Larry McClellan was thumbing through an 1878 history book of Will County when he stumbled onto Deacon Samuel Cushing.
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Deacon Cushing, the history read, had been accused by a local sheriff of hiding escaped slaves on his Crete farm. Down the dusty lane from Cushing, a farmer named Moses Cook also had helped slaves escape north to Chicago.
The two finds were the first in a string of discoveries that would lead McClellan, a Chicago Heights pastor and historian, down a previously undocumented leg of the Underground Railroad–the clandestine network that helped thousands of slaves escape during the 1800s–stretching through the south suburbs up toward Chicago.
With help from groups such as the Chicago/Calumet Underground Rail Road Effort, McClellan has taken a 10-year odyssey through microfiche and maps to unearth or confirm sites in towns from New Lenox to Crete to Calumet City.
Like the farm of John and Sabra McCoy, in the middle of today’s Sauk Trail Woods, which harbored at least a dozen fugitive slaves. Or Samuel Haven’s tavern and hotel in New Lenox, a known safe house.
McClellan plans to present his findings, when completed, to the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, the national verification center for Underground Railroad sites. Twice a year, the center reviews applications and determines official sites. The deadline for the next review is Jan. 15.
But already McClellan’s findings, shared at meetings and conferences, are catching the eye of Underground Railroad scholars and experts.
“It’s exciting stuff,” said Terry Ransom, president of the Illinois Underground Railroad Association, who has seen McClellan’s documents of the south suburban Underground Railroad. “We had a feeling something was there, but no one had really researched it before.”
The sort of time-intensive labor needed to unearth the Underground Railroad discourages many and has left the network still vastly underdocumented, said Diane Miller, national coordinator for the park service program. Since Congress created the program in 1998, it has verified 80 historic sites, though hundreds, perhaps thousands, more are known to exist, she said.
Also, the nature of the network–an illegal, dangerous system–discouraged record-keeping, making it tougher to track, she said.
But the trend is changing slowly, as more people learn to document oral history and to dig through records more efficiently, she said.
“There are people out there doing this, spending days and days looking at microfilm, seeking this stuff out,” Miller said. “It’s really starting to take hold in mainstream society.”
Besides adding a new dimension to the Underground Railroad, McClellan’s findings highlight the vast amount of detail still unknown locally about the network.
“The information he’s uncovering is very important,” said Charles L. Blockson, curator of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University in Philadelphia and an Underground Railroad historian. “Illinois was a very important way station on the track to freedom. We’re only beginning to discover everything there.”
Most American history books mention Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad that stretched up the East Coast. But far fewer talk about the thousands of slaves that stole out of Southern plantations and followed the Mississippi River north into Illinois and beyond into Canada.
The Illinois leg of the Underground Railroad was known to extend from the bottom of the state into the western suburbs, through Oak Brook and Lombard, before bending east to Chicago.
But McClellan, 58, said he always suspected the south suburbs, long steeped in African-American history, may have played a role as well. A former sociology professor at Governors State University and mayor of University Park, McClellan has co-authored two books on the history of the south suburbs and written hundreds of columns for local newspapers. He was researching material for one of his columns about 10 years ago when he came across the Will County history book and Deacon Cushing.
“I saw that and said, `This is a great story,'” McClellan said.
After being exposed as an abolitionist, Deacon Cushing was arrested and shuttled to Joliet, the county seat, for his trial, the book said. But as the trial started, a group of abolitionists chased the prosecution witnesses out of town, it said. The case was dismissed for lack of witnesses, and Cushing, who claimed to have helped 90 slaves to freedom, was freed himself.
The Cushing story led McClellan to a Crete history book that mentioned Cook, his neighbor and fellow abolitionist. Census data and 19th-Century land ownership maps from vaults at the Crete Public Library helped confirm the locations and stories.
This, in turn, pointed McClellan to other slave-friendly homes or farms across the south suburbs, he said, like the Denny family of Mokena, who built a makeshift hideout next to their barn to act as a stopping place for freedom seekers.
The sites showed a path that started in Joliet and went east through New Lenox and Crete, he said. From there, the escaped slaves either continued east along the Sauk Trail to Detroit or north to Chicago and, later, Canada, he said.
McClellan said he has confirmed 12 sites with documentation, where between 100 and 200 slaves were helped. Another 20 possible sites require further research, he said.
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“Every month something new fell in my lap,” said McClellan. “One thing just led to another that led to another that led to another.”
While some leads, like Deacon Cushing, were new to modern-day researchers, others had been mentioned before, McClellan said. His task became one of weeding truth from myth, fleshing out the stories and gathering enough documentation to verify their authenticity, he said. The documents he collected–more than 100 file folders filled with court filings, maps, Xerox copies, newspaper clippings and old property deeds–cram a full filing cabinet in the study of his home. He also has a 50-slide PowerPoint presentation that shows pictures of barns, homes and old maps of what he has found.
“There’s still much to be learned,” said Glennette Tilley Turner, a Wheaton-based author who used a small portion of McClellan’s material in her 1999 book, “The Underground Railroad in Illinois.”
McClellan plans to write some of his information into a history book on the south suburbs. But the work is painstakingly time-consuming, he conceded. The Cushing story alone–from reading the story in a book to finding the farm on land ownership maps–took three years to confirm, he said.
McClellan is driven to the work, he said, by an instinctive desire to discover and document this country’s history of racism.
“It’s important work that needs to be done,” he said. “I’m also having a lot of fun with it.”