If you were a black child in 1840s, Missouri, in order to get to school, you'd have to come here to the river shoreline.

The city of St. Louis sits right on the Mississippi River, and in the middle of that

river, there used to be a steamboat.

On that steamboat was a rather unusual school.

If you were a student at the school, you'd take a little skiff

across the river to board the boat. The Mississippi River would be the backdrop for all of your

lessons. It may sound like something out of a children's storybook, but this steamboat school

was actually an ingenious way of getting around a racist law.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we remember the Floating Freedom School and the man who founded it.

After this.

Thank you. If you were a person living in Missouri in the 1820s, there's a good chance you'd have heard of John Barry Meacham.

He owned two brick houses in St. Louis and a farm right across the river in Illinois.

He'd made good money in the barrel making and steamboat businesses.

He was skilled in carpentry.

He made cabinets.

But that was only one side of John.

He had this sort of secret life that the good white people obviously didn't know about.

Gwen Moore is curator of urban landscape and community identity at the Missouri Historical Society.

It says a lot about his character, too, that he was able to negotiate this hostile white world,

and he used that goodwill to help other African Americans.

John was born into slavery in 1789 in Virginia.

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