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A trap door
This image shows a trap door inside a Macomb home built in 1854-1855 by George Parkinson, and subsequently owned by Damon Tunnicliff, a prominent Illinois lawyer who opposed slavery and whose daughter, Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, wrote a renowned,…
Beecher Chapel marker
Presbyterian and Congregational settlers in Galesburg formed the town's Old First Church in 1837. By the 1850s, their unity fractured over Congregationalists' opposition to some southern Presbyterians' support of slavery. In 1858 Congregationalists…
WIUGRR Map
A map of the sites of the Underground Railroad in Western Illinois, documentable based on records surviving as of 2005
"Negroes" for sale
Public notices of availability of two African Americans for purchase, a sixteen-year-old girl, and a forty-three-year-old man. Parallel to the Underground Railroad, there existed a "reverse underground railroad," which, as in this item, targeted…
A college's claim to fame
The college's online history emphasizes its founding by opponents of slavery, making Galesburg a regional center of underground railroad activity.
A national underground railroad map
Western Illinois' UGRR routes show prominently in this map, including northeast from Quincy through the Military Tract counties to Princeton, the location of prominent UGRR conductor Owen Lovejoy.
A posthumous pardon
Illinois Governor Pat Quinn pardoned Richard Eells of Quincy and Julius and Samuel Willard of Jacksonville, who in 1843 were convicted of aiding fugitive slaves.
A Quincy station
Dr. Richard Eells built this home, Quincy's oldest two-story building, now located within its Downtown Historic District, in 1835, four blocks from the Mississippi River. Quincy, Illinois, was the first Underground Railroad station across the border…
A tombstone in a mixed raced community cemetery
Photograph by the Illinois State Museum of the McWorter or Old Cemetery, where the remains of African American residents of Philadelphia, Illinois were buried. Philadelphia was a village in southwestern Illinois founded in 1836 by Frank McWorter, a…
A U.S. federal list of Illinois sites
The U.S. National Park Service's "Aboard the Underground Railroad" list of recognized Illinois sites