestine routes by which enslaved freedom seekers attempted to escape slavery before and during the Civil War. Beginning in Mobile, a key port for ships unloading enslaved Africans in the 1800’s, the route goes north through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, tracing a corridor from the Deep South to Canada and passing historic sites tied to that history. In this region, the Tombigbee River was the primary commercial transportation route for cotton connecting Itawamba County to the port towns of Aberdeen and Columbus, and waterways, along with the North Star, often guided freedom seekers escaping slavery. The American folksong “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” first published in 1928, was supposedly used by an Underground Railroad operative known as Peg Leg Joe to encode escape instructions from Mobile by way of the Tombigbee, Tennessee, and Ohio Rivers; in the song, the “drinking gourd” referred not only to a hollowed-out water dipper but also as a code name for the Big Dipper, which points north. According to legend, Peg Leg Joe spread the song among enslaved people on Southern plantations. The Underground Railroad used secret trails and safe houses, with abolitionists and allies aiding enslaved people on several routes north, including one that followed the Tombigbee River from South Alabama to its headwaters in northern Itawamba County, crossed the hills to the Tennessee River, and continued to the Ohio River. Harriet Tubman, known as the “Moses of her People,” led slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad.