When Joe Erbentraut and his husband moved to their home on Elm Street in Batavia in 2016, one of the first things they noticed was a plaque on the front porch stating that the house dated back to the 19th century.
But Erbentraut didn’t know much about the details of the house’s past at the time — much less what he would come to learn later, that the home was once owned by a major local figure of the Underground Railroad.
“We knew it was an old home,” Erbentraut, 40, said. “We didn’t really go that much deeper into it.”
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Following some local research efforts, Erbentraut’s home recently joined a growing list of verified Underground Railroad sites, facilities and programs in the United States. The list is part of a National Park Service initiative, the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a program created in 1998 to show the history of resistance to enslavement.
Just a few miles away, the St. Charles History Museum, too, was recently added to the park service’s registry, as a facility that seeks to document the history of Underground Railroad activity in the area and the role St. Charles played during the anti-slavery movement.
These two recently-added sites join other Kane locations on the list — including Newsome Park in Elgin, commemorating a community of freedom seekers dating back to 1862 who arrived by train in Elgin from Alabama, and a home in Campton Township that was added just last year for serving as a former safe house for freedom seekers.
The new additions to the list — along with the recent designation for the former safe house in Campton Township — are the result of ongoing work by Eric Krupa, the St. Charles History Museum’s collections manager, to get more sites in the area designated as part of the federal initiative.
The process for nominating a site for the National Park Service initiative is sort of like writing a research paper on its significance, Krupa explained previously, which then has to go through a peer-review process.
Krupa became involved with others around the state doing similar work, and ultimately the Illinois Network to Freedom Collective took shape. The group — for which Krupa is a member of the steering committee — is a statewide collaboration of historians, experts, educators and community members.
The collective seeks to contribute to a statewide effort to get more sites in Illinois formally recognized for the roles they played in the Underground Railroad.
Last year, state lawmakers passed legislation creating the Illinois Freedom Trails Commission, meant to increase educational opportunities related to a portion of American history largely unknown to many and perhaps boost tourism centered on the journeys of freedom seekers through Illinois.
For Krupa, looking into the local area’s connections to the Underground Railroad has become a major research interest.
St. Charles, he explained, is a city that’s known for its connections to freedom-seeking efforts.
In 1842, a route of the Underground Railroad was planned through St. Charles, according to the National Park Service, and hundreds of freedom seekers made their way through town. That effort began less than a decade after St. Charles was founded.
The year 1842 is also when the Kane County Anti-Slavery Society formed.
Krupa said that access to two state roads made St. Charles a sort of connecting junction enabling the operation of a freedom-seeking network.
And the residents who first settled the area had a “more radical background,” Krupa said, with many coming from upstate New York’s “Burned-Over District,” an epicenter of the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that occurred during the late 18th and early 19th century.
There were many ways freedom seekers made their way to freedom, Krupa said, but many came from Missouri, entered Illinois downstate, moved their way up the state and eventually got to Chicago. Later, many freedom seekers were brought to Illinois by way of Iowa, he said.
As he continues on with his research, Krupa is working on getting more sites designated for their connections to the Underground Railroad, and not just in St. Charles. In addition to the recently-designated Batavia house, he’s currently working on an application for a church in DeKalb County. Efforts are also underway for sites in Aurora.
He estimates there are about 90 locations that could potentially be nominated across Kane and DeKalb counties.
Krupa told The Beacon-News that he began embarking on these efforts partially to illuminate a perhaps lesser-known history in advance of America’s 250th birthday.
“It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on in Illinois,” Krupa said. “People are excited about the Underground Railroad. … It doesn’t matter what religion you were, what race you were. Everybody was working together at this time.”
He calls the story of the Underground Railroad networks that existed in the state a sort of “Illinois pride story,” one that did not always receive the same attention it’s now getting.
“It’s taken almost 200 years for this history to finally get recognized, or realized,” Krupa said.
As he delves into the local history, Krupa is planning for the St. Charles History Museum to put on a temporary exhibit on the Underground Railroad in 2027 to look at local connections to abolitionist work, and to eventually have a permanent exhibit about the Underground Railroad and abolition efforts. He’s also looking to start walking tours of related sites in St. Charles in the fall.
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But, while much is known about Kane County’s history of involvement in freedom-seeking efforts before the abolition of slavery, including what can be gleaned from the historical records stored in the recently-designated St. Charles Museum, more is still being uncovered.
