A Bit of (Almost Local) History

Confirmation that Wheaton College was part of the Underground Railroad in the years leading up to the Civil War, as noted on the Christian History blog:

David Malone, head of Wheaton’s archives and special collections, explained to The Daily Herald newspaper that the discovery of a comment in an 1889 manuscript is actually quite significant.

"We've never been willing to say for ourselves that we were a stop on the Underground Railroad," Malone said. "Others were willing to say it for us. But we wouldn't confirm that. Now we're able to say with full assurance that this was a stop on the Underground Railroad."

Turns out the text isn’t massively hard to find if you know what you’re looking for: Google Book Search has a scanned, downloadable copy of The History of the Thirty-Ninth Regiment Illinois Volunteer Veteran Infantry (Yates Phalanx) in the War of the Rebellion 1861-1865. Here’s the passage, a first-person account of Ezra A. Cook:

In the fall of 1853 … we moved to Illinois and settled on a farm about twelve miles from Chicago. About four years afterward [my father] sold this farm and purchased another in Du Page county, about one and a half miles from Wheaton, his object being to give his children a liberal education; the oldest daughter having already spent several terms at Wheaton College.

The outbreak of the war in the spring of 1861 found myself and two sisters attending Wheaton College, which had a national reputation as an Abolition school in an Abolition town. So strong was public sentiment that runaway slaves were perfectly safe in the College building, even when no attempt was made to conceal their presence, which was well known to the United States Marshal stationed there. With hundreds of others, I have seen and talked with such fugitives in the college chapel. Of course they soon took a night train well-guarded to the next station on the U. G. R. R.

When Sumter was fired on, I did not doubt that it was the death-knell of slavery, and my heart was in the battle for freedom from that moment.