CEDAR RAPIDS — Secrets held inside one of the oldest homes in Cedar Rapids may have been demolished with the house.

Jennifer Hernandez, 34, of Cedar Rapids, lived in the home at 407 B Ave. NW as a youth.

Old-timers in the neighborhood said the house, thought to have tunnels underneath, played a role in the underground railroad.

That network of safe houses, tunnels, barns and other sites, was used to smuggle escaped slaves to safety, generally until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

The house was razed this week under the city’s imminent threat demolition list.

Flood-damaged buildings on the list are considered health and safety risks for environmental hazards or structural damage.

Those buildings – nearly 700 — do not undergo review with the city’s Historic Preservation Commission as do other homes slated for demolition that are over 50 years old.

Hernandez said the house was sold just months before the 2008 flood, but she had hoped someone would have investigated its history before it was demolished.

“The house is gone,” she said. “All we have left is our memories.”

Cedar Rapids historian Mark Stoffer Hunter said the home had been deteriorating even before the flood.

The brick home is listed on the City Assessors website as being built in 1870, but may have been a farmhouse outside the city limits dating to the 1850s or 1860s, he said.

“It was definitely one of the oldest houses in the city of Cedar Rapids,” he said. “I’ll bet it had a lot of stories to tell.”

Cedar Rapids was incorporated as a town in 1849, with the charter changed to a city in 1856. Kingston, a town on the west side of the Cedar River one block from where the home was located, was annexed to Cedar Rapids in 1871.

Stoffer Hunter said tunnels would not necessarily mean a house was on the underground railroad.

Tunnels were used for food storage, as shelters and for bootlegging. Some in northeast Cedar Rapids connected to limestone caves, including one used by a brewery to store beer, he said.

Steve Hanken of Cedar Rapids, a former archaeologist who has studied the underground railroad the past decade, said he has not uncovered concrete evidence that stations were located in Cedar Rapids, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Violators of the Fugitive Slave Act faced fines and jail time, so those efforts were rarely documented, he said.

Hanken said Quakers were known to play a role in the underground railroad in Iowa.

Curator Katharine Hardy, said the African American Museum of Iowa, 55 12th Ave. SE, has photographs and stories of the underground railroad, mostly from southeast and southwest Iowa.

“We would love to see it,” she said of any information regarding the network in Cedar Rapids.

Greg Eyerly, the city’s flood recovery director, said demolition crews have salvage rights for copper or other materials from homes being razed.

When it comes to historical significance, however, those crews – Kelly Demolition of Mount Vernon and D.W. Zinser of Walford – must call in an archaeologist to document the site, he said.

That’s what happened at the B Avenue home.

Chris Schoen, an archaeologist with the Louis Berger Group of Marion, said he has been called about five times in the past few weeks to document cisterns, such as the one found at the B Avenue site.

Cisterns, usually made of brick, were used for underground storage of water.

Schoen took photos and documented the dimensions and site of the cistern.

Jeff Carr, lead historic preservation specialist for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said cisterns and wells could contain bottles or other potentially significant artifacts, but nothing like that has been found so far in Cedar Rapids.