The former home of the Rev. John and Lucinda Cross in Batavia is one example of that.
The story of John Cross has been “difficult to research,” Krupa explained, because there’s been no biography written on him. But he’s now known to have been a sort of “Johnny Appleseed” figure, establishing a northwestern portion of the Underground Railroad network.
According to Krupa’s historical research, Cross was sent from New York to Illinois in 1839 to establish a network of abolitionists that would help freedom seekers escape from slave states.
Krupa found that Cross worked to recruit people from Ohio through Michigan, Indiana and into Illinois. Cross’ writings detailing where he stopped, along with the recollections of others, help confirm his involvement in these efforts, according to Krupa.
Cross made another trip in 1841, and afterwards settled down in Illinois and continued abolition work.
According to Krupa, this story is “very important to understanding how freedom seeking evolved in the country, not just in Illinois.”
“It wasn’t just like a one-off thing,” Krupa said. “There was collaboration … there was a plan in place. There were agents sent out. Stuff was connected.”
The National Park Service listing on his former home says that Cross is believed to have established the first continuous line of Underground Railroad in the country from Quincy, Illinois, to Canada.
The reverend later became the first president of Wheaton College, and he ultimately settled in Batavia, living there from around 1855 to 1860, Krupa said.
It’s unknown whether the Cross family helped freedom seekers in their Batavia home, but it’s believed to be likely, the house’s National Park Service listing indicates. The Cross family ultimately moved to Iowa in 1860, but maintained ownership of the Batavia property until 1869.
Cross’ story — and how he contributed to what is typically understood as the networks making up the Underground Railroad — is the subject of Krupa’s latest research undertaking. The Underground Railroad has become “mythologized,” he said, but his research efforts are an attempt to “just bring (it) back to its roots,” exploring what exactly it was and how it functioned.
For Erbentraut, learning his home’s history was “such a great surprise.”
The journalist and editor, who also writes a newsletter called “queering the burbs,” said he was told last year by Kate Garrett, the director of the Batavia Depot Museum, that there were efforts underway to find places with ties to the Underground Railroad — his house included.
Garrett got involved when Krupa reached out to her, inquiring about figures from Batavia who were involved with abolitionist activities, she explained. Specifically, there was a house on Elm Street that he was looking to confirm the past ownership of.
So, they dug into property records, finding the land parcel in question and “tracing it back through transactions,” Garrett explained. They ultimately found John Cross’ name on a purchase record.
Garrett called the discovery “very exciting,” particularly because there aren’t a lot of records about Cross at the Depot Museum.
As for the house actually getting nominated to the list, Erbentraut said he was “on board right away,” calling the National Park Service recognition “something for … the whole community to be really proud of.”
The process brought up surprising findings, like the fact that his house is believed to be even older than its current plaque indicates, Erbentraut said. The plaque dates the building to 1860, but Cross is believed to have lived there starting in 1855.
Erbentraut expressed that it’s “kind of crazy in this day and age,” where “any bit of information is (an) internet rabbit hole away,” that there wasn’t much information out there on John Cross until the recent efforts to get the house designated, despite the impact he had.
“I want to see Reverend Cross’ story be told and understood by more people and hopefully inspire some more folks to understand just the impact that one person can have,” Erbentraut said. “And also, for folks in Batavia and in the region, to know that there is a history of this here. And that it’s a history that, you know, we can choose to continue.”
Saying that the area has a “deep history of … progressive values, in standing on the right side of history,” Erbentraut said that he himself is engaged in advocating on contemporary social issues.
That extends to his home. Erbentraut said he and his husband have had a Black Lives Matter sign on their house ever since they moved in — back in 2016 when that was “more of a hot topic.” A Pride flag also hangs outside their home.
“We have all of these, kind of, like, visual indicators on the house for the social justice conversations of today,” Erbentraut said. “So it’s interesting that this house has been engaged in a part of this social justice narrative in a different form — but a connected form — dating back all this time.”
And while the house played only a small part in Cross’ story, Erbentraut thinks there’s a lot to learn from history as we tackle contemporary issues.
“I feel really honored to be playing a very small part in keeping the story alive,” Erbentraut said. “Protecting the house, kind of being a steward of the history through a house.”