BILL GAITHER/The Register-MailLeft to right, Rex Charrington, Owen Muelder and Brenda Patterson look over a map Monday morning at the Old Knox County Jail that depicts the underground railroad through Galesburg.
Underground Railroad surfaces
New map identifies supporters in area
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Saturday, May 20, 2006
GALESBURG - On top of a map of what Galesburg is, sits Owen Muelder and Rex Charrington's map of what Galesburg once was.Area historians at Knox College's Underground Railroad Freedom Station colony, one of 60 in the country, have put together a new map of the people and homes that supported the Underground Railroad movement in the Galesburg area in the first half of the 19th century.
The map is on display at Knox College's Old Jail, 337 S. Cherry St., during regular business hours.
Muelder, the director of the Galesburg station, worked with Charrington and graphic artist Brenda Patterson to design a map locating the homes of those supporters and other significant houses to the movement in Galesburg.
West-central Illinois - especially communities like Galesburg that were founded on anti-slavery principals and were close to Missouri, where slavery was legal - was a hotbed of anti-slavery activity from the 1830s to 1865 when slavery was abolished.
Though few of the houses on the map still stand, Muelder hopes to reproduce the graphic and distribute it to those interested in Galesburg's role in the anti-slavery crusade so they can find the locations of prominent area Underground Railroad organizers and supporters.
The three have worked for nearly two years on the project, using tax records, land records personal diaries and other historical documents to find 39 locations for places in Galesburg that had ties to the Underground Railroad, Charrington said.
He and Patterson both said they were excited to work on the project because of the connections it has to their families. Patterson remembers being told by an aunt when she was young that they house her family lived in at the time in mercer County was used to ferry fugitive slaves. And Charrington says work on his family history also has revealed some connections.
But the task of locating the houses has been challenging, Muelder said.
Because anyone harboring a fugitive slave - in a free state or not - was breaking federal and state laws, many chose not to go public with their actions. In one documented instance, R.C. Edgerton and some friends had to chase slave hunters out of the city so they would not catch a slave Edgerton was hiding north of town.
But since so many of the Galesburg residents did not document their actions, some of the locations on a map are more like educated guesses. Still, some of the names on the map - like West, Kellogg and Farnham - are more recognizable because they are preserved on streets in the community.
