Browse Items (24 total)

This three-paneled mural is located in the Thomas C. Carper Amtrak train station in Macomb. Unveiled November 6, 2025, the mural is titled, "Freedom's Trail: The Underground Railroad in McDonough County." The artist Michael Mahoney created the mural.…

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,…

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…

A map of the sites of the Underground Railroad in Western Illinois, documentable based on records surviving as of 2005

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…

The college's online history emphasizes its founding by opponents of slavery, making Galesburg a regional center of underground railroad activity.

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.

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.

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…

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…