Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Chicago and Northeastern Illinois

[Originally presented to the Chicago Map Society on 04/20/2023 by Dr. Larry McClellan]
Description: This presentation will be an exploration of the movement of fugitive slaves/freedom seekers and the networks of support that developed as the Underground Railroad. In the decades before the Civil War, several thousand freedom seekers traveled through northeastern Illinois. This program outlines their stories and the range of encounters with white and Black abolitionists providing assistance.
Speaker Bio: Dr. Larry McClellan has written extensively on the Underground Railroad in Illinois and northwest Indiana. He was the principal author of applications that added sites in Crete, Lockport and on the Little Calumet River to the National Park Service registry of significant Underground Railroad sites in America. In 1970, he helped to start Governors State University and taught there for many years. He is now Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Community Studies at GSU. In the late 1970s, he was Mayor of Park Forest South, now University Park, Illinois. From 1993 through 2003 he wrote a monthly regional history column for the Star newspapers in the suburbs south of Chicago. He maintains online resources at: www.illinoisundergroundrailroad.info.

[@karentrimmer]

My family were abolitionists in Stewardson IL, I have confirmed this with the local historian Larry Schultz(sp). A family member called Ma Lugar lived until 1905 when she was over 100, told bedtime stories to my great aunts. One story is about a runaway slave named Jacob and a tunnel under the graveyard. When I finally went to Stewardson in 2011, I was actually shown Jacob's grave/memorial in our family cemetery, Spain Cemetery on the family property where the barn was still standing at that time. The family grew sorghum and took it in boats up the (Little) Wabash to Decatur where more family lived, from there, it went to Chicago. Of course there was more on the boats besides sorghum.