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- Tags: Illinois
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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…
Abolition City
This nickname of Galesburg appears in a permanent exhibition of Knox College's founding and first decades in the era of the Civil War, in the Whitcomb Heritage Center, third floor of Knox College's Alumni Hall.
Susan "Aunt Sukey" Richardson gravestone
In 1842, indentured servant Susan “Sukey” Richardson, her three children, and another woman, Hannah Morrison, fled north from Sparta, Illinois, assisted by William Hayes, a neighbor of Richardson’s master, Andrew Borders. Borders had brought…
Old Charley painting
An 1856 painting of a man, Charley and a girl, Abigail Peck. Charley allegedly escaped slavery in Lewis County, Missouri in 1842 and was either caught in Quincy, Illinois and returned to bondage, or became a conductor, helping others to freedom on…
Spoon River Valley site
The road sign in this image was formerly posted in or near Bernadotte, Fulton County. It directed tourists to visit the site of the home of Francis Overton, and his daughter, Harriet Overton, both WIUGRR operators. Francis built a cabin near…
Hamilton Memorial School
Site of the Hamilton Primary School of Otterville, originally built in 1835 and rebuilt in 1873. The school was founded by physician and former slave owner Silas Hamilton. It is the alma mater of George Washington, Hamilton's manumitted slave and a…
Quilt code
This quilt, on display in Jacksonville, Illinois' Woodlawn Farm historic site, is represented to illustrate the Underground Railroad's reliance on quilts to communicate secret information among fugitive slaves. Folk tales about such quilts claim that…
Tags: antislavery, Illinois, Military Tract, myths, quilts, slavery, Underground Railroad
Come ride on the "Liberty Line"
The advertisement offers free travel to Canada those “who may wish to improve their health and circumstances.” A WIURR conductor, John Cross, of Knoxville, submitted this widely reproduced illustration to the Western Citizen. In 1842 he had been…
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…