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…
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…
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…
David Blazer, of Aledo, Illinois, shared his memory and specific details of the underground railroad activities of his father, uncle, grandfather, and of another family, the Allisons, in McDonough County, Illinois before the Civil War.